The Laws of the Ring Read online

  You would be surprised what you can learn about yourself and other people when you engage in something as primal and basic as professional mixed martial arts. You probably know me as a fighter, but I’d like you to read this book with an open mind. My hope is that you picked up this book because you instinctively see why a fighter is qualified to offer insight into human nature, but that you pass it along to your friends and family because you find something compelling and inspiring within its pages. This book is a result of me, ruminating on my experiences through thirty-some-odd years, asking myself a series of questions. Why has life gone this way for me? Why have so many good—and some bad—things happened? How did I become who I am today? How can I help others experience the good and avoid the bad? The lessons have not always been learned sequentially. Some have come about retrospectively. Their chronology unfolds as I unfolded.

  When I first started jotting down ideas for a book, I always thought it would be called Passion Runs the World. It’s my experience that the people who get the most out of life and have the most success are those who have found a way to incorporate their passion into every aspect of their existence. As I got deeper into the process, I came to the realization that community is the necessary by-product of passion. In my life, as you will see, community is primary. When it was proposed that we title the book Laws of the Cage in order to more accurately reflect my sport, I disagreed. The ring, with its symbolic inclusiveness, seemed the perfect embodiment of the community my passion has created. There are certain qualities that all successful, positive people share. Passion is the umbrella under which they all reside, and community is the collection of people who share the space, and the passion, under that umbrella. The umbrella is the perfect metaphor; it protects you, your passion, and your community from outside elements of negativity, distrust, and jealousy. As you read, think about yourself standing under the umbrella, inviting in more and more members of your community in order to protect your collective passion from the “elements.”

  Which gets us back to the original dilemma: What is your passion? I’ve asked this question and received the answer “I don’t know” more often than I can count.

  And that’s okay. I have a response to that. I say, “Fine, here’s what we’re going to do, then. We’re going to assign you a passion.”

  Sounds crazy, right? You ought to see the looks I get after I say that. Who do I think I am? How can I dictate someone’s passion? How can I take someone I don’t know and give him something to be passionate about?

  Easy: The passion I assign is the same every time.

  The passion is you.

  I tell them this: For the time being, you are your own passion. You are going to invest in yourself. You are going to make it a point to work harder at whatever it is you’re doing. You’re going to celebrate your victories, no matter how small. If you do something well, you’re going to compliment yourself for it. You’re going to set goals. You’re going to verbalize—and share—your plans. You’re going to hold yourself accountable to those goals and plans. You’re going to separate yourself from negative people who suck energy from you. You’re going to surround yourself with people who are positive and have your best interests in mind. You’re going to be healthier.

  In short, you’re going to start consciously doing things that will create a greater feeling of self-worth. You will be conscious of the choices you are making instead of simply autopiloting your way through your days, months, and years. Through this exercise, you will find something you like. By making yourself your passion, you will find a passion outside of yourself to follow on your way to a better life.

  After all, we all start alone under our umbrella. From there, we seek out others who share our passion to join us and help us make it grow. However, there are many times when we need to stand on our own and make big decisions that can dictate the course of our passion. I relate it to a big fight: I enter the cage with the people from my corner—trainers and coaches—but when the bell rings I’m left alone to make decisions based on the teachings of the community. I am alone, but the community is with me in spirit and guidance. And then, when the battle is over, the cage opens up and I am reunited with my community to either rejoice or console in the aftermath of the fight.

  It takes introspection to identify passion. It doesn’t happen in a vacuum. There are no shortcuts. You have to think about yourself, your beliefs and desires. You may come to some uncomfortable truths about yourself, and that’s okay. We live in a quick-hit, short-attention-span world, and introspection can often be in short supply. We want things, we want them now, and we are willing to compromise our lives in order to get them.

  We don’t have enough quiet moments to really look inside ourselves and conduct an honest assessment of our strengths and weaknesses. We roll through life in fast motion, feeling guilty if we aren’t keeping as busy as possible, and amid the hustle and bustle it’s easy to lose sight of purpose and passion. This book, with its Laws of Power, is intended to be a caution sign on the lifestyle highway.

  Slow down. Assess yourself. Define your passion. Make a plan. Execute it.

  By first making yourself your passion, you are going to look inward and come to realistic conclusions about your strengths and weaknesses. You’re going to learn how to stand under your umbrella and reach out to others who might need the protection and direction provided by a similar passion. More practically, you’re going to develop a strategy to incorporate your passion into your life, depending on your available time, financial needs, and emotional burden.

  You’re going to take the first steps toward controlling your life rather than having it control you. In this book you will read examples of people who have gone through these same stages and come away with a changed outlook on life.

