There's an old saying in professional wrestling, from WWE, to AEW, ROH, NJPW, and even Impact that goes a little something like this: A wrestler is only as good as their opponent.

Sure, a veteran pro can get a fantastic match out of a much less experienced foe, as pretty much any (successful) celebrity-featuring match from Bad Bunny to Shaq, Logan Paul, and even Johnny Knoxville will tell you, but if one member of a match isn't willing to sell for another or refuses to work with their foe, at worst you get a sandbagging incident that gets major marks riled up on the internet.

And at worst? Well, have you ever heard of New Jack's match with Vic Grimes?

But that sort of philosphy doesn't only go one way. No, for a generation of wrestlers to revolutionize the industry and elevate the overall game to new heights, they need to come together, form a “scene,” and allow their communal iron to sharpen each other's iron in the collective pursuit of overall elevation of the craft, as Sami Zayn pointed out in his conversation with “Stone Cold” Steve Austin on his Broken Skull Sessions Peacock show.

Zayn has high praise for how AEW's Danielson built up the wrestlers around him.

When he stopped by the “Stone Cold Cave” to shoot the shoot about the business with Steve Austin for BSS, Sami Zayn had a lot to say. He talked up his match against Johnny Knoxville at WrestleMania 38, detailed his decades-spanning feud with Kevin Owens, and even shouted out fellow wrestlers like Claudio Castagnoli, Jushin “Thunder” Liger, and AEW's own Bryan Danielson for how they shaped his career, with the latter specifically teaching him the importance of working together alongside his fellow performers. Check out a quote from the show as dictated by yours truly.

So it’s one thing if Bryan Danielson was on his own, in a vacuum, I don’t know if he ever becomes Bryan Danielson, but because he’s working with Christopher Daniels and Low Ki and these guys, now something starts building, and those guys start taking each other to the next step, just like you had to keep up with Brian Pillman, you know, it starts stacking on top of each other, makes sense that these guys who are all pretty good already create something kind of special and, kind of makes sense that these would be the crop of guys that take the business in that direction.

Inspiring insight from a performer who has been at it for quite literally two decades.

Now, as you may or may not know, Danielson and Zayn came up in largely the same way, working indie shows around the world before parlaying a very successful run in Ring of Honor into a contract with WWE. Though the duo only met on a few occasions during their indie run, most notably a trio of PWG matches where the two performers put the PWG World Title on the line, going to bat against the American Dragon helped to make Zayn the man he is today and showed him that a position in WWE was very much a possibility, even if he's a slightly undersized kid from Canada who chose to perform as a silent luchador for the better part of a decade. Dream big, kids.