Andrew Smith on the Roots of Writing and Building Focus - Part 1

A Q&A on many topics, including establishing habits to create long-term success and using competition to foster discipline.

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And now for something a little different. Today’s post is a Q&A with

Andrew Smith

, one of the writer’s I’ve discovered here on Substack. We met through a Facebook Substack group and developed a quick rapport and then realized we had other shared interests, including long histories in sports, fitness and writing. Andrew’s Substack,

Goatfury Writes

, explores the intersections of technology, society, and the future, providing thoughtful analysis and critical thinking on the latest trends and their implications. And he writes daily. Yes, daily. For his “day job,” he owns several Brazilian jiu-jiitsu gyms in the Richmond, Virginia area. I’m still not sure how he does it.

While our Substacks couldn’t be more different, we are both actively working to shape conversation around our respective subjects—his on the future of tech and advancement and mine on shifting narratives about appetite, empowerment and well-being. This Q&A touches on a few different topics, including the craft of writing, the role of competition in fostering discipline and the importance of establishing habits to create long-term success. We talked a couple of weeks ago, and it was a whopping two-hour conversation, so I have edited it for length and to remove our many “uh’s”, “you know’s” and “like’s.” Below is part 1 of the interview. Here is part 2.

So here we go…

Kristi: I think it might be helpful for us to just start with how we got here to this point, and also I'm just curious because you've got such an interesting background, and then your Substack isn't really about your day job.

I'm a naturally curious person, so I'm interested in how all of that came about and then we have a little bit of crossover from a competition, fitness, sports perspective and then obviously Substack.

Andrew: Yeah. And I want to hear more about your lifting experience, too.

The writing's always been an undercurrent for me. I've always been really, I guess, active in writing, passionate about it. I wrote essays when I was a kid and I thought I was pretty good at it and I kind of got away from it for a while.

I published a ‘zine when I was in middle school that was about the school, it was just like gossiping news or something like trash, you know.

And then I self-published some stuff, probably a little bit of stuff in high school. But we played D and D in high school, and that's where my creative outlet mostly was. Probably like drawing comic book covers and playing D and D and stuff like that.

It's kind of weird, because if you're a dungeon master, which I was for a while, you're kind of a writer. You write, you create worlds for people, and you tell stories, and it is also kind of like the conversation we're having now. It's a collaborative thing too where the players and the DM work together. And I really liked that.

I wrote songs. I was interested in punk rock, I got angry at the system, and wrote about it quite a bit. The lyrics were probably kind of sophomore work but better than what most of my peers were doing.

And then business ownership sort of took center stage in my late twenties, and I've never looked back. But the funny thing about business ownership is that writing is a pretty big component of it. I think if you can't write and you're in business, you probably need to partner with somebody who can write, and there's other skills that make a business work for sure.

But to me, what I bring to the table is…. one of the things is… being able to tell a story, to be able to get people interested in our story, what we have to say, right?

Because everything is also like writing. Business is selling yourself. You can have the best business or product in the world, but if nobody knows about it, it doesn't really matter. And similarly, when we write on Substack… you and I can put out amazing content if we wanna pour our souls into it and then if like three people read it, we're just gonna be like, I don't even want to write next week.

I could have just had a conversation with three people, but if you have some readers, you start to get a couple 100 people or 50 or whatever, it's to the point where it really feels like it matters a little more.

You're making some kind of an impact.

So that's kind of a swirling non-biography but like with little elements of biography.

What about you? What is it that sort of made you want to write, on Substack in particular, but just feel free to go anywhere you want?

Kristi: I have a real quick question for you just so we can, I can reference this. What year did you graduate high school?

Andrew: ‘93

Kristi: So did I strangely.

Andrew: It's not a coincidence that we connected, Kristi. I don't think so. I think you mentioned one thing right up front. You said you're a very curious person. Me too.

I think that's why we're having this conversation. And I think also I kind of picked up on the generational thing. Like we have very similar life experience in terms of stuff that we live through culturally.

