Great students and a common factor: I was very fortunate to have many great students – it is valuable to ask if they had any common factors that aided their development. Georges St-Pierre, Chris Weidman, Eddie Cummings, Garry Tonon and the Ryan brothers (among many others) all made unusually rapid progress towards their goals. Each of those men mentioned have very different attributes and personalities, but they also had common factors which I believe made them extremely quick developers. One such quality that is rarely spoken of, but which I value greatly, WAS THEIR INCREDIBLE ABILITY TO SENSE THE POTENTIAL OF A GIVEN MOVE/CONCEPT WHEN THEY WERE INTRODUCED TO IT. This is extremely important in a sport where there are a vast number of moves, but limited time to learn and assimilate them. All of these athletes could see and/or feel a move and make a quick assessment of whether this move would work well for them in the rule set they were working within. This is not a common thing. When we first learn moves, typically our early attempts are not particularly impressive. It is thus easy to get disheartened and quit or move on to something else. However, if an athlete CAN SEE POTENTIAL he will PERSIST and put the time and effort into mastering that skill to a point where it becomes a weapon in his hands in competition. The other danger is that an athlete will persist with a move that has little potential for them and waste time over moths/years in a project that bears no fruit. Of course there are exceptions to this. Eddie Cummings famously hated outside ashi garami based leg lock attacks early in his development, but finally went on to make them one of his best weapons. Garry Tonon balked at the idea of investing time in developing a strong guillotine, but finally pushed through and developed devastating guillotine attacks. These cases were the exception however. Most of the time all these athletes had an uncanny ability to assess the potential of a given move and make quick assessments as to whether it was worth investing time in its development or not. This gave their training tremendous FOCUS and minimized time wastage due to pursuing fruitless endeavors.