  You’ll read my story, about how I went against convention to pursue a career in fighting after deciding it was something for which I had both passion and talent. You’ll read about the people who have combined talents in order to work together with me on business ventures outside the cage. You’ll read about the courage shown by my older brother, Ryan, whose fourteen-year battle with mental illness has been a source of worry and inspiration. You’ll read about top contender Joseph Benavidez, who showed up at my gym with nothing but a passion for fighting and a trunk full of the most basic worldly possessions.

  The process isn’t easy, though. I won’t lie about that. It takes a unique person to ignore the pressures and expectations of society in order to chase a dream. It takes a strong person to stand alone under the umbrella and remain steadfast in the pursuit. Unknowns get in the way and cloud our thinking. Fear intrudes and we get stuck in stagnancy. We wait for something to happen instead of making it happen. We fear failure, so we don’t take the kind of risks that could produce success.

  You will learn that it takes more effort to wait than to act. Procrastination is tiring and soul-sapping. Waiting for the perfect opportunity is stifling and confining. You can wait for an opportunity, or you can create an opportunity.

  Conventional society discourages risk taking. Oh, we pretend to embrace it, but this officially sanctioned risk taking occurs in a controlled environment. Risk, by this definition, is putting a hundred bucks on a fifty-to-one long shot, or buying a thousand dollars in penny stocks. Or it’s reality-show risk taking, which is kind of like risk taking without the risk.

  The kind of risk I’m suggesting in this book has nothing to do with bungee-jumping, or eating a cricket, or jumping in a frozen lake. I’m talking about life-changing risk, the kind that makes you take a deep breath, question everything you ever thought about your life, and still—even after acknowledging that standing pat would be easier and safer—putting your head down and charging forward into the unknown.

  It’s the kind of risk that turns your life from a poorly focused, passion-free existence into something happier, more positive, and far more fulfilling. By following the L
aws of Power described in this book, you will feel more comfortable and confident about taking the kind of risk that will change your life. You will have the tools and the clear-eyed knowledge to take the smart risk that will pay big dividends.

  My passion is risky. It’s clearly not for everyone, and the style I employ while practicing it is high energy and exciting. Because of this, I’ve often been confused with someone who would be willing to take the contrived risk. I’ve heard, “Urijah, let’s go bungee-jumping,” or “Urijah, doesn’t skydiving sound like fun?”

  No, it doesn’t. I tell people, “Dude, my life is too good for me to take that kind of risk. I might screw up and miss out on the life I’m leading.”

  So here’s my goal: If you live your life by the Laws of Power outlined in these pages, your life will be so good you won’t want or need to take contrived risks. Metaphorically speaking, you will jump out of an airplane, but it will be a permanent, life-changing experience and not a cheap thrill. You, like me, will choose to embrace the real rather than chase the artificial.

  Prologue: Know What You’re Fighting For

  It wasn’t easy. My path to the cage at the Colusa Casino—and everything that followed—would not have happened if I hadn’t been consumed with a sense of purpose.

  The first task to complete on your way to a better, more passion-based life is this: Know what you’re fighting for.

  You’re fighting for a lifestyle that allows you to incorporate your passion throughout your personal and professional lives. You’re fighting to control your life instead of having it control you. In short, you’re fighting for a life without compromise. It doesn’t just happen organically. You can’t wish it into being. You must push forward at all costs.

  My pursuit began when my friend Tyrone Glover sold me a ticket to watch him compete in a new kind of professional fighting: MMA. He was fighting in Colusa—one of the few places in California staging fights—and from the moment the fight began, I knew I would do everything in my power to get inside that cage.

  I got a queasy feeling the second Tyrone’s fight started. It wasn’t nerves, it was excitement. I wanted to jump into the cage right then and there. I didn’t care that the sport was considered all but dead, pushed to the margins by Arizona senator John McCain’s attempt to make it illegal in 2000. After watching tapes of the first UFC events, run under the motto “There Are No Rules,” McCain called the sport “human cockfighting.” He was right; the sport was badly in need of reform. It was primal. It was vicious. And it was incredibly exciting. I had watched early UFC fights when I was in high school, but seeing one in person was completely different. I couldn’t imagine anything that would test a man’s mettle to this degree. I was convinced I would be good at it; it seemed to be invented with me in mind. I immediately became consumed with the idea of pursuing it.

  The butterflies in my stomach turned into bumblebees as I sat on a metal folding chair and watched Tyrone fight. This was my future, and I was ready for it to begin.

  The 1st Law of Power

  Positive Thinking Breeds Success

  Here’s an easy question: Who would you rather hang out with, someone who is always genuinely happy and positive, or someone who is always grumpy and negative?

  As part of your progress toward living your dream, you need to assess your attitude. Is negativity infecting your life and serving as a dream stopper? Is your mentality limiting your potential?

  Remember this: Negativity takes no imagination. It’s far easier to criticize someone’s decisions after they make them than to propose better ones beforehand.

