On a cloudy summer day, a friend and I went to a cafe. A light rain started not long after we received our drinks, forcing people to hurry from the outdoors to shelter. After talking with my friend for some time, on topics ranging from meeting girls at night to what World War 3 would […]
I used to take personal achievement very seriously. If I wasn’t achieving, accomplishing, or even doing something productive, I believed I was moving backwards in life, wasting away like a drug addict. Metrics had to be hit, whether related to money, women, fitness, web site views, or accumulated knowledge. Otherwise, I was not realizing my […]
Once you declare an idea or person to be your enemy, you give them a room in your mind. Within that room you insert their history, strategies, tactics, strengths, and weaknesses. You dedicate more of your waking hours to understanding how to defeat them. As time passes, items from that room start to leak out […]
When The Shoe Fits is a transcription of a lecture given by Osho in 1974, based on the teachings of the ancient Taoist Chuang Tzu. Osho is one of the more famous modern Taoists who achieved cult-like status among his followers. To remove suffering, he advises men to not achieve and just allow life to […]
Many men want the influence of being followed by a great mass of people without understanding the costs to gaining that influence, not just from a fame standpoint, where you lose your privacy, but also an adversarial standpoint, where your influence starts to encroach on the interests of powerful groups. I have learned firsthand that […]
Alan Watts (1915-1973) was a British philosopher who helped popularize Eastern philosophy to Western audiences. After gaining value from his Youtube lectures, I picked up The Way Of Zen to further educate myself on his teachings. For the sake of simplification, there are three main schools of Eastern philosophy: Buddhism, Zen, and Tao. Depending on […]
I wake up every day around noon. Instead of leaving bed, like many normal people have to do, I grab a book and lay under the covers. I read twenty pages of a work that took some man hundreds of hours to complete, and possibly thousands if you account for the expertise he had to develop […]
Most of the knowledge you have is due to the internet. Public education in the West has failed to give you a proper understanding of the world or skills that would be useful for navigating through life, forcing you to educate yourself at your own pace and on your own terms. Through that, you have […]
In the past year a close friend of mine named Bob was diagnosed with cancer. While I was familiar with the disease, I didn’t know the best way to help him. More than one year later, with his treatment completed, I’m ready to share some advice on what you can do if a friend or […]
As I get older, I’ve become more mindful about how to teach my brothers to grow up as strong men. I have been examining the environment they’re in and trying to find ways to replace negative influences in their lives with positive ones. While I barely see them enough to have a huge influence, the […]
How would you feel if you spent most of your life working, having children, and trying to make a difference, only to come to the conclusion in old age that it was all for nothing and that there was no meaning to your life at all? That’s exactly what happened to Leo Tolstoy, who wrote […]
In my mid 20’s I bought the idea that I could create my own lifestyle from scratch, not based on consultations from wise men or guidance from church and family, but from my own desires. After years of work, I successfully created a lifestyle that satisfied the desires I had in that particular stage of […]
Marcus Aurelius was the only Roman emperor who fits the title of “philosopher king” as described by Plato, ruling with wisdom and prudence gained from his Stoic teachers. Thankfully for us, he maintained a diary called Meditations that relayed his knowledge and what he learned during his life. I became interested in reading it after […]
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