TRAIN EVERYTHING

No one will push you to be great but once you decide to be great and commit to being great all forces will come to your aid.

The Greeks had a play about women in power, it’s eerily similar to the world we live in.

The cone of Learning. If you want to remember then teach.

Financial independence isnt necesarrily about hitting a certain number in your bank account. It's about how many people you have to answer to. Thats the number that you need to focus on, get that number as close to zero as possible. If you can do that you are freer than 99% of men who walk this earth. Maybe you wont be rich in money, but you can be rich in freedom. I'm not against working for someone doing a job that is meaningful or brings you great satisfaction. All men need meaningful work in their lives, and theres nothing dishonorable in following or submitting to worthy leadership or cause. In fact many men would do better forgetting independence and instead focusing on finding a man worthy of following. However, I am absolutely against slaving away at something you hate or something that is meaningless just so you can buy more things and sleep a little easier (what man sleeps easily anyways?) Too many people waste their lives just so they can pay bills and buy fleeting nonsense. Id rather live leanly and be free, than trade my time and my soul doing something i hate or something immoral for a little bit more comfort and security. The goal is always to be a free man first, a rich man second. But as I've said before, there are many ways to be rich. You can be rich in health, rich in energy, rich in friendship, rich in love, rich in skill, rich in experience, rich in character, the list goes on. You can be rich right now if only you would decide to.

Cardio is mostly mental. I’ve believed this for years but I’m finally able to articulate why. Watch some of the best wrestlers in the world right now. Bo Bassett. Mitchell Messenbrink. Jax Forrest. These guys look like they have unlimited gas. People assume it’s some elite VO2 max, some superior aerobic engine. That’s not what’s happening. Pay attention to how they move. They’re playing. Every shot isn’t life or death. Every scramble is an opportunity rather than a life or death crisis. They attack from bad positions. They back out and reset without hesitation if the feeling isn’t there. There’s a looseness to everything they do that looks almost casual, but on the other side of that casual posture is devastating effectiveness. That looseness isn’t a technique quirk. It’s a performance state. It’s the reason their cardio looks supernatural. Here’s what I think is actually going on: Tightness is metabolically expensive. When you’re stressed aka afraid, afraid of giving up position, afraid of losing, afraid of looking bad, your body begins to brace for impact. Muscles that shouldn’t be working are working overtime. Your breathing changes. Your movement loses fluidity. Every action costs more than it should. You’re not gassing because your lungs are small. You’re gassing because fear has a fuel cost. The playful athlete doesn’t have that overhead. Their nervous system isn’t running a threat response in the background. This makes movement much cheaper. It makes decisions come faster. They can sustain a pace that looks impossible because for them, it actually is easier. This is why you can’t just coach someone to “attack more.” Coaches can tell their guys to go out and attack. That’s good solid advice. But if the athlete isn’t in a playful state, if they’re tight, if every offensive sequence feels like a high stakes gamble, the instruction won’t translate. The body can’t cooperate. The mind will second guess everything they do. They’ll gas early with no idea as to why. The fighters that seem to have infinite endurance have trained themselves, or were born with a different relationship to competition. They reduce competition from a high stakes battle to a simple game. I’ve watched this in myself for years doing jiu jitsu and boxing. The only time I get tired is when I leave that state. When I’m loose, playing, experimenting, being creative, my energy expenditure is different. I do things I didn’t know I could do. Time moves differently. The round ends and I’m surprised it’s over. The moment I get tight, whether it’s ego, whether it’s fear, bad position, someone catching me off guard, my gas disappears almost immediately. That’s not a coincidence. That’s the mechanism. And here’s where it gets deeper: some athletes have to almost die to find that state. You’ve seen it in fights. A guy gets badly hurt, nearly finished, he survives and then something releases. The fear burns off. The body stops bracing. And suddenly the guy who looked dead comes back to life and starts performing at a level he couldn’t access before getting dropped. That state was available the whole time. He didn’t need to get hurt to find it. He just needed to let go of what was costing him. The best athletes don’t need the near death experience. They walk out already there. Ali boxed like Ali talked, light, taunting, dancing, impossible to hold. Tyson boxed like Tyson looked, coiled, explosive, total predator. The ring doesn’t create a new person. It reveals the one that’s already there. Which means the real question isn’t “how do I build more cardio.” It’s “who am I when I compete, and is that person loose enough to play?” The future of grappling and combat sports belongs to the athletes who figured out play is the highest performance state. Not getting hyped up. Not being ultra aggression. Not discipline grinding through pain. Play. Loose. Passionate. Present. Train your nervous system to live there and your “cardio” will take care of itself.

