Until you get punched in the face

On the dangers of being self-enamored

Ronda Rousey’s MMA fight this weekend — her first in nearly 10 years, since she retired in ignominy after two embarrassing defeats in a row — has me thinking about the perils of taking success too seriously.

I’ve never had the shit kicked out of me in public. As a result, I’m loath to criticize someone who has. She’s braver than me, and stronger, and better looking, too. I’m a little bug compared to Ronda Rousey. Please don’t hit me, Ronda. And yet: Criticize I shall. Because I have a book coming out July 21, and I have promised my publisher that I will post regularly until then. This is, I think, the origin of much great art.

So, with little due respect, what can Ronda Rousey teach us about getting high on your own supply?

There’s a problem with life: It’s short. Experience is the best teacher, but sometimes the small sample size we get when running life’s biggest experiments causes us to learn the wrong things, to make too much of insufficient data. Consider the experience of a comedian who kills at their hometown club then bombs in the big city, where no one gets their local humor.

Humans’ proclivity for pattern-matching is by and large incredibly adaptive, arguably the core of cognition itself. But it can go tragically wrong. I consider it one of the central axioms of personal development that the lessons we learn in emotionally charged situations are overly strong and overly general. Lessons like: “I have a sixth sense for when stocks will go up or down,” or “never date women you meet online,” or “I always choke when it matters most.”

Once you’ve really invested in the wrong lesson, it can take years —­ or a lifetime —­ to unlearn, unless you make a point of becoming aware of your conditioning.

Spend a few hours at a low-stakes poker table, and you will almost certainly see this up close, in the form of someone making an absurdly large opening bet holding a hand like pocket jacks or queens. After everyone folds, they’ll table their cards with a “thank God that’s over” look on their face, and explain “I never win with this hand.” This is someone who has been burned by losing a couple of big pots with starting cards that they feel entitle them to win — and, to guard against ever having to feel that specific pain again, they will play the hand badly for the rest of their life, losing a little money in expectation every time.

A central challenge in poker is that to become any good at all, you have to avoid hastily forming new rules based on lessons you think you’ve learned in a few high-stakes pots. This is critical, and very hard, because variance in poker is so high — when you make the right play several times in a row and lose big every time, it hurts. As a result, it’s the norm for weak players to build whole edifices of bad strategy around unlucky results. You would be surprised by the extent to which, even at the highest levels, poker players struggle to overcome superstitious instincts developed in just this way.

I have to imagine the conditions for overfitting are even riper in professional MMA, where every one of the 1-3 fights you have per year is potentially career-altering — and where the whole context of the fight, from the marketing to the weigh-in to the walk out, is designed to drive the emotional stakes as high as humanly possible.

Which is all to say, what happened to Ronda Rousey makes a lot of sense.

Those of you who weren’t yet fully sentient when Rousey was coming up missed a wild run. She was an exceptional judo player — the first American woman to medal in the Olympics — and as an MMA fighter, her judo skills made her seemingly invincible. Her game plan was roughly the same each time: Wade in behind aggressive (if sloppy) boxing, find a way to take her opponent to the ground, then search for an opening for her Olympic-caliber armbar.

Rousey accrued 12 straight wins, 8 of them in under a minute. Sports Illustrated dubbed her “the World’s Most Dominant Athlete”; Joe Rogan seriously speculated that she might beat Floyd Mayweather in a fight. Kelefa Sanneh, writing for The New Yorker, questioned whether Rousey’s fights were even worth watching: “There are some people, believe it or not, who might question the wisdom of paying $64.99 to watch Rousey spend fourteen seconds proving something that every MMA fan already knew.”

Even though Rousey used the same game plan in every fight, her opponents seemed powerless to do anything about it — until they didn’t. Rousey came into her November 2015 fight against Holm a 15-to-1 favorite, but fell apart quickly when Holm was able to execute the obvious counterstrategy: preserve distance, mix in leg kicks, avoid giving Rousey armbar entries. The result was a totally lopsided fight that the commentators struggled to process in real time — with Rousey’s face bloodied and Holm untouched, Rogan ventured a tentative “Holly is starting to show her skill.” A couple minutes later, Rousey was out cold. By perfectly executing the response to Rousey’s Plan A, Holm revealed there was no Plan B.

This didn’t have to be the end for Rousey: MMA history is littered with specialists who’ve diversified their game over time. In the wake of her loss to Holm, people expected Rousey to take a similar path, by rebuilding her game to avoid rushing straight in against elite strikers.

Instead, Rousey doubled down on her old strategy. Despite taking 13 months to work up to her next fight, she seemingly changed nothing, from her coaches to her game plan. This time around, Amanda Nunes had her out in 48 seconds flat. Post-fight, Nunes said she wasn’t surprised that Rousey hadn’t made any adjustments to her game, because Rousey had learned the wrong lesson from her early string of successes: that she was able to stand and strike with great boxers.

It’s easy to see episodes like this in the biographies of others and think, “I would never be so delusional.” But it is very easy to take success personally. We fell into this trap to some extent at Alvea, the pandemic medicine company I co-founded at the height of COVID. We’d been able to raise a ~$20M seed round in a flash in early 2022, right when Omicron was plowing through the world. This led us to believe that raising our next round, a year and change later, would also be straightforward. But we’d learned the wrong lesson. The right one was “it’s easy for a vaccine company to raise seed funding from philanthropists when the world is blowing up.” As a result of our belief in the fake lesson — “we are great at fundraising and investors love us” — we delayed our next fundraise too long, which was one of the major factors in our forced pivot and eventual wind-down.

It’s humbling to realize that most outcomes in life, good or bad, are actually like this — contingent and circumstantial, as dependent on luck or the actions of others as they are on your own. Just as in poker, or MMA, we are by default far too ready to draw conclusions from limited or skewed experiences, to concoct misleading rules that corrode our agency. Your degree of success in life will, in fact, be largely determined by the extent to which you are able to internalize this truth. The most emotionally loaded beliefs in your head will offer the intoxicating promise of clarity. But they are intoxicants all the same.

Chapter 9 of You Can Just Do Things, my book out July 21, is all about how to spot the fake lessons you’ve already internalized, and stop yourself from developing new ones.