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Win or Learn
What It’s About
How a Dublin plumber became Conor McGregor's coach. John Kavanagh's memoir is part fight-camp diary, part philosophy on growth: there are no losses, only outcomes that teach you something. The clearest articulation of the SBG mindset that built one of the most successful MMA gyms in the world.
Three Key Ideas
Win or Learn Mindset
Treating every defeat as useful information rather than a judgment removes the fear of failure and drives continuous improvement.
Software Over Hardware
Mental preparation, pattern recognition, and deliberate practice separate elite performers more than physical attributes do.
Culture Builds Resilience
A team that trains for each other, not against each other, stays loyal through crisis and produces results no individual effort can match.
Read a Sample
Win or Learn
The man they smashed into the concrete
Picture yourself at eighteen, walking home through Dublin with your girlfriend. On a side street you see a group of men kicking a cyclist who's down on the ground. You stop. You're a quiet, gentle kid who's never hit anyone in his life. Still, as you get closer, you say, "Lads, that's enough." Seven heads turn, and they come at you. They pin you down, smash your face into the concrete, hit you with a brick and try to shove you under a bus. Your girlfriend is screaming. A friend who happens to be walking past drags you out from under the tangle of arms and legs. The police show up, take one look at you and decide you're the criminal. Back home you hide under the covers for days, because you don't want your mother to see your broken cheekbone and shattered eye socket. After that, you barely leave your room for a year.
That boy was John Kavanagh. Today he coaches Conor McGregor, one of the most famous MMA fighters in the world, and he's the chief architect of mixed martial arts in Ireland. Back then, though, he was just a terrified, depressed teenager who couldn't understand what had happened to him or why he hadn't been able to defend himself. His book is about the long road from there. It tells how a beaten-up kid who felt like nothing became a world-class coach, and how along the way he realized that fighting isn't really about the other person. It's about you.
In this summary we'll follow Kavanagh from the side streets of Dublin to the octagon in Las Vegas. We'll see how the "Win or Learn" philosophy, SBG Ireland's trademark, came about, and how you can apply it in your own life. At the end we'll pull together the concrete lessons anyone can use, whether or not they ever step into a cage.
Who It’s For
- Anyone who wants a practical framework for turning setbacks into growth rather than just surviving them.
- Anyone who coaches, mentors, or leads a team and wants to build a culture of honest development.
- Anyone struggling with self-limiting beliefs and looking for a concrete, experience-backed way to reframe failure.
- Anyone interested in the inside story of how SBG Ireland and Conor McGregor's rise were built from scratch.
About the Author: John Kavanagh
John Kavanagh is an Irish MMA coach and the founder of SBG Ireland, the gym widely credited with developing mixed martial arts in Ireland. He is best known as the head coach of Conor McGregor, who became the first UFC fighter to hold titles in two weight classes simultaneously.
Kavanagh holds a black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu and competed professionally in MMA before transitioning fully to coaching. He trained as a mechanical engineer at Dublin Institute of Technology before committing to full-time coaching, and has spent more than two decades building SBG into one of the most respected MMA gyms in the world.
