UFC Fight Night: Dillashaw vs. Cruz Media Day

It’s huge. The relationship changed: before, I was his motivation and he was that kid that wanted to be like me. Now, where I’m at in my career – even though I won the belt, I get motivated from him. He’s training as hard as he can, not making a lot of money yet – decent money, but not really in the spotlight like I am – but he’s busting his butt.

It’s motivating to see kids that are doing that, and they want my spot. So I feed off of him a lot.

I say this all the time: I’d rather learn from my wins than my losses. But when you lose, you kind of just start back at square one. You go back to that humble person.

When I was the champ, I made some mistakes. I hired a big team: I had a nutritionist, I had a publicist – I had all these extra people that I didn’t really need.

After that loss, I sat down and I thought about what did I really need; what got me to that position. I didn’t need all that to get to that position. I’m more of a guy that when I’m in the grind, when my back’s against the wall and I’m just hungry and motivated – that’s when I shine the best. It’s not when I’m relaxed and people are trimming my fingernails or my toes for me.

When you’re the champ, it’s whatever you want; that’s how it is. And I lost that belt, and I just got back to having fun training. Going back to the gym, having fun with the team, making up new moves and getting back to that. It’s not a job – I do this for fun.

The balance is hard. The balance is hard, because you start believing your own hype. You’ve got all these people telling you, “Oh, you’re invincible. No one can beat you. You don’t have to train that hard. Your weight cut’s going to be easy.” You know, all these people in your ear. And you take that responsibility off of yourself.

When I got the belt, I felt like I didn’t have any responsibility – like everybody had their job to do, and they’re going to take care of me and we’ll get it done. When I got in the cage and the door closed, I was by myself in there. So I got familiarized with that feeling of being alone again.

That’s what I did this camp: made myself alone. I started traveling to do my training in Chicago. Changed a lot of things just to make sure this fight goes the way I need it to go.

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