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This is the fifth part in a series designed to help you boost your resiliency. For the previous entries, see Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV.

When we first introduced the topic of resiliency, we discussed how it is both a reactive and an active quality, a skill that helps you bounce back and reach out.

Today’s discussion will center on the active aspect of resiliency and the path to gaining the confidence to take risks and embrace change.

Anchoring Your Resiliency in Your Authentic Self

When your self-esteem and sense of self-worth is tied to other people, your job, or any other external factors, your confidence is subject to every wind of change and lacks real stability. Any time these external factors change, your happiness and confidence go with it. Your emotional fortitude goes up and down like a roller coaster.

Tying your self-concept to external factors also keeps you from embracing adventure and approaching the world like a courageous explorer. If you base your self-concept on external things, any changes in those things will throw you for a loop, create anxiety, and compel you to cling as tightly as you can to the status quo. You become desperate to keep your life just the way it is and can’t handle change. You avoid traveling, moving, changing jobs, and getting into relationships because these steps alter the environment on which you’ve based your self-concept, leaving you feeling lost and out of control

The key to active resiliency is to build your self-concept not on a constructed self, but on an authentic self, not on external things, but on the inner, personal strengths that make you unique as a man. Your unique strengths are your special tools that will allow you to build a happy and fulfilling life. Understanding what tools you possess can give you the confidence that you’ll be able to face any challenge that comes your way. While we can’t predict the future, we can have confidence in our ability to deal with whatever happens.

Basing your self-concept on your personal strengths allows your resiliency to remain strong wherever your go and whatever happens to you.

Think of it this way, you can either live in a fort, with your only gun in the turret, or you can strap your arsenal to yourself and take it anywhere you go. The resilient man is the guerrilla warrior of life.

Finding Your Character Strengths

Those will some knowledge of psychology will probably be familiar with the “DSM”-the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The DSM classifies and lists all the psychological disorders recognized by the American Psychiatric Association.

Drs. Martin Seligman and Christopher Peterson are pioneers in the field of positive psychology. Believing that the field of psychology had spent too much time focusing on mental sickness instead of mental health, the two set out to create a list not of human disorders but of human strengths. These doctors set out to find virtues which had been prized almost universally across time, religion, and culture.

Their research yielded 6 core virtues. Under these virtues they listed 24 character strengths associated with each one. The character strengths were the avenues to living and attaining that virtue. Let’s take a look at the list:

1. Wisdom and knowledge-cognitive strengths that entail the acquisition and use of knowledge

• Creativity
• Curiosity
• Open-mindedness
• Love of learning
• Perspective

2. Courage-emotional strengths that involve the exercise of will to accomplish goals in the face of opposition, external or internal

• Bravery
• Persistence
• Integrity
• Vitality

3. Humanity-interpersonal strengths that involve tending and befriending others

• Love
• Kindness
• Social Intelligence

4. Justice-civic strengths that underlie healthy community life

• Citizenship
• Fairness
• Leadership

5. Temperance-strengths that protect against excess

• Forgiveness and mercy
• Humility/modesty
• Prudence
• Self-regulation (self-control)

6. Transcendence-strengths that forge connections to other people and the larger universe and provide meaning

• Appreciation of beauty and excellence (awe, wonder, elevation)
• Gratitude
• Hope
• Humor
• Spirituality

Before you proceed further, take 20 minutes to take the VIA Survey of Character Strengths, available free at authentichappiness.org under the heading “Engagement Questionnaires.”

Did you take the test? Good. Now look over the list of strengths given in your results.

No test is perfect, and the taker can bias the results by choosing answers that don’t describe themselves as much as they describe the person they wish they were. So you want to double-check that the strengths listed are the real you. Seligman and Peterson recommend that you evaluate the authenticity of each strength with this criteria:

• A sense of ownership and authenticity (“This is the real me”).
• A feeling of excitement while displaying the strength, especially at first.
• A rapid learning curve as the strength is first practiced.
• A continuous learning of new ways to enact the strength.
• A sense of yearning to find ways to use it.
• A feeling of inevitability in using the strength, as if one cannot be stopped or dissuaded from its display.
• Joy, zest, enthusiasm, even ecstasy while using it.
• Invigoration rather than exhaustion when using the strength.
• The creation and pursuit of personal projects that revolve around the strength.
• Intrinsic motivation to use the strength.

If a strength meets several of this criteria then it is truly one of your signature strengths. Signature strengths are “strengths of character that a person owns, celebrates, and frequently exercises.” If a strength doesn’t meet any of those criteria, then they’re probably not one of your signature strengths.

Using Your Signature Strengths to Enhance Your Life and Resiliency

“Resiliency comes from a discovered self, not a constructed self. It comes from the gradual emergence of your unique, inborn abilities in a process called individuation. The better you become, the more unique you become as an individual-and it never ends.” -Dr. Al Siebert

Now that you know what you signature strengths are, you can use them to enhance your life in three ways:

1. Start basing your self-concept on your signature strengths, not on external things. This isn’t some banal self-esteem affirmation where everyone is special just because. Your signature strengths are the things that truly make you unique and give you something special to offer the world. Allow yourself to feel confident in what you have to offer people. As we discussed on Monday, we may never be superheroes in the traditional sense, but you should look at your signature strengths like your unique “superpowers” that you can use as a force of good in the world.

2. Embrace your signature strengths as the arsenal of tools you have to meet life’s challenges. Unlike external things, your signature strengths can go anywhere and help you in any situation. If you get divorced, let go from your job, or move to a new place, your signature strengths are hanging around your shoulders like a bandoleer, ready to be employed to build something new. You are the Rambo of resiliency.

3. Exercising your signature strengths wherever and whenever you can. The exercise of your signature strength is the path to true fulfillment, gratification, satisfaction, and happiness. Find ways to employ your signature strengths more often in your job, relationships, families, and faith. The more fulfilled you feel, the stronger you’ll feel as a man, and the easier it will become to take risks and brush off setbacks.

The Resiliency Advantage by Dr. Al Siebert

Character Strengths and Virtues by Dr. Martin Seligman and Dr. Christopher Peterson

Authentic Happiness by Dr. Martin Seligman

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Every boy dreams of being a superhero, and knows that donning a cape or Spiderman costume is hardly just for Halloween.

But as we get older, we realize we don’t possess the supernatural powers of Spidey (or Batman’s primo cache of gadgets). And we notice the absence of the kind of otherwordly arch nemeses that plague our comic book heroes in the real world. The idea of being a hero is gradually put aside as “kid’s stuff.”

But while evildoers may not appear in the real world painted up as sadistic clowns or riding on the Goblin Glider, the world has never ceased its need for heroic men who are willing to come to the aid of those in danger and stand up for what is right.

