I have a teacher named Rigan Machado. He has been my jiu-jitsu teacher for over twenty-five years. He has won eight world championships, and during his competitive career he went undefeated through more than three hundred and sixty-five matches in a row.
Think about that number for a second. Three hundred and sixty-five matches against the best grapplers in the world. Not one loss.
Years ago I asked him the question I had been waiting years to ask. What kept him locked in? What was the thing, internally, that allowed him to perform at that level over and over again?
His answer was simple, and it has stayed with me for years.
He told me that during his competitive years, anything in his life that brought negativity, he took out. No newspapers. No television. No people — even family. If it was going to infuse negativity into his preparation, he was unwilling to spend mental space on it.
I sat with that answer for a long time.
What Rigan had described was not just discipline. It was the visible part of something underneath. Three questions that he had answered honestly, and lived by, for two decades. Three questions that organize the inner life of every high performer I have ever watched go the distance.
Most athletes never ask them. Most professionals in any field never sit with them. They train, they compete, they grind, they burn out, and they never realize the answers underneath their entire career have been left unexamined.
Let me show you what they are.
The basics.
The first question is clarity. What are you actually trying to accomplish?
This is the foundation. Most people answer with a result, win the tournament, hit the qualifying time, scale the business to a certain size. Those answers are real, and they have their place. But underneath every result is a deeper layer, what you want the work to make of you. The athlete who wants only the result is fragile. Their identity rises and falls with the scoreboard. The athlete who knows what they want the work to make of them is durable.
Clarity is not certainty. It is the steady picture that emerges when the noise has settled. The Tao Te Ching put it this way two and a half thousand years ago: do you have the patience to wait till your mud settles and the water is clear? You cannot see clearly into water you are still moving. You have to wait.
The second question is desire. How deeply does that desire run?
Most people have desire. The real question is whether the desire you have is the kind that lasts. There are two kinds, and the meditative arts make the difference easier to feel in the body. Ego-driven desire is loud, reactive, fixated on outcomes, and it has an expiration date built in. It runs hot, and hot things burn out. Purpose-aligned desire is steady, expansive, rooted in growth and contribution, and it compounds across decades. Ego desire feels tight and high in the chest. Purpose desire feels grounded and low in the belly. Once you can feel the difference, you can choose which one is in the driver’s seat.
The third question is discipline. What are you willing to give up to see it through?
This is the one most people flinch at. Clarity asks you to think. Desire asks you to feel. Discipline asks you to actually do something, to make a choice that costs you something today, for a payoff that may not show up for years. This is where Rigan’s answer lives. And here is the part most people get wrong about discipline: it is not gritted teeth. It is not punishment. It is alignment, the quiet, daily choice to keep your actions matching your values, especially when no one is watching.
The training.
The three questions are not a one-time checkpoint. They are a returning practice.
You sit with them. You let the easy answers surface and pass. You write the truer answers down. You ask them again next week, and the week after, and you notice when the answers shift. Use them before training: what do I want from today, how deeply do I want it, am I willing to give what it asks of me? Use them after a loss. Use them in recovery. Use them in the small moments, standing in line, walking the dog, cooling down after a session. The more situations you tie them to, the more they begin to ask themselves.
The deepest training, though, is not just the asking. It is the cultivation of the inner ground that lets the answers actually land. Sitting meditation, standing meditation, conscious breathwork, Tai Chi, Qigong, philosophical study, these are the daily practices that allow the questions to do their work. Without that ground, the questions stay theoretical. With it, they reshape an entire life.
When all three are in place, when clarity has steadied the picture, desire has fueled the engine, and discipline has cut away the noise, something rises up from underneath that the Taoists have a name for. They call it wu wei. Effortless action. Flow. The state athletes call the zone. You cannot chase it. You build the conditions for it. Then you stop chasing.
That is what Rigan’s three hundred and sixty-five matches were really built on. Not luck. Not even just talent. Three questions answered honestly, lived by for two decades, and supported every single day by a practice that kept the answers honest as he changed.
An invitation.
If something in this has stirred you, if you have been training, working, building, competing without ever sitting with what is actually underneath it, we would love to walk with you for a season.
Try our two-week trial. Two weeks of guided practice in the meditative arts. Tai Chi, Qigong, breathwork, sitting and standing meditation, the daily structure that lets the three questions begin to ask themselves. Designed for the curious beginner and for the experienced practitioner who is ready to integrate what they already know with what they have not yet met.
Two weeks is enough to feel the shift. Two weeks is enough to know whether this work is for you. Two weeks is enough to begin building an evolving life practice with the meditative arts, the kind of practice that does not stay frozen in time, but grows with you, layer by layer, decade by decade, for the rest of your life.
The questions are already inside you. The answers are waiting for the water to settle.
Begin your two-week trial today, and learn how to create an evolving life practice with the meditative arts. Just click the link below and start today.