◆ THE NEW CHAPTER · 2026-07-28

What Jiu Jitsu Taught Me About Building a Business

I came to Jiu Jitsu the same way I came to most things that have genuinely changed me: late, humbled, and with no idea what I was getting into. And somewhere between getting my posture broken for the hundredth time and finally understanding why, I started noticing how much the mats had to teach me about building a business.

Not in a motivational-poster way. In a real, uncomfortable, specific way.

Tap Early. Learn Fast. Leave the Ego at the Door.

The first thing Jiu Jitsu does is expose your ego. You walk in thinking your general fitness or coordination will carry you. It does not. You get submitted by people half your size in the first five minutes, and you have a choice: protect your ego or protect your development.

Tapping is not losing. Tapping is the mechanism by which you actually learn. You tap, you reset, you figure out where you went wrong. Do that a thousand times and you get better. Refuse to tap, hold on too long trying to prove something, and you get hurt. Then you're off the mats entirely.

I watched this play out at ArtResin more times than I'd like to admit. There were product directions I held onto too long because I'd invested too much personally in the idea. There were partnerships I stayed in past the point where the signs were clear. The cost of not tapping in business is not a sore arm the next morning. It's months of momentum lost, cash burned, and a team that can sense the denial even when you can't.

Tapping early is not weakness. It is the fastest path to the next useful thing.

Position Before Submission

This is one of the foundational principles in Jiu Jitsu. You do not go hunting for the finish before you have the position. Chase the submission without the position and you get reversed, swept, and end up worse off than before you tried.

I think about this constantly in relation to how businesses chase monetization before they have distribution. Before they have an audience that trusts them. Before they have even a basic position in the market that makes the ask feel natural.

When we were building ArtResin in the early years (starting in 2008, long before resin was anywhere near as mainstream as it later became), we were not yet trying to convert anyone. We were trying to become genuinely useful to artists. We were trying to be the people who showed up with real answers to real questions about a product category that had almost no reliable information available. That was the position. The submission, the sale, came later and it came much more easily because of the groundwork.

If you're building something and you're frustrated that monetization isn't working, it's worth asking honestly whether you have the position yet. Most of the time, the answer is no.

You Get Better by Rolling with People Better Than You

This one is simple and it is brutal and it is completely true.

You can drill technique forever. You can watch instructional videos. But your real development happens when you roll with people who expose your gaps in real time, not in theory. People who are faster, smarter, or further along than you are a gift, even when they are handing you a very uncomfortable experience.

I spent seventeen years in agency motion design before starting ArtResin, and the most formative stretches of that time were the ones where I was clearly not the best person in the room. Working alongside people who were sharper, more experienced, or just wired differently pushed me to get specific about what I actually brought to the table. It forced me to develop a point of view rather than just a set of skills.

After my exit from ArtResin in 2024, I made a deliberate decision to return to craft. To get back to making things with my hands and my eye, not just managing and directing. Part of that decision came from this exact principle. I wanted to be back in rooms, or at least in conversations, where I was learning again. Where the gap between where I was and where I wanted to be was visible enough to actually motivate movement.

Consistency Beats Intensity Every Time

The people who show up regularly, work their fundamentals, and stay in the practice for years will always outpace the person who trained intensely for three months and burned out.

I have seen this in creative work my entire career. The designers and directors I most respect are not the ones who had one extraordinary year. They are the ones who kept showing up, kept refining, kept being curious through the decades. The output compounds. The judgment compounds. The network compounds.

ArtResin was not built in a sprint. It was built across sixteen years of showing up, iterating, listening to artists, and making the product and the community around it incrementally better. There was no single breakthrough moment that made everything work. There were a thousand small, consistent actions that accumulated into something real.

You can read more about my background and that arc on my bio page. And if you want to see where I am now creatively, the current work lives at davidzak.com.

The mats are honest in a way that very few environments are. They tell you exactly where you are, every single session, with no room for spin. That kind of feedback is uncomfortable. It is also, I think, the best thing I have found for staying grounded about what actually works.

← All articles · About David Zak · The 40-year timeline