While we now think of the Man of Steel battling super villains like Lex Luthor and Bizarro, when Superman was introduced in 1938, he was a champion of the little guy, fighting for social justice and morality and against corruption. As you can see in Superman’s debut in Action Comics #1, the “Champion of the oppressed. The physical marvel who had sworn to devote his existence to helping those in need” was concerned with the execution of innocent people, corrupt legislation, and even wife-beating.

To a people demoralized by the Great Depression, this was truly a hero for the time. And amidst our current recession of both finances and morale, it’s the kind of hero we need today. Most encouragingly, while we probably shouldn’t go about fighting injustice by busting into the governor’s mansion, it’s the kind of heroism that is within the reach of every man.

But for many of us, engaging in even this kind of heroism seems as difficult as running faster than a speeding train.

What Makes a Man a Hero?

Why do some men stand by and watch an injustice or an emergency take place without doing anything, while other men spring to action and save the day?

Two researchers, Zeno Franco and Phillip Zimbardo, have taken up these very questions. Many of you might be familiar with Dr. Zimbardo’s famous 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment that showed good people turning into sadistic tyrants when placed in a position of authority over other human beings. However, one of the interesting observations of the experiment was that “good guards” did exist in the make-believe prison. These guards didn’t abuse or insult the student-prisoners, like the “evil guards” did,  but they never tried to stop the abuse, either. Thus, the good guards actually ended up facilitating abuse by not taking action.

All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. ~ Edmund Burke

The Stanford Prison Experiment demonstrated that given certain circumstances and social pressures, normal, decent people can end up doing unspeakable things.

But it also showed that these same circumstances and social pressures can cause men to commit a different but equal wrong: not taking action when action is required.

We see this wrong all the time. I’m sure we can all remember a time when we saw another human needing assistance, but we simply stood by and did nothing. I’ll admit it. I’ve seen car accidents and just drove by. I’ve also seen people treated unfairly but didn’t say anything because I feared  I would suffer social ostracization.

Forty years after his infamous Stanford Prison Experiment, Zimbardo has taken up the task of finding out what causes individuals to move from cowardly inaction, to heroic action. After analyzing the deeds of heroes both big and small, Zimbardo along with his research partner, Dr. Franco, argue that heroic individuals have a robust heroic imagination.

How to Develop Your Heroic Imagination

According to Zimbardo and Franco, the heroic imagination is “the capacity to imagine facing physically or socially risky situations, to struggle with the hypothetical problems these situations generate, and to consider one’s actions and the consequences.” It’s the ability to see oneself as a hero and capable of heroic action before the need for heroic action arises.

Okay, great. Heroic people can imagine themselves doing heroic things. But are some people born with more or less heroic imagination? If I was born with a weak heroic imagination, am I doomed to a lifetime of wienerdom?

Zimbardo argues that while some individuals may have a natural tendency for heroic behavior, all of us have the capacity to nurture and grow our inner hero. It’s a not a static characteristic. In his article “The Banality of Heroism,” Zimbardo lays out five concrete steps we can all take to develop our heroic imagination and thus be ready to take action when action is required.

Below are the five traits that will strengthen your heroic imagination and propel you into heroic action.

1. Maintain constant vigilance for situations that require heroic action. Every day we have opportunities to take a stand and be heroes. Sure, we probably won’t have to land a plane or fight off a ruffian, but we can be heroes by sticking up for a student being bullied by one’s peers, blowing the whistle on a supervisor who is engaging in shady and unethical business practices, or stopping to help a stranded driver. The more you develop your ability to spot situations to be heroic, the more chances you’ll get to take heroic action.

2. Learn not to fear conflict because you took a stand. When you see a situation that requires action, don’t wussy out because you’re afraid of what other people will say or do. A real man doesn’t give a damn if some people get upset or uncomfortable with doing the right thing. Don’t be afraid to stand by your principles and live with integrity.

3. Imagine alternative future scenarios beyond the present moment. We often fail to act because we’re too short-sighted. We think about the immediate consequences rather than the long-term ones. Sure, you might lose your job because you blew the whistle on unethical practices by your company. But think about the the long-term consequences if you don’t act. How many more people will be hurt if you don’t out your employer? Will you be able to look yourself in the mirror 20 years down the road knowing you didn’t do the right thing because it would have caused a couple of months of financial hardship?

Zimbardo also suggests we not only look to the future, but that we should “keep part of our minds on the past” as well. Study the lives of great men who performed heroic deeds. Studying their noble deeds will instill in us the virtues and values required for a heroic imagination and inspire us to take heroic action when needed.

4. Resist the urge to rationalize and justify inaction. Inaction is easy because it’s so easy to rationalize. The “bystander effect” is a perfect example of this. The bystander effect occurs when an emergency situation occurs in a large group of people and no one takes action to remedy the situation because they rationalize that someone else will take care of it.

Don’t be that person.

Instead of looking for ways to rationalize inaction, train yourself to rationalize action. Instead of thinking, “I won’t do anything because someone else will take care of it,” start thinking “I must take action because no one else will.”

5. Trust that people will appreciate heroic (and frequently unpopular) actions. In point number two, we’re told not to fear the conflict that might arise from doing the right thing. Conversely, we should also develop a confidence that people appreciate and honor heroic action. While your action may be unpopular at first, people eventually come around and appreciate and recognize true heroes.

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The acrimonious late-night showdown between Jay Leno and Conan was surely about a lot of things. Money, ratings, television. But it was also about a man who couldn’t get over his glory days. Who decided to step down, but then missed his old life and was desperate to return to it.

It’s happened before to high-profile men-Brett Favre tearfully said goodbye to football and then hello and then goodbye and then hello again.

Sometimes trying to get back to your glory days actually works. Mr. Favre had a great season this year. But typically it ends up hurting the piner and those left in his wake (sorry, Coco).

While most of us will never play professional football or host a late-night talk show, we all can struggle from time to time with wanting to return to our “glory days” and missing some bygone period in our lives. This can hit in middle-age and inspire a man to buy a sports car and ditch his wife for a young babe. But it can also happen at the end of your twenties when you’re trying to adjust to the working life and missing your college years.

It’s hard not to think back to high school and college with real fondness. It was indeed a glorious time. No real responsibilities besides studying and working at a pizza place. Sleeping in, playing sports, driving around with your friends, and hanging out at parties. You felt profoundly free. The world was your oyster, and the possibilities for your life seemed endless. What were you going to make of your life? Who would you be spending it with? What were you going to do when you “grew up?”

