In a conversation on the Lex Fridman Podcast, legendary grappling coach John Danaher sat down alongside Georges St-Pierre and Gordon Ryan to discuss what truly separates champions from everyone else.
When asked about the key to success, Danaher did not point to drilling techniques harder or logging more mat time. Instead, he offered a framework that applies far beyond the world of jiu-jitsu.
“In any developed sport, by the time you enter that sport, most of the basic precepts, the major techniques, the major mechanical understandings of the sport are long since worked out,” Danaher explained.
“The key to success is to be able to identify some area of the industry that you’re in which is currently undervalued.”
His argument centers on the idea that every industry, including combat sports, moves in waves of fashion. At any given time, certain skills and attributes are overlooked by the majority of practitioners, even when those skills carry real, objective value.
The athlete or professional who can identify that gap and develop it before others catch on will enjoy a significant early advantage.
Danaher used his own career as proof. Leglocks had existed in grappling for decades, but for most of the sport’s history, leading figures downplayed them.
“When I looked at them, I said there was immense potential but it wasn’t being realized and needed to be changed,” he said.
His decision to develop a comprehensive leglock system with his athletes, including Gordon Ryan, reshaped the competitive landscape entirely.
Danaher believes this principle of identifying undervalued skills applies to any professional field. Whether you are in technology, business, or sport, the people who excel are rarely those who do the same things as everyone else with slightly more effort. They are the ones who look at the available possibilities and ask which genuinely useful tools are currently being ignored.
Georges St-Pierre echoed this sentiment from his own experience.
“When everybody sometimes goes right, I was never afraid to try to go left,” St-Pierre said.
He described taking down opponents with superior wrestling backgrounds on paper, precisely because no one expected him to attempt it.
Gordon Ryan credited Danaher directly for shifting his entire approach to the sport.
“When I came in I was a blue belt and I was beating brown and black belts in competition already, but he really changed my way of thinking about the sport,” Ryan said. “Instead of doing things harder, I would actually try to get better at jiu-jitsu.”
Danaher’s philosophy comes with a lesson about how champions are built. Technical mastery matters, but it is the strategic identification of what others have missed that creates a lasting edge. By the time a technique becomes fashionable, its peak advantage has already passed. The real work happens in the quiet period before the crowd arrives.
As Danaher summarized: “Because it’s an inherently useful product, it will be very, very successful in its initial applications against people who aren’t currently using it.”