Kristi: So that gives me like a reference because I was a journalism kid.

I grew up with—we'll get into this because I'm gonna write about it soon—but, you know how you grow up and you have these sort of labels assigned to you or you take on these labels that follow you throughout your life?

Well, I was kind of like the nerd in the family.

My dad wanted one of his daughters to become a professional golfer. So, we, my sister and I, both did competition very early in our lives. We started at like age 12 playing tournaments. So that was kind of my DNA, but I was always more the studious kid or whatever.

And so, I started journalism in middle school, doing newspaper, doing yearbook, and I did it through high school, and then I did it in college, and I thought that I was gonna pursue writing. I thought that would be what I wanted to do, but I took a course in college in copy editing and had this really persuasive professor who had worked at the Wall Street Journal in Hong Kong. And he persuaded me to apply for this newspaper, copy editing internship [The Dow Jones News Fund internship program], which I got and that sort of just launched me in a different direction.

Andrew: And what year was this give or take when we're talking about, like just a little after high school?

Kristi: Yeah. I think it was my junior year [in college] in the summer. I did my internship at the Long Beach Press Telegram for copy editing.

I graduated and then did copy editing work. I worked in Southern California for a newspaper there. And then I went up to the Bay area and worked for a newspaper there in copy editing.

But along with that, I took an interest in fitness. I took a weightlifting class in college and really loved it. And then I was also into running and all of it kind of paralleled the journalism.

I ended up like working for the YMCA and getting certified as a personal trainer and did that for many years alongside working full time as a newspaper copy editor.

And then I had like 12 years at the Austin American-Statesman, which is the newspaper here in Austin. And again, I started as a copy editor and in 12 years moved over to digital and I ended up being the editor of the two websites, statesmen.com and Austin 360, which is the entertainment portion of it. So, I've always been more on the editing side of things.

And then after that, I moved over to the dark side, marketing, and went to work for an e-commerce site and built a content strategy for this travel company. And that's where I really honed… marketing, SEO, all the digital skills and did a lot of writing and then built a team as well.

So, most of my writing actually happened as a marketer than as a journalist.

And then the Substack thing, that was actually very interesting because I was working with a therapist, who I'm still working with. She is an intuitive eating-certified therapist, which is a whole other story.

But I saw her specifically because of that and I told her, hey, I'm chronicling this experience I'm having because I know this is gonna be a huge transition. There's gonna be all this learning and strife in this process, and I wanna like capture everything. And she was like, oh, you should write a Substack. And so, at that point, I was thinking, I'm writing all of this and I'm intending it to be a book. But then I thought, OK, well, I can still put this out on Substack and I can still write behind the scenes and have it all kind of come together.

So that's really what started me on Substack. I was following like, I think my only Substack was—is it called Letters from an American by Heather Cox Richardson? So, it was just kind of a crazy suggestion, and I was like, ok, yeah, let me do this and see what happens.

Andrew: That's pretty cool, man. I read Heather Cox Richardson. I guess I've subscribed to her for a few years now.

I've read a lot of over the years about [how] focus is a muscle, right?

Like you can focus on things. And I kind of taught myself to read, to remind myself that I enjoyed reading every day by forcing myself to read every day for about 15 minutes at first and then gradually I got longer and longer over time.

I would read like the most boring crap that I could imagine. Like I read international franchise—I forget the website, international franchise organization or something like that—because we were thinking about franchising our business.

We have multiple locations now, but before that, we thought about one way to do it would be franchising. Franchising is legally really challenging and difficult. So, I wanted to understand the scope of it or whatever.

But then I started reading Warren Buffett's letters to shareholders because I wanted to understand. And that was like a foreign language to me 10 years ago.

With business ownership, you're forced to learn some investing, you're forced to kind of understand risk and reward and stuff like that, like putting money in and getting money out and things like that. But like how money is created like wealth, like how it actually works on an economic level.