These days you have a pretty good idea of the answers to those question. You’re married to Susan, have a job as a financial planner, and live in Dallas. Life is good, but sometimes you think back to the student life and would give anything to get back there. You wax nostalgic until you’re in a deep funk and sit on your porch sipping on a brewski and reminiscing about the good old days. Pretty soon you’re surfing the internet for a time machine.

“Ohhhh, man I wish I could go back in time. I’d take state.”

A little nostalgia for another time period in history can be a positive thing, but too much nostalgia for another time in your life can rob you of satisfaction and happiness in this one. How do you get over your glory days and fully embrace the life you currently lead?

Create new firsts. When people over the age of 35 are asked to recall the most vivid or most important events of their life, they disproportionately remember things that happened between ages 15 and 25. This association is natural-it’s the time of our lives when we’re making big decisions about our identities and the direction our lives are going to take.

It’s also a time where we experience a myraid of “firsts.” First kiss, first date, first time away from home, first time outside the country, first sex, first love, first college class and so on. Any kind of first is an exciting, heady experience. Firsts make you feel alive.

If you’re feeling stuck in your life and longing for the past, maybe it’s time to experience some new firsts. Certainly, a lot of the big ones have already been notched, but there are always new things to go after. First trip to Asia, first time surfing, first marathon, first time riding a motorcycle, first painting class. Keep filling your life with new, soul-expanding adventures.

Focus on a new goal. Sometimes our funk is not so much for lost youth, but simply the let down we experience after we achieve one of our major life goals. Psychologists have shown that we actually get more pleasure and satisfaction on the journey to a goal than we do when we finally attain it. We’re happy for a bit, and then we think, “Okay, what now?” Olympic athletes and astronauts often struggle with depression after they win a medal or make it to space. After you’ve reached such a pinnacle in your life, what can you possibly do for your next act?

The obvious answer of course is to create a new goal. Without goals your life will lack direction and purpose. The goal doesn’t have to be as grandiose as the one you’ve already attained, it just has to be something that will keep you busy and give you something to focus your life around.

Let go of false scenarios. Oftentimes when we pine for the good old days of our life, we find ourselves somewhat unconsciously dreaming of a false scenario. We want to get the freedom of our youth back. But if we were asked to give up our wife and kids we wouldn’t have any desire to do so. What we really want is to have that freedom back and keep our families. But of course that’s not possible.

Everything in life involves trade-offs. The single life is great, but there are definitely times when you’re lonely and sitting at home wishing you had somebody, and times where you’re sick of playing games with women and just want to find the one. You can’t get rid of those negatives without being in a committed relationship.

Acknowledge trade-offs, be grateful for the benefits of what you have, and don’t torture yourself with impossible scenarios.

Move on and out. In high school I did pretty well for myself. I was a football player, student council president, homecoming king, and voted Mr. Edmond North High School. I was never cocky and never ran with the popular kids, but when I graduated I thought I was a pretty cool guy.

Then I spent two years working in Tijuana, Mexico as a missionary. Nobody knew what a homecoming king was or what the Mr. ENHS title was, and they didn’t give a crap about any of it. I didn’t know a single soul, and they didn’t know me from Steve. My high school exploits quickly seemed totally unimportant, and I was humbled in a hurry.

If you’re still living in the town you grew up in or the town you went to college in, and you still think a lot about the past, it may be time to start a new life for yourself somewhere else, somewhere where you don’t keep running into people who still remember you from way back when and want to spend their time reminiscing about the good old days.

Recapture the salient qualities of the time that you miss. It’s impossible to recreate the past. You’re never going to play varsity baseball again, and hold hands with your crush at the movies, and hear your name called as prom king.

But while you can’t recapture these experiences whole hog, you can work on adding the most salient qualities about what you used to love back into your life. Even though it will never be the same, that doesn’t mean you should give up on trying to recapture some of the elements that used to lend some magic to your life.

If you miss playing high school sports, a lot of what you’re missing is the feeling of competition among men. Join a intramural team for adults in your town.

If you’re missing the camaraderie you used to feel with your frat brothers, a big part of what you’re missing is having strong male friendships. Join a lodge of Freemasons.

If you’re missing the warm fuzzies you used to get when dating, start romancing your wife with novel dates. Studies have shown that going on unique and interesting dates with your spouse can bring back the old butterflies you used to feel for each other.

Embrace different kinds of satisfaction. Being young is definitely awesome. The freedom and fun will be forever unmatched. But the key to growing up is being able to embrace new kinds of satisfactions in your life. Having a lot of freedom is certainly one of the pleasures in life, but it’s not the only one.

There is incredible satisfaction in becoming a husband and a father. In molding and shaping your children. There is satisfaction in becoming a mentor to young men. In finding success in your career. In making an impact on the world. In being in control of your life. In being wiser. There is pleasure in the passion of new love, but there is pleasure in long-term companionate love as well.

When all you think about is what you miss about your former life, you can miss out on the joy to be found  in your current one.

Embrace the idea of “seasons” in life. Some people prefer life in places like California, places that are always fairly temperate but lack distinct seasons. But I’ve always been a seasons guy. I like watching the world change around me, seeing how different the very same place can look in each season, and enjoying the distinct activities and weather each season brings. Each season, although different, has its own charm.

For example in Vermont, summer is a glorious time. The days are warm but not scorching, and the nights are cool. You can spend your time wandering through the woods, eating maple cremees, and floating down picturesque rivers.

Of course, the winter is another story. Cold, dark and snowy, it keeps the state from being overrun with new residents who fall in love with the area in the summer and fall. Winter season stretches on for half the year and many people, even those who’ve been there their whole lives find it depressing. The winter really brings them down; all they can think about is the coming spring.

My uncle-in-law has lived in Vermont for decades, and I asked him how he stands the winters. He said they used to bother him, but he started getting right out into it-snowshoeing and skiing every day-and now the winters don’t faze him at all. I talked to another Vermonter who said that winter was her favorite season, because she loved to ski more than anything.

So where am I going with this? Well our life is broken into seasons. Spring, then summer, then fall, then a long winter. During the winter of our lives things are certainly not as carefree as they once were, but we can find the things about this period of our journey that are unique and fully embrace them.

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Editor’s note: This post was co-written by Chris Hutcheson and Brett McKay.

In our modern age, solving a problem by asking a dude to step outside is generally considered an immature, low class thing to do.

But for many centuries, challenging another man to a duel was not only considered a pinnacle of honor, but was a practice reserved for the upper-classes, those deemed by society to be true gentlemen.

