The Laws of the Ring (19 page)

The 25th
Law of Power

Everyone Has Strengths: Let Them Complement
Each Other

I
t's clear
by now how a chance encounter with a real estate agent extended far beyond real
estate, and I think it's worth describing just how far-reaching this turned out
to be. Within two years of our first meeting, Dana helped me purchase two more
homes, which helped turn the neighborhood into a fighters' commune. Dana also
introduced me to Matt, who helped me start the gym. Matt introduced me to Jeff
Meyer, a contracts lawyer and businessman who was looking for a way to escape
the rat race and develop a lifestyle more suited to a family man with a loving
wife and two young daughters.

Jeff had recently left a small family winery that
he helped become a flourishing business and opened his own law firm—doing work
he disliked, for hours that were unreasonable. There's that bargain people make.
Anyway, Jeff was tired of living for that
un
certain
future. He and Matt had become friends after sharing office space years earlier,
and Jeff entered my life when Matt asked him to write up a contract for our gym
partnership. Jeff's passion had always been sports, and he had become an avid
fan of mixed martial arts. When Matt approached him with the contract, Jeff's
mind began to reel with possibilities.
This could give me
an avenue to combine my professional talents and my passion!

Matt spoke highly of Jeff, both as an attorney and,
more important, as
a person
. I saw a promising
pattern developing here with regard to my network, and knew that this time
around, I shouldn't hesitate. Dana → Matt → Jeff? In short, Jeff was
great. Savvy. Highly professional. Looking to be inspired. I definitely saw the
value in adding him to my team.

My relationship with my manager, Mike Roberts, was
an informal one—no contracts or obligations. He asked only that if he came up
with something—an endorsement, a sponsorship—that he get 10 percent. But when my
career took off, I saw a need for more refined management. Mike had ideas, but
he lacked the plan to put them into action. Although it may seem like I was
making it up as I went along, going with the flow of a growing sport, I was
always aware of the bigger picture. If the sport blew up—
when
the sport blew up—I wanted to be positioned to take full
advantage of the opportunity. Before I met Jeff, I approached Mike with the idea
of starting a management company and formalizing our relationship, but he was
lukewarm on the idea. The tire business removed any financial considerations
from the equation—he wasn't hurting on cash—and he enjoyed the freelance aspects
of his MMA work.

I saw my connection with Jeff as an opportunity to
change the dynamic. But it didn't involve cutting Mike out. On the contrary.
Right away I saw the seeds of a great combination: a savvy lawyer who could
complement Mike's hustle, passion, and knowledge of the sport. Obviously, I
wasn't in a sport where the best athletes made the kind of earnings that other
pro-athletes were making, so I needed to maximize whatever came my way. Jeff
represented the professionalism that I felt I needed in order to expand my
earning opportunities. If I was going to be able to get significant sponsorships
and endorsements, I needed someone who could write up the contracts and
represent me in negotiations. Mike's skills were more grassroots but just as
necessary. I needed to convince both of them to get under my umbrella. I saw
great potential in a Jeff-Mike team; now I needed to persuade them to see it,
too.

I was stoked about making this work. These two
guys, different as they were, could become a killer team, but they had vastly
different styles. Mike was a handshake guy—no suits, no contracts, laid-back
negotiations that were known to include a beer or two. Jeff was more
detail-oriented, and his corporate background brought legitimacy to
any
meeting.

Even though Mike had dismissed my earlier
suggestions regarding a formal arrangement, I felt a partnership might change
his mind. But I had to “massage” it the right way.

I make no bones about the fact that I was anxious
about brokering this collaboration. I thought about avoiding the possibility of
confrontation altogether: by telling Jeff I already had management in place and
calling it a day. This would remove the possibility of hard feelings between
Mike and me. But that would have compromised the potential I saw in working with
Jeff, who, I was sure, was a missing link in my quest to get to the top of the
fight game.

So I decided to take the first step by forming an
LLC with Jeff before breaking the news to Mike that I wanted him and Jeff to
work together as my management team. I gave it to Mike straight, over a
beer.

“This guy has great credibility, and his talents
mesh with yours perfectly,” I said. “He's a detail guy and you're a big-picture
guy. He's got the plan you've been looking for, and he'll free you up to do what
you love to do. Trust me, I know both of you, and this will work.”