Because of my interest in punk rock from earlier in life, I think a big part of me kind of rejected, almost like being curious about capitalism, about how the system worked, and that retroactively came back with a vengeance in my upper thirties probably when I really started becoming interested in finance and how it worked.

I don't know about you, but the things that I'm happiest about are things that I didn't think I could do or that maybe I wasn't supposed to. It wasn't supposed to be me, you know, like learning about finance. —Andrew Smith

That's not something I would have described as a trait when I was a kid that I would be any good at, you know, investing or explaining how economics works to people or any of that kind of stuff, but here we are.

I wanted to ask you too. Did you grow up in Austin?

Kristi: I grew up outside of Dallas in a suburb there called Garland. “King of the Hill” is based on my hometown if that gives you any kind of …

Andrew: It does. And Austin is different.

Kristi: Yes. And I was always very different. So, I always felt like I don't fit here. I don't belong. This is not my place. I can't wait to leave.

Andrew: Yeah, me too. I grew up in Columbia, South Carolina, and I could not wait to get out of there. And when I was 19, I did finally, just ran away.

I ran to Richmond, which isn't in the grand spectrum of our country, not terribly different than Colombia. But just as an example, in Colombia, the 100^th anniversary of the end of the civil war was in 1965, and to commemorate the end of the civil war, the South Carolina legislature decided that they were going to raise the Confederate flag above the State Capitol and—OK, fine, 100-year anniversary, that's cool—it stayed up there for 30 years.

And so, I'm a kid growing up, remember, punk rock? I could not have loathed that symbol of hatred more back then.

It came down a few years after I left, and they put it on the state lawn on the lawn of the Capitol. And so, I was like, well, I made a good decision leaving, and a couple of years later, it actually was completely removed.

I think it was like the year 2000 or something like that. But I just needed a change in pace and just get out of there. So, I get it… [that feeling of] I don't belong here. This isn't for me.

Kristi: How did you get into Brazilian jui-jitsu? Where are you with that today?

Andrew: I grew up in South Carolina as I mentioned and one of the things was that we would always play outside. We always played baseball, basketball, football, just something outside, always playing games like that, and so I was always like an active kid and always playing and eating dirt and stuff like that.

Years went by and, let's say puberty hit around 11, 12, whenever it sort of starts messing with you. And one of the consequences of that was that I decided that I liked rough things.

I liked to be rough, and tackle football was like one of the most fun things. And if I'm completely honest with myself, I think that the tackle football thing was a lot like the finance and economics thing that I did in my upper thirties when I was eight or 10 years old. I was terrified of tackle football. I thought it was scary because you could get hurt and stuff like that. Puberty hit, and I had no fear and I felt like overcoming the fear and proving that I could do this was important somehow or other. I had a good time with it, and I think I kind of lumped wrestling in with that because I had an experience with a kid.

He had wrestled before, and he had a trampoline in his backyard, and we wrestled on it, and I beat him, and I was like, well, if this kid wrestled before and I beat him, maybe I should try this stuff out because I just like rough stuff.

And so fortunately the place where I went, I think it was ninth grade, and I wrestled during like the off season because I missed the regular season by the time I figured out that I should go do this.

Wrestling in high school meant that first of all everybody was better than me. So, I had to be really, really humble. And second, it was a lot of hard work, and I got a lot of discipline in a way that I never had that before in a way that, like, people go to boot camp and go to the military or whatever and get that when they're 18. I definitely got that when I was like 13, 14, 15.

It never went away, and the understanding that wrestling was really tough really kind of also appealed to me in a way because I knew that it was something that I was willing to do that other people weren't willing to do. I got pretty good at it by my senior year. Good enough to qualify for states and win the regionals, but I lost in the state tournament, and I was like, if I could go back next year, I was sure I could do better.

But I graduated… there was no wrestling at the University of South Carolina, no wrestling program which even looking back today, I'm like, that's very strange.