“A man may shoot the man who invades his character, as he may shoot him who attempts to break into his house.” -Samuel Johnson

While dueling may seem barbaric to modern men, it was a ritual that made sense in a society in which the preservation of male honor was absolutely paramount. A man’s honor was the most central aspect of his identity, and thus its reputation had to be kept unvarnished by any means necessary. Duels, which were sometimes attended by hundreds of people, were a way for men to publicly prove their courage and manliness. In such a society, the courts could offer a gentleman no real justice; the matter had to be resolved with the shedding of blood.

How did this violent way to prove one’s manhood evolve? Let’s take a look at the history of the affair of honor and the code duello which governed it.

Origins in Single Combat

In the ancient tradition of single combat, each side would send out their “champion” as the representative of their respective armies, and the two men would fight to the death. This contest would sometimes settle the matter, or would serve only as a prelude to the ensuing battle, a sign to which side the gods favored. Prominent single combat battles have made their way into the records of history and legend, such as the battle between David and Goliath in the Valley of Elah and Achilles’ clashes with both Ajax and Hector in Homer’s Iliad. As warfare evolved, single combat became increasingly less prevalent, but the ethos of the contest would lend inspiration to the gentlemen’s duel.

Dueling in Europe

“A coward, a man incapable either of defending or of revenging himself, wants one of the most essential parts of the character of a man.” Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

Dueling began in ancient Europe as “trial by combat,” a form of “justice” in which two disputants battled it out; whoever lost was assumed to be the guilty party. In the Middle Ages, these contests left the judicial sphere and became spectator sports with chivalrous knights squaring off in tournaments for bragging rights and honor.

But dueling really became mainstream when two monarchs got into the act. When the treaty between France and Spain broke down in 1526, Frances I challenged Charles V to a duel. After a lot of back and forth arguing about the arrangements of the duel, their determination to go toe to toe dissipated. But the kings did succeed in making dueling all the rage across Europe. It was especially popular in France; 10,000 Frenchmen are thought to have died during a ten year period under Henry IV. The king issued an edict against the practice, and asked the nobles to submit their grievances to a tribunal of honor for redress instead. But dueling still continued, with 4,000 nobles losing their lives to the practice during the reign of Louis XIV.

Dueling in America

“Certainly dueling is bad, and has been put down, but not quite so bad as its substitute — revolvers, bowie knives, blackguarding, and street assassinations under the pretext of self-defense.” -Colonel Benton

Dueling came to American shores right along with her first settlers. The first American duel took place in 1621 at Plymouth Rock.

Dueling enjoyed far more importance and prevalence in the South than the North. Antebellum society placed the highest premium on class and honor, and the duel was a way for gentlemen to prove both.

The majority of Southern duels were fought by lawyers and politicians. The law profession was (as it is now) completely saturated, and the competition for positions and cases was acute. In this dog-eat-dog society, jostling for position and maintaining an honorable reputation meant everything. Every perceived slight or insult had to be answered swiftly and strongly to save face and one’s position on the ladder to respect and success.

And while we tend to paint modern politics as uncivil and romanticize the past, politicians of the day slung bullets in addition to mud. Legislators, judges, and governors settled their differences with the duel, and candidates for office debated their issues on the “field of honor.” Political showmanship of the day involved timing a duel for right before an election and splashing the results in the papers.

Dueling and Violence

“The views of the Earl are those of a Christian, but unless some mode is adopted to frown down by society the slanderer, who is worse than a murderer, all attempts to put down dueling will be in vain.” -Andrew Jackson

Despite putting on a courageous front, no gentleman relished having to fight a duel and risk both killing and being killed (well, perhaps with the exception of Andrew “I fought at least 14 duels” Jackson). Thus duels were often not intended to be fights to the death, but to first blood. A duel fought with swords might end after one man simply scratched the arm of the other. In pistol duels, it was often the case that a single volley was fired, and assuming both men had survived unscathed, satisfaction was deemed to be achieved through their mutual willingness to risk death. Men sometimes aimed for their opponent’s leg or even deliberately missed, desiring only to satisfy the demands of honor. Only about 20% of duels ended in a fatality.

Duels founded on greater insults to a man’s honor, however, were often designated to go well beyond first blood. Some were carried out under the understanding that satisfaction was not gained until one man was incapacitated, while the gravest insults required a mortal blow.

To us, duels seem like a pointlessly barbaric way to settle disputes; going into a duel the odds were nearly 100% that one man or both would be wounded or killed. And, adding insult to injury, it could very well be the innocent party who was slain.

Even at the time, there were many critics that argued that dueling was unnecessarily violent and contrary to morality, religion, common sense, and indeed, antithetical to the very concept of honor itself. But there were also those who argued that dueling actually prevented violence.

The idea was that single combat warriors averted endless bloody feuds between groups and families ala the Hatfields and McCoys. The duels nipped these potential feuds in the bud as insults were given immediate redress, with satisfaction given to both parties.

The practice was also thought to increase civility throughout society. To avoid being challenged to the duel, gentlemen were careful not to insult or slight others. The courtly, formal manners this time period is famous for-the stately dress, the bowing, toasting, and flowery language-were designed to convey honorable intentions and avoid giving offense. Jealousies and resentments had to be repressed and covered with politeness.

In the 1836 manual, The Art of Duelling, the author summarizes the pro-dueling perspective of the time with comments that seem remarkable to the modern ear:

“The practice is severely censured by all religious and thinking people; yet it has very justly been remarked, that ‘the great gentleness and complacency of modern manners, and those respectful attentions of one man to another, that at present render the social discourses of life far more agreeable and decent, than among the most civilized nations of antiquity; must be ascribed, in some degree to this absurd custom.’ It is certainly both awful and distressing to see a young person cut off suddenly in a duel, particularly if he be the father of a family; but the loss of a few lives is a mere trifle, when compared with the benefits resulting to Society at large.

I should consider it very unwise in the members of government, to adopt any measures that would enforce the prohibition of duelling…the man who falls in a duel, and the individual who is killed by the overturn of a stage-coach, are both unfortunate victims to a practice from which we derive great advantage. It would be absurd to prohibit stage-travelling-because, occasionally, a few lives are lost by an overturn.”

Dueling Necessities

The components of the gentleman’s duel were often quite varied. The challenged party was usually given the choice of weapons, and the possibilities were endless. Duels have been fought with everything from sabers to billiard balls. A duel was once even fought over the skies of Paris, with the participants utilizing blunderbusses in an attempt to rupture each other’s hot air balloons. One succeeded, sending the opposing man and his comrade plummeting to their death, while the winner floated triumphantly away.

