I ' m the arachne Spaming VEL as she stalks you in the jungle <| sep |> I ' ve mixed feelings about this stuff . On the one hand , thinking about how to learn and how to improve is fascinating . On the other hand , I think a lot of white belts including me are sometimes looking for a magic bullet where there really isn ' t one . The initial learning problem for BJJ is basically that a there is an awful lot of it and b much of it is physically counterintuitive and hard . People try to apply various teaching learning techniques to minimise this . But it still basically shakes out to ' You ' ll be totally lost for 36 months and very confused for 612 . Then you ' ll start to kind of get it at which point you ' ll appreciate just how much you still have to learn . ' The only reliable way of speeding this up is to put in a crazy amount of mat time ideally combined with athletic prowess which is really just brute forcing the problem . For some people and , again , I think I ' m in this boat thinking about all this helps pass the time while we put the hours in and probably helps a tiny bit . For others , it becomes a frustrating distraction , because they feel if they can just get the right learning method it ' ll all click when that ' s just not going to happen . Basically , I think you just have to lean into it and enjoy the journey . In particular , we should appreciate how easy it is to learn as a white belt . We just have to turn up regularly and we get better really fast from any objective standpoint . Things , as I understand it , get much harder once you ' re into the rarified heights of late blue and purple which is really when it become important to work out how you best learn and improve , because the free ride of being a beginner is over . I don ' t even want to think about the effort it takes for good black belts to improve !