The Stoic Handbook with Jon Brooks
Oct 15, 2026 · 1 hr 6 min · 11 segments
Your first jiu-jitsu class can expose how little your toughness helps. Going back takes a different kind of courage. Jon Friedland joins me to explore what training can teach us about Stoicism. We…
Jon BrooksHostSo stoicism with jujitsu, the, the connection for me, I, I've, you know, real passively for the first 10 or so years doing stoicism.
But, um, in, in the last 10 or 15 years, I really went deep into stoicism and still trying.
But the connection didn't happen until I had my third degree and my black belt, and it happened because, um, you know, we say at the academy from white to black belt, it's kind of me, me, me, like, how it works for me.
Like, you know, I got long legs, or I'm super flexible, or, or I'm athletic and I wanna compete, or I'm the 90-year-old man here, the stay-at-home mom here.
And then from black belt to third degree, you start more working on, well, how does it work for you, like, other people, other people that don't have these same attributes and temperaments? But third degree and beyond, where I am now, I feel like we're trying to find the blanket things that apply to everybody regardless of their intentions and their temperaments and their natural attributes, and the broad strokes of stoicism seems to just nail, hit the nail on the head.
The, this, this overarching philosophy we can negotiate the rest of our life with applies insanely well with jujitsu.
So I started seeing the connections, like, oh, this, maybe this is my key to helping connect everything for all body types and all temperaments beyond just how it would work for you specifically versus me specifically.
They were two separate studies for me until I had that realization, and now putting them together just, it feels just right.
So stoicism with jujitsu, the, the connection for me, I, I've, you know, real passively for the first 10 or so years doing stoicism.
But, um, in, in the last 10 or 15 years, I really went deep into stoicism and still trying.
But the connection didn't happen until I had my third degree and my black belt, and it happened because, um, you know, we say at the academy from white to black belt, it's kind of me, me, me, like, how it works for me.
Like, you know, I got long legs, or I'm super flexible, or, or I'm athletic and I wanna compete, or I'm the 90-year-old man here, the stay-at-home mom here.
And then from black belt to third degree, you start more working on, well, how does it work for you, like, other people, other people that don't have these same attributes and temperaments? But third degree and beyond, where I am now, I feel like we're trying to find the blanket things that apply to everybody regardless of their intentions and their temperaments and their natural attributes, and the broad strokes of stoicism seems to just nail, hit the nail on the head.
The, this, this overarching philosophy we can negotiate the rest of our life with applies insanely well with jujitsu.
So I started seeing the connections, like, oh, this, maybe this is my key to helping connect everything for all body types and all temperaments beyond just how it would work for you specifically versus me specifically.
They were two separate studies for me until I had that realization, and now putting them together just, it feels just right.
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