Swords were the weapon of choice until the 18^th century, when the transition to pistols made dueling more democratic (fencing took skill-a man might challenge another to a duel, spend a year learning swordsmanship, and then return to fight the duel. But nearly anyone could pull a trigger). As the practice of using guns grew in prominence, arms makers began to create sets of pistols specifically built for dueling. The idea behind this practice was simple. If two men were going to engage in a duel, their “equipment” needed to be as similar as possible so as not to give one man an unfair advantage over the other. Thus, by the latter 18th century, sets of dueling pistols were being produced by fine arms makers throughout Europe. Dueling pistols were often smooth bored pistols, and usually fired quite large rounds. Calibers of .45, .50, or even .65 (caliber = inches of diameter) were in common usage. The pistols were made to exact specifications and were tested to ensure that they were as equal in performance and appearance as possible. A man’s dueling pistols were a prized possession, an heirloom passed down from father to son.

Code Duello: The Dueling Code

“A duel was indeed considered a necessary part of a young man’s education…When men had a glowing ambition to excel in all manner of feats and exercises they naturally conceived that manslaughter, in an honest way (that is, not knowing which would be slaughtered), was the most chivalrous and gentlemanly of all their accomplishments. No young fellow could finish his education till he had exchanged shots with some of his acquaintances. The first two qualifications always asked as to a young man’s respectability and qualifications, particularly when he proposed for a lady wife, were ‘What family is he of? And ‘Did he ever blaze?” -19^th century Irish duelist

Dueling code evolved over the centuries as weapons and notions of honor changed. Proper dueling protocol in the 17th and 18th centuries was recorded in such works as The Dueling Handbook by Joseph Hamilton and The Code of Honor by John Lyde Wilson. While the dueling code varied by time period and country, many aspects of the code were similar.

Despite our romanticized notion of duels as being fought only over the most grievous of disputes, duels could often arise from matters most trivial-telling another man he smelled like a goat or spilling ink on a chap’s new vest. But they were not spontaneous affairs in which an insult was given and the parties marched immediately outside to do battle (in fact, striking another gentleman made you a social pariah). A duel had to be conducted calmly and coolly to be dignified, and the preliminaries could take weeks or months; a letter requesting an apology would be sent, more letters would be exchanged, and if peaceful resolution could not be reached, plans for the duel would commence.

The first rule of dueling was that a challenge to duel between two gentleman could not generally be refused without the loss of face and honor. If a gentleman invited a man to duel and he refused, he might place a notice in the paper denouncing the man as a poltroon for refusing to give satisfaction in the dispute.

But one could honorably refuse a duel if challenged by a man he did not consider a true gentleman. This rejection was the ultimate insult to the challenger.

The most common characteristic of a duel between gentlemen was the presence of a “second” for both parties. The seconds were gentlemen chosen by the principal participants whose job it was to ensure that the duel was carried out under honorable conditions, on a proper field of honor and with equally deadly weapons. More importantly, it was the seconds (usually good friends of the participating parties) who sought a peaceful resolution to the matter at hand in hopes of preventing bloodshed.

Once the challenge to duel was given, several issues had to be settled before the matter could be resolved. The challenger would first allow his foe the choice of weapons and conditions of the combat, and a time would be set for the event. Seconds were responsible for locating a proper dueling ground, usually a remote area away from witnesses and law enforcement, since dueling remained technically illegal in most states, though rarely prosecuted. Duels were sometimes even fought on sandbars in rivers where the legal jurisdiction of the time was hazy at best.

Honor was not only given for showing up for the duel-proper coolness and courage under fire was also required to uphold one’s reputation. A gentleman was not to show his fear. If he stepped off the mark, his opponent’s second had the right to shoot him on the spot.

The End of the Dueling Age

Many modern men mistakenly believe that dueling was a rare occurrence in history; a last resort only appealed to in the case of serious matters or by two overly hot-headed men. In fact, from America to Italy, tens of thousands of duels took place and the practice was quite common among the upper classes.

But dueling’s popularity eventually waned at the end of the 19^th century, lingering longer in Europe than America. Stricter anti-dueling laws were passed, and sometimes even enforced.

The bloodshed of the Civil War on this continent, and the Great War on the other, also dampened enthusiasm for the duel. Despite our modern romanticism for dueling, it was a practice that hewed down young men in the prime of their life. Having lost millions of their promising youth in battle, felling those who remained became distasteful.

Additionally, Southern society was vastly transformed in the aftermath of the Civil War. The aristocracy was shattered; busy with Reconstruction and rebuilding, there was less time and inclination to duel. A man’s prestige and position in society became less about his family, reputation, and most of all, honor, than it did about cash. Disputes were taken not to the field of honor but to the courts, with vindication given by “pale dry money instead of wet red blood.”

Stay tuned for Part Two of the Dueling Series: Man Knowledge: Famous Duels in American History.

Sources and Further Reading

Gentlemen’s Blood by Barbara Holland. An absolutely delightful book. Covers a serious topic in a strangely breezy and humorous way that really works and is full of truly interesting stories and insights. (The last quote is from this book)

The Art of Duelling by The Traveller. A readable contemporary manual on the ins and outs of dueling. Reading up the author’s tips and advice for those going into a duel gives an interesting window to the time.

Code Duello: The Rules of Dueling. Take a look at the very specific rules which governed the duel.



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This is the fourth part in a series designed to help you boost your resiliency. For the previous entries, see Part I, Part II, and Part III.

Have you ever reacted to something with an intensity of emotion that didn’t seem to match the circumstances of the event? The logical part of your mind is telling you that’s it’s not that big of deal, but you still feel really angry/hurt/depressed/anxious, and you can’t seem to turn off the emotion.

These kind of “overreactions” can leave us feeling pretty frustrated. They hurt our relationships and keep us from making progress in our lives. Not only do they lead us to dwell on things longer than we should, but we end up making poor decisions in this emotional state. These kinds of incongruous reactions keep us from responding resiliently to our problems.

So what causes these mismatched reactions? A collision with an iceberg, an iceberg belief to be precise. Water is pouring in your hull, but atop the deck you don’t really understand what has happened. All you know is that you’re sinking-fast.

What Is an Iceberg Belief?

According to the authors of The Resilience Factor, this experience of a mismatched stimulus/reaction is “a sign you are being affected by an underlying belief-a deeply held belief about how the world ought to operate and how you feel you ought to operate within that world. …These deeper motivations and values often drive us and determine how we respond to adversity…these underlying beliefs-or icebergs, as we call them- are usually outside our awareness, deep beneath the surface of our consciousness.”

So iceberg beliefs are fixed and frozen ideas about the world that we hold deep within us. Drs. Reivich and Shatte offer these examples of iceberg beliefs:

“I should succeed at everything I put my mind to.”
“People must respect me at all times.”
“Women should be kind and supportive.”
“A man doesn’t let his emotions show.”
“Failure is a sign of weakness.”
“I must never give up.”
“Only weak people can’t solve their own problems.”

