Tell me 100 times. My teacher has been saying a lot of the same phrases for as long as I’ve known him. After a while, you feel like, “OK, I’ve heard that 99 times. I got it.”

But on the 100th (or 300th?) time, it actually landed. Some technique finally worked, or I finally submitted so and so, or whatever.

It can take until black belt until you truly understand some bit of advice your teacher gave you. That’s because it can take that long until you realize how the gaining of one inch of progress took your teacher traveling a hundred miles.

I’ve found myself to also be repetitive in teaching at times. Sometimes I can see that some students are tired of hearing something.

But there are things I teach my students that I didn’t learn until after ten years of training. I’m giving them a major shortcut. For some, it will be that. For others, they’ll need to experience some struggles before things click. And that’s OK. Because that happened with a lot of the teachings I’ve received. Some tips made sense right away, and some didn’t until after much later.

Remember that you don’t know what you don’t know. So if your teacher is repeating something a lot, maybe there’s more to it than you think.

Unfortunately, sometimes it does take five or ten years of hearing it before you finally go, “Oh!”. It’s what makes jiu-jitsu both the most frustrating activity you’ll ever do and the most rewarding.