So, I moved to Richmond for the reasons I mentioned earlier just also for a change of pace and I was in college, I'd been an engineering major for my first year, and at some point I decided there's no way I wanted to do this kind of stuff for the rest of my life and I switched to art. So, a year and a half in South Carolina, I had to move to Richmond, took a year off. Richmond didn't have a wrestling program, but they had a judo club. And so, I said, OK, let's try this judo stuff because I knew it was pretty close, and I could take it as a class too.

It was really, really a low-key introduction to judo, but there was mat work, which is a lot like wrestling. You know, in judo you try to throw somebody on the feet, but then if you go to the ground, you keep going for at least a few seconds. And I was like, man, that's like wrestling, you try to pin the person.

All this to say I got into judo, there was a judo club as well. Judo club at VCU was a really cool place. In ‘97 I was super interested in this stuff. I had started also watching like old UFC tapes. I had VHS tapes in the UFC. I went back and started at the beginning, and I saw that judo and jui-jitsu were this component of grappling where most people thought of martial arts as striking, I think 25, 30 years ago, as like kung fu karate, that kind of stuff. Boxing maybe they might have considered a martial art, but like wrestling and judo and jui-jitsu, people didn't really think of that as much of when they thought about martial arts.

And so, when the UFC came around, it was really important because basically what happened was two people are here and then they go like this and that's the grappling range, right? So, and that happened fight after fight pretty much. Not everybody got into the grappling range, but 85% of them did or something like that. And if you had one person who wanted to get into the grappling range, it got there. So, the conclusions were pretty clear that jui-jitsu and judo were awesome and effective martial arts. So that really kind of reinforced the hidden knowledge that I really liked. And I was like, this is what I wanna do.

My desire was…because I love this stuff so much and I was obsessed with it…I absolutely wanted to turn it into something that I did for a living at some point, and I tried different phases of that.

I was a practitioner for about eight or nine years and opened up a school in 2006 as this kind of exponential growth of mixed martial arts started to take off. From there, it took a while still, because even though you have all these tailwinds at your back, if you don't know how to market your business, it's not gonna go anywhere.

I had to get fully past the last of my punk rock kind of shackles against capitalism, irrational shackles against being successful, you know. And when I finally shook those off and I said, all right, well, here's the deal, having a bigger school is better for me because I can pay my bills more easily. But it's also a lot better for the students of the school because right now, let's say you come in and you want to train with another woman who's like, got some of the same attributes that you have. Well, back then, good luck. There might be one other woman maybe if you're lucky and then there might be like 15 other dudes. So, I saw the things that needed to change in order for it to become successful. I saw that marketing was one of the things getting bodies in there. And then I saw that culture was another thing that really badly needed to change.

I think it's interesting because we've affected a lot of people over the years, and I've sure learned a lot of lessons and made a lot of mistakes. But we've also made something of an impact, I think jui-jitsu is better because we're around. Like there are… we have between three schools now… like 750 people in the Richmond area training with us. And so we exert some kind of a positive influence on the community, you know, maybe that's like 1/10 of the Richmond jui-jitsu population or something like that, but it has an outsized impact because people come and visit and talk about our gym positively. —Andrew Smith

If you're doing a sport for fun, for leisure, that's one thing. If you're trying to do it, not just competitively, but at the highest level that you can get to, that's quite another thing, right?

Kristi: Yeah. Well, and it's weird because, I didn't think of myself as doing that because I was not the natural athlete, and my father was just this super obsessive man. He went all in on everything he did in life. And I have a little bit of that. My sister has a little bit of that. It's a blessing and a curse. The thing with us was when my dad got us into golf, we went all in. So, we were pretty much required to go out and hit balls every single day for a couple of hours after dinner, every night. He built us a putting green in the backyard and a sand trap and we had to have a little putting competition every night to see who would do the dishes. And I played but I was never super great at golf.

And I did tournaments through high school and all of that, but I really wanted to just get out of Garland, go to college. I was the first person in my family to go to college. My dad was a butcher. So, it was like, I'm just super driven to be successful and have this life that my parents didn't have. So, golf was just sort of this side thing that I was required to do basically.

