Professor Eli Knight returns to The Jiu Jitsu Mindset, and this time we build the conversation around the hero’s journey — the call, the crisis, the near-quit, the mentor, and the message he’d leave behind.

Eli is a Royce Gracie black belt and one of the clearest thinkers working in self-defense jiu-jitsu. He talks here about the loss that pushed him into a taekwondo class as a teenager, the cousin who went to jail while he went to martial arts, the year his daughter was born and he nearly walked away from all of it, and why he still isn’t sure who he would be without jiu-jitsu.

He also gives one of the best answers we have had on what the art is actually for: “Jiu-jitsu to me is the serenity prayer. It teaches you how to accept things you can’t change, how to change things you can, and how to know the difference.” And then, at the very end, he takes the whole thing apart again with a bar of soap.

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In this episode

• 00:00 Welcome back — year five of the podcast
• 00:29 Submission Coffee and the My Jiu Jitsu Journey app
• 01:25 Professor Eli Knight returns: the hero’s journey
• 03:35 Crisis, loss, and the class that caught him
• 05:28 The soft kid who learned to face chaos
• 08:45 Zen, Daoism, and what religion didn’t give him
• 10:03 “He went to jail, I went to martial arts”
• 11:17 It doesn’t make you a good person — it reveals you
• 12:21 Pete’s story: six years old outside Macy’s
• 14:48 The year he almost walked away
• 18:42 The leap of faith into a martial arts career
• 20:10 “I’m not 100% sure who I am without jiu-jitsu”
• 22:19 The mentor: “you’re off in the woods looking for Yoda”
• 25:35 Coaching with real care — Fit to Fight and Ryan Hoover
• 27:05 Instructor vs. coach: knowing what you are
• 30:36 When the fighter is already redlining
• 33:21 Technique vs. principle is a false choice
• 34:57 What he’d want people to take away
• 36:56 Jiu-jitsu is the serenity prayer
• 38:57 The bar of soap

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