Before I started my first company, before I earned a Ph.D. , I was a judo champion. I competed for 14 years – and I was pretty good at it. I won international competitions on every continent except for Antartica and Australia, and culminated by winning the world championships. Then I went off and did something completely different – was a professor teaching statistics, then a consultant doing statistical programming. Now I’m running a company, making educational games and, more importantly, creating a platform so anyone can make educational games. We have the low-code developer version done and the no-code version will be out by April.
Some days, I look at other judo champions who went on to become their country’s national coach or run a gym, and I wonder if all of those years of doing judo were wasted. Then, I think about what I learned from training at judo all of those years that directly relates to the work I’m doing now,
All those years doing judo were not wasted
There are three very specific ways that the lessons I learned from training and competing.
1. When you can’t do the best thing, do something
You can’t always have everything perfect. Ideally, you’d have training partners who were your same weight and skill level, and you’d go twenty rounds a night. The old “iron sharpens iron” idea. Most of the years that I was competing, I lived in the Midwest, which is not a hotbed of judo competitors. Even when I lived in San Diego, there were not a lot of people competing at the national level my size. In those circumstances, a lot of people didn’t train every day because, “I don’t have the training partners I need.” As for me, I did what I could. Every day. Some mornings, I lifted weights. Other mornings, I ran. In the evenings, I’d fight whoever was willing to get in front of me, and when my partners were tired, because, God bless them, they were often 40-year-old guys in the Navy who worked a desk job, I’d practice throws or do matwork drills.
You might reasonably wonder how this relates to our 7 Generation Games wiki. Right now, we’re making a program like WordPress for educational games, but easier. You answer some questions, select images and it writes the code for your game. I did the first draft of the data entry screens and creating the code and now Dennis is integrating it with the database. The short version for you non-techies is that it doesn’t make sense for me to keep writing code until he has done his part.
So… what can I do to move our project forward? Well, we have made a lot of games in the last year, so many that they aren’t even all listed here , I’ve been making them so fast that I haven’t had time to update all of the websites. Today, I got a start on updating our company wiki to document what each game teaches and a bit of the technical side, like the path through the game. Yesterday, I was going through some of our older games and fixing bugs. (If you wonder how bugs slip into games that are being played by tens of thousands of students, I answer that here.)
When I lived in Minnesota, sometimes I would roller skate around the lake for miles or ice skate for an hour. Someone once told me very nastily,
“You know, that’s not going to make you any better at judo.”
In fact, it did give me more leg strength and burn calories. Believe me, if you’ve ever competed in a sport where you need to cut weight, having a pound or two less to drop the day of weigh-ins is a gift from heaven. Updating the wiki doesn’t get the game builder done faster, but it will help any new developers who are maintaining existing games – thus freeing up my future time for things like professional development for schools that want to use our game builder, or for creating new blocks. Fixing bugs doesn’t create the game builder, but if we’re telling people – “Hey, check out our platform for making games” – the games we made with it ought to be as good as we can make them.
I like making new games and I like working on the 7 Gen Blocks platform, but, to be honest, some days, I am just not feeling it. Those days are few, but they happen. Start-up culture may say, “Push through! Toughen up! Sleep when you’re dead!” In fact, though, I found that it is possible to overtrain. So, some days, I did arm bar drills, or practiced throws or did boring gripping drills. (If you want, you can see a video of me teaching how to do an armbar here.)
What I learned: If you can’t do the number one best thing to move toward your goal, do the second-best thing, or, if you can’t do that, the third-best thing. Maybe you can only do the sixth-best thing. What matters is that you do something.
Okay, this post is getting long, so I’ll tell you about the other two ways next time.
In other news –
I Did a TED Talk on What we talk about at the secret world champion meetings.
Summer 2026 – Free Professional Development for You/Your District on Making Educational Games
We will be offering free PD on making educational games using either the low-code or no-code game builder. Limit one per district. The PD will be offered by Dr. AnnMaria De Mars, live in California or Minnesota and via Zoom in other states. On-site PD in other states can be arranged but the district would have to pay travel expenses. Get more information here and I’ll contact you to set up a date and time for the session.
If you are not employed by a school district or your district has not scheduled a workshop, you can still sign up and join one of the two public, online workshops we’ll be doing this summer.