Over the course of our meeting, as Mike sat mostly
stone-faced, I testified to Jeff's credibility and outlined his strengths in
detail and in relation to our long-term goals.

As I feared might happen, Mike wasn't very
receptive. Either to a formal agreement
or
to
allowing someone to compromise the way he was used to doing business. But I
boiled it down by simply saying, “Mike, you and Jeff are both people I need in
my career.”

With that, Mike agreed to give it a shot. Half of
my work done, I next met with Jeff.

I reversed the conversation I had with Mike by
emphasizing Mike's relationship with fighters and organizations and his
knowledge of the ins and outs of MMA negotiations. I made it clear that I was by
no means minimizing the abilities of either of them by asking them to work
together. Quite the opposite, I thought putting them together would have a
synergistic effect on all of our careers. But Jeff wasn't seeing it.

“C'mon, Jeff,” I pleaded. “Just give it a shot,
let's set up a meeting.”

“All right,” he said, relenting. “But it seems to
me like too many cooks in the kitchen.”

Mike's and Jeff's claims on territorial rights
melted as we sat at a table in a midtown Sacramento restaurant. It was replaced
by mutual—although maybe a little grudging—admiration.

I laid out my plan for them to merge into a single
company, combining Jeff's knowledge of the law with Mike's management
connections. In dealing with this potentially volatile situation, I had to use
my positivity and creativity to sell each man on a mutual sense of purpose. They
had to see the endless possibilities available if this worked the way I
envisioned it.

In June 2006, three months after I first met Jeff
Meyer, MMA Incorporated was formed. It took no time at all for the perfect
complementarity of the partnership of Mike and Jeff to begin guiding and
building the careers of our fighters. The original group of fighters consisted
of me, Scott Smith, James Irvin, Scott Jorgensen, Charlie Valencia, and Joseph
Benavidez. MMA Inc. remains my management team to this day, and it is a great
business success story in the world of MMA.

The 26th Law of Power

Talk the Talk—Walk the Walk

W
e all know this guy: spoiled, lazy, entitled, thinks he can talk his way into—or out of—anything. When you first meet him, he comes across well. He's friendly, seems to have his stuff together, knows a lot of people, and talks a good game. But then he says something that sets off your bullshit detector. It doesn't have to be a big deal; it's just something that hits you wrong.

You start to listen a little closer. Something else doesn't add up. It could be a boast you don't believe or an alleged fact you know to be false. These tiny things grow in your mind until they become something big enough to permanently alter your opinion of that person. Maybe you end up calling him on something and making it clear that you're onto his game. More likely, you just let all the evidence pile up at his feet and decide not to have anything else to do with him.

These people are in every profession. They are the people who inflate their résumés and exhibit questionable ethics. They believe words can substitute for actions, and they're constantly seeking shortcuts to short-term pleasure. Any personal credit they might have established is destroyed by their inability to accept who they are and work with a purpose toward a goal.

As we've discussed, it is important to associate with people whose potential and passion can help you—and them—reach significant goals. But it's ignorant to believe that
who you know
by itself is some magical passport to a better life. It's equally important for you to be able to identify people who are attempting to use your passion to help themselves and only themselves. You can't just parlay a connection, especially a loose one, into personal credit, but some people believe that's all it takes.

It's not just who you know, but what those people think about you and whether or not they think you're a credible person.
Who you are
dictates
who you know.
Everything positive flows from there.

Any benefit derived from an association with someone powerful or influential is purely a result of your personal credit. Name-dropping—a staple of the all-talk, no-action crowd—diminishes both the name and the dropper if there is no personal credit attached to it.

Our Alpha Male community is centered on a united belief that together we are better. We are equals, and we are there for each other. There is always an open bed or an open couch in our community, and there's always a job for you if you're willing to work hard and subsume your personal desires to the betterment of the whole. Come in, get under the umbrella, and work toward a common goal. These are lofty concepts, but we try to uphold them.

There's a kid named Lance Palmer who is a rookie fighter with a lot of promise at 145 pounds. If you show up at my house right now in the middle of the night, you might find him curled up on the couch in the living room. Six months from now there might be another good young fighter on that same couch, and Lance might have graduated to a bed in a house across the street.

