“Lessons from the Mat: The 12 Martial Arts Principles That Will Help You Succeed in Business and in Life”By Benjamin Chen and Scott Burr

The business book genre is not short on frameworks. What it is short on is authors willing to show you the wreckage alongside the wisdom — to tell you not just what they learned, but what it cost them. Benjamin Chen, writing with Scott Burr, delivers exactly that in Lessons from the Mat, a book that earns its authority the hard way.

The book opens with a scene that immediately signals this isn’t going to be a sanitized leadership manual. It’s Halloween 2023 in Shanghai. Chen, 58, has just come from a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu training session. He’s buzzing from the mat, riding through crowded streets, when his phone rings. It’s his boss at RAB Lighting. The bad news: after nearly six years building one of the largest electrical product launches in U.S. history, Chen is fired. The good news comes next — but the damage is done, and the moment becomes the seed from which the book grows.

From there, Chen organizes his nearly four decades of startup experience and 40-plus years of martial arts training into 12 principles, each rooted in martial arts philosophy: Stillness, Ready Stance, Your Circle, Connect, Consider Fully/Act Decisively, Flow, Ippon, Failure Is Success, Keep Showing Up, Embrace Discomfort, Learn from the Masters, and The Gray Zone. The connective thread is the Judo concept of Seiryoku-Zenyo — maximum efficiency, minimum effort — which Chen argues is as powerful a governing principle in business as it is on the mat.

What sets this book apart from the pack is Chen’s willingness to be candid about failure. He describes ignoring his head of sales at AppGenesys, a $50-million cloud computing startup, and watching the company collapse — only to see Amazon launch the very model his team had been advocating for. He recounts losing a significant sum on a flashy colleague’s startup because he didn’t understand the basics of venture capital. These aren’t throwaway anecdotes. They’re the load-bearing pillars of the book’s argument: that failure isn’t the opposite of success but the price of the knowledge that success requires.

Each chapter includes a “Keiko” section — the Japanese word for practice — offering concrete exercises that translate the principle into daily action. These range from belief inventories to post-failure rituals, and they give the book a practical dimension that many philosophy-forward business titles lack.

The foreword by Jerry Colonna, author of Reboot, lends the book additional credibility and frames its central idea with precision: leadership, like martial arts, is a practice of becoming — never finished, always demanding that we show up again.

Lessons from the Mat is best suited for entrepreneurs, executives, and ambitious professionals who feel stuck despite putting in the work. It’s not a book of hacks or quick wins. It’s a book for people ready to examine their relationship with difficulty itself — and to recognize that the mat, like the marketplace, rewards those who keep showing up.

Nicole Killian