At the time when I was a kid, I thought, oh, I'm not the natural athlete, so I'm not an athlete, so I'm not good, which is just so stupid now because we know that the best athletes are the people that are dedicated to their sport, right? The people that show up and practice and do the work are the people that are gonna succeed, but I didn't know that at the time.

So that's kind of the environment I grew up in and then I just dabbled in college with…I took a weightlifting class and just really, really loved it, loved the focus on the technique and all of the strength. I've always been… I'm a bigger person. I can lift a lot of weight and so I'm comfortable with that. And then also because I grew up playing golf and being a girl in golf and I actually worked on a golf course, I'm very comfortable being around men, and it being a male-dominated sport doesn't bother me at all. And weightlifting in the gym was sort of that same kind of culture. I dabbled in a little bit of everything throughout my life, including crossfit, which is how I was introduced to Olympic lifting. And so I don't know how long I did crossfit. I can't speak positively about it because it just seems absolutely stupid, the movements that are done to failure.

I was hurt all the time and had to stop crossfit. But I loved the Olympic lifting piece of it, because it actually reminded me of golf. It reminded me of the golf swing, which is not really about strength. It's more about your technique and physics and getting your body to do the things that you need it to do. So that's how I got into Olympic lifting. I decided I wanna find a coach who just does Olympic lifting and focus on that. Being kind of like my dad in this way, I'm like a tinkerer, I like to just keep working on things just, try this thing, try that thing.

I didn't think I was a patient person, but Olympic weightlifting is all about patience. It's really one of those sports where you're just constantly working on incremental changes to your body and to your technique and it's all about repetition and muscle memory and, and it's such a mental sport, which I really loved, because it's as much about like getting past your own fears. So, it's not just like I'm just brute forcing my way through things, it's really like, you've got to think about so many different pieces and you have to let go of control, which is also really hard.

Andrew: Was competition a part of what drove you in it as well? Like was it going to see how you could stack up and stuff like that?

Kristi: Yeah. But competition for me is almost always about myself and what I can push past versus competing against someone else. And so, suddenly for a couple of years, my goal was I wanna make it to Nationals. And so that was the big thing. I didn't make it the first year [which I recently wrote about], so I just spent a whole year then preparing for the next year attempting to qualify for Nationals, which I made, but it happened to be 2020. And so, Nationals was held virtually, and I'm one of those people that perform much better on a stage in front of people and I really did terrible because we were literally doing Nationals in my coach's garage.

Andrew: I go for walks every day. It's a big part of my routine now, especially after 2020, I had to break my jui-jitsu routine to some degree. My partner and I, we trained together at jui-jitsu during the pandemic, and we did classes online for people and stuff like that, and as classes got back to opening up at the gym across the street, I made my way back over there and started training with other people eventually. I train with other people now on a regular basis.

But it was weird going back. One was getting back into the routine reason, but another was like, the pandemic really cast a dark shadow on jiu-jitsu for me. It was really, really ugly out there. And I felt like the bifurcation of society somehow entered our jui-jitsu world, because we had like one gym that was in a more conservative area and one gym that was in the center of the city in a more progressive area. And so, the policies became different in each of the gyms. And there was this weird divergence, a cultural divergence, and I felt that like viscerally, it cleaved me in half.

But I think I have a really good routine now because I train jui-jitsu minimum three times a week. I teach six classes, but they're bundled together like Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. I get in a flow state any time I train. When you're focused on something and you're good enough at it to do it reasonably well, you kind of forget everything else. You lose time.

But the walks have been supplementing, fitness-wise, really well. I just walk for 30 minutes a day. There's nothing super athletic about it or whatever, but, mentally, I put these headphones on and I walk by the water over there in the shade and I lose myself and whatever I'm listening to usually, either an audio book or an article or something like that and, damned if really good ideas for articles don't pop up all the time when I'm just going for a walk in nature and just thinking about things a little bit.

Keep reading - part 2

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