Here are some others I thought of:

“I never want to end up like my father.”
“The most important thing is to be well-liked.”
“Men are always competent in whatever they do.”
“A man never quits what he starts.”

Examples of Iceberg Scenarios

Let’s explore how these icebergs can affect you in real life by looking at some hypothetical scenarios:

Dan’s iceberg belief is, “People must respect me at all times.” As he’s driving to work, someone cuts him off. He spends the rest of the commute riding the guy’s ass, cursing, and flashing his high beams.

Jeff’s iceberg belief is “Manliness can be judged by how good you are with the ladies.” He approaches an attractive woman, and she totally blows him off. James feels deeply hurt and spends the rest of the week replaying the moment and feeling angry and depressed.

Joe’s iceberg belief is that “A man never quits what he starts.” His son Jeremy comes to him one night and tells him that he’s quitting the hockey team because he doesn’t enjoy it anymore. Joe becomes enraged at his son, telling him he’s a loser for giving up, and he’ll never amount to anything in life.

Where Do Icebergs Come From?

Iceberg beliefs can almost all be traced to the way you were brought up. If your dad was a super stoic guy, “Men don’t show emotion,” might be one of your icebergs. If your mom was Miss Manners, one of your iceberg beliefs might be: “People who are impolite are not worth knowing.”

Icebergs in Your Relationships

Icebergs can shipwreck our relationships. This is particularly true because we often have iceberg beliefs about gender roles, even ones we’re not conscious of. Have you have been beaten by a woman you were competing with in a game? Maybe you felt extra crappy about it, crappier than you’d feel if you had been beaten by a dude. You know it’s stupid to feel that way, but that emotional reaction is caused by an iceberg belief about how these encounters should go down.

We all have iceberg beliefs about how a man and how a woman should act, and when these beliefs are violated, we can have a very strong visceral reaction, and we can’t quite understand the intensity of our emotions.

Let’s say you just worked on a handyman project around the house. Or maybe you’re in charge of the finances in your relationship. And you do something wrong, even a little thing. Your wife sees the mistake, tries to pretend like it’s fine, but disappointment is written all over her face. You might feel really angry or defensive or really sulky and humiliated. It shouldn’t have been a big deal, but your iceberg belief was that men always know what they’re doing, and so you feel way crappier than you should. And you probably take it out on your wife, becoming uber defensive and angry.

Note-this kind of thing can work both ways. The woman in your life may become really upset when you don’t live up to one of her icebergs beliefs. A lot of women have icebergs beliefs about men being strong and competent with everything. When you fail at something or otherwise come off as weak to them, it can create quite a visceral reaction in them. For example, my wife thinks that the man should take care of haggling deals and be awesome at it. Unfortunately, I’m not. And when I fail to get us a bargain, she gets really angry with me.

The Problems Icebergs Can Cause

“Iceberg beliefs cause you to overexperience certain emotions and underexperience others. Emotionally resilient people feel it all…but they feel those emotions at the appropriate time and to the appropriate degree. Less resilient people tend to get stuck in one emotion, and that comprises their ability to respond productively to adversity.” -The Resilience Factor

There are 4 problems that the Drs. Reivich and Shatte believe can be caused by iceberg beliefs:

1. Iceberg beliefs can become activated at unexpected times, which leads to out-of-proportion emotions and reactions.
2. Their activation might lead to emotions and behaviors that, although not extreme, are mismatched to the situation.
3. Iceberg beliefs can become too rigid, which causes you to fall into the same emotional patterns over and over.
4. Contradictory iceberg beliefs can make it hard to make a decision.

The first 3 points are pretty self-explanatory, but let’s take look at number 4. We can experience contradictory iceberg beliefs that confuse us and make decision-making difficult. You might have two iceberg beliefs: “A man should always follow his passion in life.” and “A man takes care of his family.” You’re called into your boss’ office and offered a promotion. You know you’ll hate the job but it will be a lot more money to support your family. The colliding of these icebergs can make you feel paralyzed and anxious.

It’s important to note that icebergs are not by necessity bad or good-they can be either, or both. “Integrity is the most important thing in life” is obviously a positive iceberg.” “I will never quit at anything,” has some definite positives for your life, but can be taken too far if you’re not careful. “People cannot be trusted” is a mostly negative belief. So you have to do a cost/benefit analysis of which icebergs you want to keep and make work for you and which you want to work on melting away.

Why It’s Hard to Melt Your Icebergs

You may say, well, this is good to know, I’ll just snap out of my negative icebergs and melt them away. But it’s not so easy, as we are all susceptible to a confirmation bias or what RF calls the Velcro/Teflon Effect. As you go about your life, you tend to filter out and ignore whatever doesn’t support your iceberg beliefs while honing in on everything that does.

So Gary believes, “All women are untrustworthy and manipulative.” At the start of his relationship with Sarah, she tells him that she isn’t looking to date anyone seriously. After a few weeks Gary tells Sarah that he wants to become more serious, and she tells him that they shouldn’t see each other anymore because that’s not what’s she’s looking for. Gary will seize on this snub, while ignoring what Sarah told him at the beginning of their relationship, and will declare that women are all a bunch of liars and Sarah just wanted him to take her out and pay for her meals. He may even seek out women who are untrustworthy and manipulative, to unconsciously confirm his bias. The mind can be a tricky thing.

Spotting Your Icebergs to Build Your Resilience

So it’s hard to simply shut off your iceberg beliefs. But it’s possible to stop yourself from colliding with them by spotting them before impact. By standing in your crow’s nest and being vigilant, but you can steer a smoother course for yourself. The more you become aware of your icebergs, the more you can understand why you react the way you do, and the more power you will have to react to things appropriately and resiliently.

To start spotting your icebergs, think back to the last time you felt your reaction wasn’t commensurate with the event that elicited it. Then start asking yourself some questions to get to the heart of why you felt the way you did. It helps to do this exercise in a journal or with some you deeply trust.

The Resilience Factor recommends asking the following “what” questions (why questions tend tn make you defensive) to figure out the iceberg you hit:

What does that mean to me?
What is the most upsetting part of that for me?
What is the worst part of that for me?
What does that say about me?
What’s so bad about that?

Use whichever questions make sense, in any order that makes sense.

Let’s say Jason’s wife Amanda says to him one night, “You know you seem to be drinking a lot after work lately. Maybe you should cut back some.” Jason blows up at her, yelling about how she’s a controlling bitch and it’s none of her damn business how much he drinks. James is taken aback my his reaction and works through what happened like this:

Question: So Amanda suggested you cut down on your drinking some, what’s so bad about that?
Jason: I’m a grown man and I know how much alcohol I can handle. I don’t need her watching over what I’m doing.
Question: What’s so upseting about her watching over what you’re doing?
Jason: I feel like it means she doesn’t trust me and doesn’t think I have it under control.
Question: What’s so bad about her not thinking that you’re in control?
Jason: I felt like she was insinuating that I’m turning into an alcoholic.
Question: Why is that so upsetting to you?
Jason: Because my dad was an alcoholic bastard and I’m not like that. I’m not like him.

