Maybe Being Genuine Matters As Much As Doing It Right

I've been training Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu for the last two years (just got my blue belt!). It's a very precise, technical sport. There are situations where moving your elbow one inch to the left is the difference between winning and losing a match. Because of that technical precision, it can feel like there's a singular, ideal way to do jiu-jitsu that you just have to work relentlessly toward.

I also started jiu-jitsu as a female mom of two. So I'm not exactly the usual 23-year-old athletic ruffian you might picture thriving in that setting. Which means that a lot of the time, I feel like I'm doing all of it sort of… wrong.

But I heard a quote recently that changed how I saw the sport. It's from an extremely accomplished, severe-looking Norwegian jiu-jitsu champion named Tommy Langaker, who said, "You have to be original in the way you approach things and that's when you become genuine in the way you fight. A copy is never as good as the original."

In other words — there isn't just one correct way to approach jiu-jitsu. And if you assume there is, you'll end up copying the way others have found to do it.

I also found this to be a fascinating aspect of US Champion figure skater Alysa Liu’s journey. The details are fun to learn about but my big takeaway from her is the difference between “trying not to lose” versus showing up in a competition to joyfully express your genuine self within the technique. As she puts it: “You can’t beat someone who is having fun.”

And as you may have guessed, I've observed this to be true in small business too. Especially with indie product businesses, for sure — but honestly I think it's true even with businesses that seem more "boring" or standardized on the surface.

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Some examples of where I've seen this dynamic play out with business owners:

Muddling your wholesale line with "standard" items. People who have a lot of "standard" pieces in their line when their real passion is the weird, unique ones. When they edit the line down to be cohesively about those unique pieces, the message becomes clear and specific for store owners instead of muddled.

Using legalese or business-speak. Many, many people use a writing voice in their line sheet and store owner communications that's very different from their actual voice. When you bring your real voice in — the one that fits the line you've created — the line often comes into focus so much more. This applies to your Wholesale Terms too!

Doing marketing you hate. You have to market. You don't have to market everywhere. If you hate social media, you won't thrive there. Choose a channel or two you can learn to love and pour your genuineness into it consistently.

Creating systems and processes that would work in a totally different setting. If you're running your business in 3.5 hours a day with a toddler on your hip, you shouldn't have the same systems as someone sitting at a desk 12 hours a day. There are plenty of tools and practices indie businesses should adapt from other contexts, but not all of them make sense for yours. Be confident in what will actually work for you. What matters is that it works, not how it looks from the outside.

Wrong-sizing your business. I think most businesses have a "right size" that the owner has an intuitive sense of — and that right size is sometimes much bigger or smaller than an outside observer would guess. It doesn't tend to go well when you hire 10 employees but really want to be a one-woman show. It also doesn't go well when you play small but really should grow big. Some of this comes down to your own vision and ambition, but a lot of it is just listening to your business and letting it be the size that actually makes sense.

Many parts of sports and business really do have a right and wrong answer. Elbow position matters in jiu-jitsu and your numbers matter in business. The Faire algorithm functions in a specific, learnable way that you can thrive in if you approach it correctly. But technique is rarely a single prescribed path — it's a set of constraints, and those constraints almost always leave you more than one way to satisfy them. 

Genuine isn't the opposite of technical precision. Genuine is the way you show up, as yourself, within the techniques, the reality, the skills, and the constraints. That’s how you become an original.

More wholesale goodness right this way…