My teacher told me about a student he watched. It wasn’t because the student was necessarily dangerous on the mat, though I did know he had a reputation for being rough at times.

He only rolled with people he knew he could beat or people he knew he could never beat. He rarely had a round with someone in the middle.

All three rounds are important:

• You need the easy partners; that’s where you get to experiment and work on new things.
• You also need the ones who are way ahead, the ones you know you will probably lose to, but you learn from that too, as long as you go into it with an emphasis on building awareness.
• And then you need the ones in the middle. That’s where you get to see where you are. That’s where you get to have the wins you can be proud of and the losses that frustrate you a little bit. You need to stretch.

This student skipped the middle.

There’s also the other one. You know him. Sometimes he needs water. His belt needs to be retied. His gi jacket needs fixing. 30 seconds, 45 seconds gone. He knew it was going to be a tough round. Now it’s a shorter one too.

Both are doing the same thing. One’s picking his partners. The other one is shaving seconds off the clock.

You have to lose to get better. You have to lose when you gave a real effort and you had a chance to win. That’s hard, sometimes frustrating. But the frustration never lasts. I think the real reason for avoidance is ego preservation. And that matters only if you’re putting a lot of weight on individual rounds.

It doesn’t have to be every class. But it can’t be no class.