overkill on materials

like anyone who spent either too much or maybe not enough time in college, my usual approach to anything I'm not getting is to study it more. Read more about it, research differing methods, looking at it from every possible angle - even the ones I know aren't necessarily correct or useful....

I'm wondering if this is maybe not the greatest idea with bjj/grappling, since it doesn't usually foster any sense of focus with me, and instead I end up swimming in a sea of a zillion different sweeps, for example.

this happens when I'm rolling, too. My timing goes out the window while my brain displays an hourglass rotating over itself, pondering the next move(s). It's rather comical, in that mentally I'm conjuring just a pile of different options/counters/attacks, but in so doing, I never get to pull the trigger on any of them.

I'd like to be able to put blinders on, but then I'd just become predictable, and probably bored as well. I'm awful at that -- I want to see it all.

What I really need is that chair from The Matrix. Just have some needle jammed into my brain stem and cram all these instructionals I've amassed into my head, perfectly assimilated. Man, that would be awesome.

Prime example: I mentioned trying to study up more on nogi, which I'm presently rather wretched at... I pull out the library of DVDs (which is really, really obscenely vast at this point) and start pulling out options. I'll spend an hour or two watching these and it'll help. Five minutes later, I'm looking at Roy Dean's nogi series, 4 from Chris Brennan, 2 sets from Pablo Popovitch, Saulo's Freestyle Revolution, 3 sets of Marcelo Garcia... yeah sure, all in a couple hours I'm gonna watch and absorb that. Pfft.

Ideally, I would love to be able to just plow through every single one of these. Study them. Take notes. Take them to the mats on open mat days and work through them. But that'll take weeks. Months, actually. And during that time, I can't rightly just "turn off" the gi end of my game. So, I'm splitting my time b/t the two.

And unlike the general demographic on the mats, I'm not getting any younger. Thirty-eight is just months away. I've managed to turn my biological clock into paranoia about my jiu jitsu progress. Lovely.

But I guess blinders is what will have to happen. Pick one. One instructional. Work through it. Work with folks to quickly determine what's working, what isn't, and move the hell on.