I caught this absolutely beautiful bit of foreshadowing from Robin Black a few months back. There was something magical about it, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. So I saved the interview and kinda forgot about it.
It wasn’t until recently I connected the dots when reading other old interviews.
This first interview they recorded a day before Conor McGregor knocked out Jose Aldo in a record 13 seconds.
Robin is talking about how certain fighters have learned to adapt to Jose Aldo’s leg kicks. Basically, you have to keep your weight off your front foot.
It gets interesting when he points out that Conor probably WON’T do that, and why (around the 2-minute mark):
OK, well that solves that problem, but it also creates a whole bunch of new problems that we don’t normally deal with.
And takes away all these great things that we do.
And I know philosophically that they do not adapt for you. They make you adapt for them.
That’s SBG, that was Coach Kavanagh, who I’m a big fan of his thinking. And so they will not be dealing with that.
“They make you adapt for them”
This ^ is a beautiful concept.
I think this is just another frame for what Tim Ferriss calls “improving your strengths instead of fixing weaknesses.” Or what Gary Vaynerchuk calls “playing offense instead of defense.” Or what Gary Lucchesi means when he says, “attack the work.”
In other words, the path to victory is to play your game. Do you. And make the world adjust.
Black continues:
Pressure is [McGregor’s] thing. Yeah, so what does that leave? His counter left…
“Make you pay for it” is the most in line with Conor McGregor. So I gotta figure that’s the answer, also when the deal is that you truly know you have a weapon that shuts people off, his straight left hand is that. You might do it on the first time. You might do it on the third time. You might do it on the eighth time.
But all night long, I got 25 minutes and one of these is going to shut you off.
So, obviously the 13-second KO tells us this strategy worked for Conor.
But we get an even BETTER understanding of how WELL the strategy worked when we read Jose’s interview in MMA Fighting, after the fight (link):
Everybody said I was too angry. Angry about what? I’m always cool in there. I go in there to do what I trained. I trained that.
I threw a hand in his chest and then a cross.
I thought about throwing a kick earlier but I thought ‘no, he prepared something for the kick, for sure’.
I threw a boxing combination, which is normal for those who understand about fighting.
He managed to get out and connect a good punch that caught me off base and finished the fight.
In other words, Jose adjusted to Conor.
And lost.
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