So Jason realized that his wife’s comment had made him defensive because it touched on his fear of and commitment to, never turning out like his dad.

When you do this exercise, you’ll first come up with more visceral reasons for why you’re feeling the way you are. You have to keep digging to get to the heart of the matter and spot your iceberg.

So quit rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, and start steering a course to more resiliency.

Source: The Resilience Factor by Dr. Karen Reivich and Dr. Andrew Shatte

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All-American halfback.
The NFL’s leading rusher in 1938 and 1940.
Rhodes scholar.
Decorated war veteran.
United States Deputy Attorney General.
Supreme Court Justice.

History is filled with men who seem larger than life-men surrounded by an inflated myth of accomplishment, an aura that collapses as soon as one takes a closer look.

But a few men are truly just as remarkable as their billing.

Byron “Whizzer” White is such a man.

White was the epitome of the scholar-athlete, a man who excelled on both the playing field (where he earned the nickname “Whizzer”) and in the classroom.

White graduated at the top of his class in high school, at the University of Colorado, and from Yale Law School. He earned a Rhodes scholarship and became an Oxford scholar.

At the same time, he earned 7 athletic letters at CU (three in basketball, two in football, and two in baseball) and was All-Conference in every season in all three sports. On the gridiron he was a true triple-threat, and excelled at rushing, passing, and punting. He was a halfback that sometimes played quarterback, and both punted and returned punts. He became the NFL’s highest paid player and made the All-NFL team in each of the three seasons he played professional football.

“He was a man who knew himself and knew his convictions and didn’t care too much what others thought.” Ira C. Rothgerber

The son of a beet farmer, White rose from humble beginnings to an appointment on the highest court in the land, where he served for 31 years and became the fourth longest serving Justice in the 20th century. As a Justice, White was a man who stuck with his principles for his entire career. His strongly pragmatic and non-ideological approach, in which he decided every ruling on a case by case, fact by fact basis, was criticized by those who felt he lacked an overarching philosophy. Indeed, his rulings at first glance seem all over the political spectrum, but each was guided by his deep convictions on the Constitution and the role of the Judiciary; convictions he did not think could be classified in tidy boxes. He thus abhorred both “thinking by labels” and being given one. One of White’s former law clerks said:

“Being non-ideological and non-doctrinaire is clearly very important to White, just as is being his own person and not worrying about his place in history. He recognizes that being a justice who believes in a more limited Constitution is not the way to gain historical notoriety. Whether it’s because he gained such fame as a young man in sports or whether it’s just his natural disposition, I think he cares a lot more about doing what he think is right than whether it will make him a famous figure in history.”

Lessons in Manliness from Byron R. White

“Byron White is the straightest arrow I have covered in twenty-five years. His personal integrity is impeccable, in the extreme.” -Contemporary sportswriter

Keep Your Priorities Straight

When Bryon White graduated from the University of Colorado, he was faced with an excruciatingly difficult decision: accept a Rhodes scholarship to study at Oxford or join the Pittsburgh Pirates and enter the NFL as its highest paid player.

White absolutely loved football. And for a guy who had never had too much scratch and had worked his way through life since he was a kid, the money was truly alluring.

But when it came to the value of sports over academics, there was no comparison for him. Asked about his exams for the Rhodes scholarship during an interview on his football exploits, White answered, “I don’t think such things as football and scholarships should be mentioned in the same story.”

Sportswriter Henry M’Lemore said of White, “To him the end zone was a touchdown and nothing more.”

And so he turned down the $15,000 offer from the Pirates to bury himself in books at Oxford.

Without even the money to pay his way across the ocean, White worked on construction crews and as a waiter in his old fraternity house to earn the dough for passage to England. He could have been earning $1,000 a week in the pros; instead he toiled for $5 a day.

Happily, after White had made his decision, Oxford and the Rhodes Trustees decided to grant White an unprecedented waiver, allowing him to play football for a year and then begin his studies at Oxford.

After a glorious year on the gridiron, the Pirates’ owner begged White to stick around for good instead of setting sail. But White knew it was time to resume his studies and entered Oxford (he would play two more seasons with the Detroit Lions after the outbreak of war in Europe forced him to return home).

Asked about his decision to become an Oxford scholar instead of continuing with the NFL, White said:

“I entered football as a game, played it as a game, thrilled to it as a game, and I leave it as a game.”

Hustle, Hustle Hustle.

“He was a determined man. He had goals and he was going to accomplish them. Everything he did he was going to do to perfection. He was unique. There was never any patty-caking with Byron…It was leadership by example. He was so competitive. From the first down, he was ready to go all out.” Art Unger, CU teammate

“I hate to lose right down to my heels.”-Whizzer White

White was surely a man who was blessed with raw, natural talent. But this potential would never have been realized if he hadn’t absolutely worked his ass off in everything he did.

All his life, White was dogged by the stereotype that a man can either be a dumb jock or a non-sporty intellectual. People found it hard to believe that a man who was so deft on the gridiron could also have a first rate mind. And so White hustled to prove them wrong.

In college he kept a strict routine from which his fraternity brothers never saw him deviate-class, football practice, job, study. “He was a brute for study,” his friends remembered. He would read his textbooks as he soaked his bum knee in a whirlpool after practice. At halftime during his games, he would be stretched out on a table with his nose in a book.

When he arrived at Oxford, his fellow students were dubious that this professional football player was a real scholar and his tutor felt doubtful that White would be able to complete his law syllabus, as he was one term behind. So White worked on his studies 14 hours a day, not even relaxing during the frequent breaks in the Oxford schedule. When White went on “vacation” with some friends to stay in a villa on the French Riviera, his roommate remembered that “Byron would be up at the crack of dawn, out the door, and running up and down a steep hill outside the villa. Then he’d come back for a big breakfast and study until dark. He studied the rest of us into the ground.”

When he joined the NFL for his second season, he had to finish some classes he had started and so brought along his portable typewriter everywhere the team traveled, writing papers into the night. Each evening after dinner he would retire to his room and sit at his desk, wearing a green eyeshade and poring over his law books.

At Yale Law School, White’s fellow students, most of which came from prominent families from the East and ½ of which came from Ivy League Schools, thought that the hype around this gridiron great from Colorado was finally going to be deflated in the face of the school’s rigorous academics. Determined to prove his worth, White once more hit the books for 14 hours a day. He graduated from Yale’s Law School magna cum laude, the first to do so in ten years.