  At some point between my first and second professional fights, when the prospect of making a career in a sport that then consisted of competing in semilegal fights on Indian reservations was still a wild long shot, I sat around with a group of friends and talked about my big plans. I have a tendency to do this—I just can’t help it. I’m a motivated guy, and I want everyone around me to feel the same way.

  During this particular conversation, my buddy Will Creger interrupted me and asked, “Why are you so confident about everything? Where does that come from?”

  His tone wasn’t angry or challenging. My attitude just blew him away, and he was both curious and amused. He was a successful guy who came from a successful family. His mother was a schoolteacher and his father was a top executive with a construction company. It’s safe to assume he’d been around positive, happy people throughout his life, and yet he couldn’t get his mind around the way I approached mine.

  It’s just the way I am. I make a point to stay positive and I’m always looking forward to the next thing to feed my excitement. When something bad happens in my life, I’m pretty good about shrugging it off and going forward. In reality you have to anyway, right?

  I don’t think I’d ever given my disposition a conscious thought until then. When I did give it some thought, though, I realized my upbringing was largely responsible for my mentality. My parents had me and my older brother, Ryan, while living in a New Hope Christian commune in Isla Vista, California. My name, which means “God is my light,” is a lasting symbol of those days. From the little I remember, the place had a heavy hippie vibe. You know, anything goes, love everybody, do what you do, and don’t judge. It seems paradoxical today, in an age where fundamentalist Christianity is conservative and uptight, that such a place could also be based on religion. It was, though—charismatic Christianity carried the day.

  Even after we left the commune, the strain of positivity that was cultivated in the commune proved pretty durable among the Fabers. It stuck around in separate households after my parents divorced. It has, in fact, stayed with me all these years later.

  My dad, Theo, is the happiest, easiest-going person I have ever met. He had some difficult times following his breakup with my mom, with alcohol and despair darkening his disposition, but most of the time I think he’s fundamentally incapable of feeling stress. His mind-set hasn’t always produced the best results when it comes to his career and his finances, but he’s sure a lot of fun to be around.

  My mom Suzanne’s positivity was more of the aggressive sort. She came from a broken family and was consequently adamant that her children grow up cultured, educated, and financially secure. She was highly disciplined and ambitious, and she expected her children to be the same. The walls of her home were always papered with inspirational sayings. She even made us write out goals and tape them to the wall in our rooms to serve as constant reminders of what we should be striving toward.

  I vividly remember the saying that was on our refrigerator for years. It read:

  Dream impossible dreams. When those dreams come true, make the next ones more impossible.

  My mom was always running down a list of the things her kids could do. We could cook, we could play sports, we could build things. You name it, we could do it. She pushed confidence, positivity, and self-sufficiency on us like they were magic vitamins.

  During my short stint as a child model and actor, I did commercial television shoots, for a radio station and a local hospital, among others. (It was all pretty small-time.) On one of the shoots, when I was in fifth or sixth grade, I remember talking with one of the producers, who asked if I liked to dance. “I can’t really dance, but my brother is really good,” I said frankly. Without a moment’s hesitation, my mom butted into the conversation and corrected me. “Honey, you can dance. Any kid of mine can dance.” I had to take her word for it at the time, but now that I think about it, I definitely have been known to get down on the dance floor on occasion. Without my mom’s foresight and encouragement I might have had to stay sidelined on the dance floor, and my fight entrances might have had a little less bounce and energy when Tupac’s “California Love” starts bumping.

  We’re not going to settle the nature vs. nurture argument in this book, but I can say with certainty that the cumulative effect of growing up in an environment wher
e those kinds of messages were always front and center has something to do with who I am today. The combination of an aggressively positive mother and a naturally positive father resulted in an upbringing where nobody ever told me I couldn’t do something. Mom taught me that anything was possible, and Pop taught me to shrug off misfortune and soldier on with a smile on my face. There were no barriers, no fears, no second thoughts.

  Just because you haven’t done something doesn’t mean you can’t, so resist the urge to criticize. This is harder than it seems. There’s a difference between being a critical thinker and being a critic. A critical thinker comes up with constructive criticism after looking at a problem from all angles; a critic simply tosses out his or her caustic opinion with nothing substantive to back it up, and tends to lend mostly negative thoughts on any given topic. In pursuing your passion, accentuate the positive in yourself and other people, and never allow someone else’s critiques to stop you from tackling your dreams. Don’t confuse this with living in a fantasy world—remember, an umbrella can be used to protect you from the sun as well as the rain. So, to answer Will, there’s a chance the confident attitude I took into the fight with Jay Valencia had its roots on my mom’s refrigerator.

  The 2nd Law of Power

  Enjoy What You Have

  My brother and I spent a lot of time in the summers with our pop, who was always bouncing from one construction job to another. One year, Pop decided to buy a beat-up motor home for us to live in while he did his work rather than rent a house.