Positive, confident people establish their own personal credit. It can't be acquired through association. In the fighting community, the guy who talks a good game but can't back it up is a fixture, but when every fight from the
Gladiator Challenge
at the Colusa Casino to
UFC 132
in Vegas is verifiable online, it's tougher to be a good liar. The popularity of MMA and the power of twenty-first-century media and technology have weeded out a lot of these guys, simply because the posers can't fake it very long before someone wises up and finds a fight record on Sherdog.com or calls a gym and discovers the truth.

A big part of all-talk, no-action is fear—a fear of putting yourself out there, which is linked to a fear of failure. It's easier to talk about something and pretend that it exists than it is to try and fail. And it's often the case that all-talk, no-action people devise elaborate and often-entertaining excuses when they're called on their falsely created persona.

But the person who constantly exaggerates wealth, or physical gifts, or sexual prowess, or intelligence is a little more sinister. He—or she—preys on others' gullibility and overall good nature. No matter how we classify ourselves, I genuinely believe that we want to believe the best in people, and that our first inclination is to accept what they say at face value. For that reason, as I will explain in a moment, ironically, the all-talk, no-action crowd only ends up accelerating its personal
dis
credit faster than anybody.

So, yeah, I have a serious problem with people who are constantly trying to enrich themselves by using someone else's status as collateral. Since I have made a name for myself in my sport, I've had to deal with more and more people who believe they can profit either financially or socially from their proximity to me. I don't like to be wary and skeptical of people's motives, but as your success increases, it becomes necessary to more carefully scrutinize those people who want access to your circle.

I'm not trying to sound boastful. This phenomenon is not limited to people in high-profile professions; most hierarchical organizations or groups invite the type of jockeying for position that all-talk, no-action folks thrive on. Some people can even rise to the top by relying on this tactic, but it is an ascent without passion, and sooner or later, a fall is inevitable. Here are a couple cautionary tales for you to chew on.

The Strange Case of Internet Steve

A guy I'll call Steve came to the gym as a big talker. He was a high-school-football star. He came from a wealthy family. He had connections that, it seemed, would take him wherever he wanted to go.

And for now, he wanted to be a fighter.

A lot of what he said was true. He
was
a good football player, but he went to three high schools and used steroids to gain an unfair advantage over the other players. He was also wealthy. Steve's father was a businessman; I believe he was in some sort of real estate. But whatever the case, Steve grew up with a lot of advantages and was never held accountable for much of anything. If he had a problem with a football coach, he transferred to another school. He bounced through life acting as if he were bulletproof. If something bad happened, his dad—more to the point, his dad's
money
—would bail him out.

From the beginning, Steve operated under the principle that people would believe what they perceived. If he put up a good front, created a good story, and stuck with it, people would have no choice but to buy into it. The image he put forward was that of a cocky, successful guy who was an accomplished fighter from the start.

To further this image, he built himself an Internet page after he had his first pro fight, which I had asked him not to take; he lost the fight but edited highlight video on it to look like he had won. This, to him, provided verification for all the truth-stretching he did to make girls like him and guys fear him. The page brought him instant recognition at the gym, but probably not the kind he was seeking. Guys immediately tagged him with the nickname “Internet Steve.”

Steve didn't stop with the Web page. He was active on social-networking sites, especially MySpace and Facebook, where he exaggerated his relationship with me and inflated his abilities and his performance in the gym. In truth, I
thought
I understood how misguided he was and could help him access the kernel of goodness that I believed lay within him. He was spoiled, obviously, but I didn't hold that against him. In fact, I understood it to be one of the reasons why he was redeemable. I saw through the bluster, even when the bluster was all anybody could see.

And the truth is that Internet Steve had some talent. He was a good athlete. He was even enthusiastic and went through stretches where he appeared to be eager to learn and train.

However, his good qualities were overwhelmed by his almost pathological need to perpetuate a false image. He repeatedly dropped my name at bars and used his connection to our gym—which was full of hardworking, modest guys—to build his unearned reputation. I have no problem with my friends—people who have credit with me—talking about our relationship, but whenever someone brought up Steve's name, I couldn't vouch for him.

It was not uncommon for someone to come up to me and say, “Oh, you must know Steve. He says he's one of your top fighters.” No, he wasn't, and his insistence on using the credible reputation of our gym to create a false persona didn't sit well with me or anybody else at Team Alpha Male. And so Steve quickly developed a reputation as a poser, someone whose gift for exaggeration far exceeded his gift for fighting. But this opinion I kept to myself.
If you don't have anything nice to say . . .
is what I told myself whenever Steve's name came up.