Everything is downstream of Energy. Your relationships. Your output. Your mood. Your clarity. Your ability to endure difficulty. When your energy is depleted everything downstream degrades and most men are operating in a permanent state of partial depletion without realizing it has become their baseline. The fix is subtraction before addition. Before you add a new protocol or a new supplement or a new routine, subtract what is draining the energy. The time indoors. The screen time. The poor sleep. The stress you're accepting. The people that don’t align. The food that isn't food. Get the inputs right. The outputs correct themselves.

The most controlled people in any society are usually the ones most convinced of their freedom. The most effective control doesn't feel like control at all. It feels like choice. It feels like personal expression. It feels like being uninhibited. It feels like rebellion. This is why it works. The cage is most effective when you dont know its there.

Nobody is going to produce mass propaganda telling you to be strong, independent, and locally rooted. That is not in anyone's commercial or political interest. There is an enormous and well funded machine pushing you toward consumption, dependence, isolation, and distraction. None of what that machine promotes is in your interest. All of it is in someone else's. They are not hiding this. It is just easier to comply than to notice. The things being demonized the hardest right now: physical strength, independence, intact families, local community, exclusivity, discrimination. These are the exact things that make men hardest to control. Pay attention to what is being attacked. It tells you exactly what is worth building.

The most energetic people I've met consistently live the simplest lives. Consistent sleep time, natural light, daily walks, time in nature, meaningful hobbies, real food, physical work, true friendship, time in silence. No complicated protocol. No stack of supplements. Just the basic requirements of the human organism met without substitution. Most people are running complex systems to compensate for ignoring simple ones. Get the basics right first.

Stop explaining yourself. Refuse to Elaborate. The less you explain yourself the more authority you carry. Most men over explain as a form of approval seeking disguised as communication. They want agreement so they provide all the reasoning in advance, removing any friction between the person and the conclusion they want them to reach. The man who states his position and stops talking occupies a different position entirely. The silence after the statement requires something from the other person. It transfers the pressure. It signals that the position does not require defense. Boldly state what is true. Stop there. Less is More

Not a fan of “guys” who make a single thing their entire identity. The jiu jitsu guy, the fitness guy, the beard guy, the raw milk guy, the politics guy. They take something that is actually cool and reduce it to a costume. The thing itself is not the problem. The costume is the problem. A man should be many things (TRAIN EVERYTHING). But the man who is only one thing has usually made that thing a substitute for the harder work of actually becoming someone. The adoption of a single identity is basically a way to pretend to be a main character. Be a polymath. Be a renaissance man. Be someone who does many things deeply, but never make them your entire personality. Be refined but never defined!

Reminder: I have open coaching spots. Together we dive into the critical areas of your life: your discipline, your body, your belief systems, your relationships, your money, your purpose, your daily structure. We dissect them, we find the blind spots, we expose the weakness. We shift the frame. Then we build a plan of action and hold you to it. A lot of what I know cannot be fully shared on public platforms. It requires context and conversation. It requires one on one work. That is what coaching is. Coaching isn’t motivation, or therapy. That’s not what I do. I correct you, I direct you, and I help you execute. If you are stuck in a critical area of life, or you can feel that something in you needs to be sharpened, adjusted, rebuilt, or confronted, send me a DM. Do not message me unless you are serious and willing to challenge and change yourself, or sick of facing the same problems year in and year out. 2026 is flying by. Do not arrive at the end of this year still carrying the same problems. Conquer them so you can move on to the next level.

Discipline is choosing what you want most over what you want now. That's it. It’s not loud, it’s not glamorous, it’s not exciting, and it rarely feels monumental. It’s not about motivation or willpower or habits. It’s simply the repeated decision to favor the long term self over the short term one. Made every morning. Made in the afternoon when it gets hard. Made at night when the easy option is right there. Most men's self discipline problem is not a discipline problem. It is actually a clarity problem. They haven't decided clearly enough what they actually want most. Without that clarity the short term usually wins because it is immediate and certain. Decide what you want most. Write it down. Make it real. Make it vivid. Make is so potent that the short term option looks small in comparison. The discipline follows the clarity.

The most attractive quality a man can have is not looks or money or status. It is Direction. A man who knows exactly who he is and what he wants develops a look of certainty in his eyes. The way he moves forward without explanation or permission is magnetic in a way that almost nothing else is. This is not about having everything figured out. It is about having the next thing figured out and always moving toward it. The movement is what matters. Direction and Momentum. Most men are standing still waiting for certainty before they decide to move. But the certainty only comes after you move. It is the reward for movement, not the prerequisite.

This is not procrastination. Procrastination involves activity, substitute activities that are dopamine driven, activities that do not lead you towards your goals. Whether that’s scrolling, video games, food, the list goes on. When you procrastinate you’re never doing nothing, you’re doing something, something that keeps you from doing what you need to do to accomplish your goals. It’s all satiation, it’s all cope. Stop pacifying yourself. Let the waves of angst wash over you. On the other side of the confusion and stress is clarity, energy, and peace.

More time in stillness will fix your relationship with time and will help you manage your energy better.