But instead of giving up on Steve and kicking him out of the gym, I repeatedly gave him chances to prove that all of his talk, self-promotion, and hype were going to turn into a lifestyle that supported them. There were times when he realized he had gone too far, and he would immediately reel himself in for a short time and dedicate himself not just to the task at hand, but to toning down his bravado. And it was my sincere hope that this ethic would prevail. To my disappointment and Steve's detriment, it never happened.

Finally, after months of what I considered second chances, I confronted Steve about the blatant lies he was telling people—mostly girls, not surprisingly—and the misinformation he was disseminating on his social-networking sites. I was also tired of trying to motivate him to practice consistently and forsake the bluster. “That stuff's not necessary,” I told him. “The fact that you're lying to people about your accomplishments, and really training with the guys that are doing what you're claiming to do, is pissing the rest of the guys off.”

Our conversation ended when he came to the realization that he was no longer going to be able to stick around the gym without being held accountable for his words and actions. Rather than accepting the constructive criticism in the manner in which it had been offered, Internet Steve took his exaggerations and went home. Quitting.

I wish the story of Internet Steve had a happier ending. I would love to report that he eventually took all the advice he'd been given to heart and turned it around to become a credible person and a good fighter. But this wasn't to be.

His case underscores the difficulty of self-assessment and the risk of being open to allowing anyone to have access to your life. The essence of community is to be welcoming, but at some point tough decisions need to be made. Internet Steve made it easy on me by refusing to accept my last-gasp effort to open his eyes to his behavior. Had he not done this, and had he continued to act in a fashion that was detrimental to the group, I would have had to kick him off the team. But Internet Steve's decision to quit was in keeping with his personality. Rather than face his shortcomings and vow to work on overcoming them, he took the easy way out. The commitment that is necessary for someone to look inward and face the harsh reality of his inadequacies and psychological flaws is brutally difficult. It's much easier for someone like Steve to pick up and move on to the next gym, where he undoubtedly found a new group to pitch his fantasies to.

Obviously, I learned something about myself while dealing with Internet Steve. It was a harsh lesson, too. As I said above, my inclination—and I think it's the inclination of most people—is to be accepting, to see the best in others and believe that even the worst qualities can be overcome and transformed into good ones. Understanding Steve's background, I attempted to provide him with a stable place to train and role models he could learn from. None of it, unfortunately, got inside Internet Steve and forced a change.

“What the Fuck Are You Doing in My Room?”

Joey (not his real name) is a local Sacramento guy I've known for quite some time. He came into my life after a friend told me Joey could possibly help me take advantage of some marketing opportunities. This didn't prove to be accurate, but to this day, Joey continues trying to pitch me on something or other that he claims will benefit both of us. It didn't take long for me to realize any benefit was going to be his, and his alone.

The most ridiculous example of his gall had nothing to do with money or opportunity. A couple of years ago, I took a USO tour of Afghanistan. I returned on a Saturday, and I had a bunch of messages saying that Joey was throwing himself a big birthday bash. I didn't respond to them, and I had no intention of going to his birthday party. I was totally exhausted from the traveling and my brain was screwed up from the time change.

So I went to bed at around eight that night.

At two-thirty in the morning, there was a commotion in my room. I woke up to find Joey postparty drunk, standing there with a couple of guys and a couple of girls at the foot of my bed.

“There he is, right there,” he said, like I was a zoo animal or something.

Joey knew we never lock the doors in any of our friendly houses, and he saw this as an opportunity to boost his credibility with these people—most notably the girls—by proving to them that he knew me.

“Urijah, what's up?” he said, like waking me up in the middle of the night to introduce me to a bunch of people I didn't know was the most normal thing in the world.

“What the fuck are you doing in my room?” I asked, confused as all hell.

“I'm a huge fan,” said one of the chicks.

“Well, uh, thank you,” I replied, trying as hard as I could to be polite under the circumstances. “Now can you please leave so I can get some sleep?”

The girl told me that her boyfriend was outside—at least
he
had some sense—and then she leaned over the bed, kissed me on the stomach, and ran outside.

One of the stranger moments in my life, and it underscored a point: In order to remain consistently dedicated to your passion, you have to limit negative forces. It can be hard, but sometimes it's best to distance yourself from people who make you compromise your positive attitude by being quintessential hangers-on.