“I had never seen anyone work as hard as he did. And after practice was over, he was still out there, practicing punt returns-catching them on the fly-or kicking, and always taking extra laps.” Bill Radovich, Detroit Lions teammate

“He didn’t quit, even for one play, all day long, both ways. He was no fun to tackle, I’ll tell you. Others were faster, but listen, he was hard man to bring down. A hard man.” Sammy Baugh, Washington Redskins

White worked just as hard on the playing field as he did in the library. In college he would stay an extra 30-45 minutes after 3 hours of famously grueling regular practices working on his punt returns. In the summer he would spend hours honing his passing skills by throwing the football through a tire he had set up. To strengthen his injured knee, he spent a summer loading and unloading piles of bricks.

In actual games he went full throttle; his teammates remember him constantly playing black and blue. As a senior at CU he was the leading scorer in the country, and his record for all-purpose yards per game would not be broken until Barry Sanders came on the scene in 1988.

Yet he wasn’t an isolated, anti-social killjoy either. At CU he was elected class president, voted as the “Most Popular Man on Campus” his senior year, and chosen by his fellow students to be the “canebearer” at graduation. He traveled across Europe during his stay at Oxford (and not always with a textbook!), and later in life was involved with half a dozen community and service organizations.

How did White learn to be such a master hustler? “I just got in the habit of working,” he said. Word.

Build Your Mind and Your Body

“Byron was extremely quiet but somewhat intimidating. None of us in the room could believe how fully his forearms filled his suit coat. We all felt like wimps.” Tom Killefer, fellow finalist for the Rhodes scholarship on meeting White during the interview process.

Strength in body and strength in mind went hand in hand for Byron White, and he kept in shape religiously even when not playing college or professional sports.

At Oxford, he was barred from playing on the university’s teams because he had shed his amateur status, and thus had to look for other ways to exercise. Each Oxford student was assigned a manservant, sort of like a personal butler. White would regularly clear furniture from his sitting room and have nightly knock-down-drag-out wrestling matches with his manservant. It was an unorthodox breach of class lines, which would have gotten him reprimanded had administrators found out.

White understood that building one’s physique helped prepare both a man’s mind and body for emergencies. White’s diligence in maintaining his physique came in handy during his time in the Navy during WWII.

In 1945, a kamikaze plane bombed and crashed into the ship White was on, punching through the decks, landing in the ammo stores and plane hangar, and setting off a fire which raged all over the vessel. Gasoline in the planes ignited and ammunition was set off and fired in every direction.

Putting out the flames and rescuing men trapped by smoke and fire was the top priority. White, who had emerged from the attack unscathed, immediately went to work rescuing people and manning the fire hoses. He used his strength to lift burning beams off men who were about to be killed. White worked for four hours straight, saving every man he could, oblivious to his own safety. E. Calvert Cheston, a fellow officer remembered:

“He was absolutely focused on the fires and on the men. A shell would go off or an explosion would occur, but there was Byron-locked in on the man who needed help or on the hose that needed to be manned. I don’t think he ever thought about himself. We were all working frantically, but he stayed so cool it was almost unnerving And he never took a rest.”

When hiring clerks as a Supreme Court judge, White would ask candidates, “What do you do for exercise? How’s your health?” People thought it was strange, even out of line, but Whizzer understood the crucial connection between body and mind.

Seek Success for Your Own Satisfaction, Not for Fame and Glory

“Byron would have been just as happy-I think he might have preferred-if he played with twenty-one other players in an empty stadium-no fans, no coaches, no referees. Football was like all sports for him-a personal challenge, a thing to test his own limits. He really hated the stuff that happened before and after the whistle.”

“[White] was such a nice guy: you couldn’t believe that somebody with all that p.r. could be so down to earth and generous.” -Chuck Hanneman, Detroit Lions teammate

For those who knew Bryon White, perhaps the most salient characteristic about his life was not his myriad of accomplishments, but how damn modest he was about them. White was practically allergic to getting attention. Quiet, taciturn, he was a private man who loathed the press, rarely granting interviews, especially about his football career. He never wanted his football success, rather than his merit, to seem responsible for his accomplishments as a man of the law.

While playing with the Pirates, a disappointing season and scheduling difficulties left the team’s owner unable to meet the team’s payroll. Even though White would be the NFL’s leading rusher that season, he still felt he hadn’t been playing as well as he should and worried that the other players wouldn’t be paid. Although he was the highest paid player in the league, and had delayed Oxford partly for the large salary, he refused to take a paycheck for half of the season or receive any money for exhibition games even though his contract guaranteed it.

And after a dismal, losing season with the Pirates, White treated the whole team to an all-out steak dinner at a nice hotel. When asked about it later, he said the team had given the dinner.

In the Navy, the man who had been relentlessly covered in the papers from coast to coast, still kept a low-profile. Cheston said, “Byron was probably the least anonymous junior officer in the navy. Everybody had heard of him, but no one could believe how unpretentious and down-to-earth he was. You couldn’t get him to talk about his football days. He never brought it up, and if you did, he’d just shrug it off.”

In response to his Bronze Medals, White said, “I just got in on the gravy train. The other guys really deserved the medals. I came into the squadron from a PT job in November after the biggest work was done.”

When Justice White attended an Orioles baseball game and the owner offered to move him and his wife from the nosebleed section to his own box seats, White refused, not wanting to be seen as receiving extra perks because of his position.

It wasn’t false modesty or a show. In the words of one of his teammates, “Byron just hated ever to seem big-headed….He was just constitutionally incapable of tooting his own horn.”

Source: The Man Who Once Was Whizzer White by Dennis Hutchinson

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At the heart of the modern crisis of manhood is the extension of adolescence, a boyhood which is stretching on for a longer and longer period of time. Once thought to end in a man’s 20s at the latest, men are extending their adolescence into their 30’s and in some especially sad cases, their 40’s.

But in some ways it’s not their fault. It’s the fault of a culture in which rites of passage have all but disappeared, leaving men adrift and lost, never sure when and if they’ve become men. Today’s men lack a community of males to initiate them into manhood and to recognize their new status.

Across time and place, cultures have inherently understood that without clear markers on the journey to manhood, males have a difficult time making the transition and can drift along indefinitely. Thus, rites of passage were clearly delineated in nearly every culture as one of the community’s most important rituals.

While almost every culture had a rite of passage ritual, there existed a great diversity in what these ceremonies consisted of. The common thread was an experience that involved emotional and physical pain and required a boy to pass the test of manhood: to show courage, endurance, and the ability to control one’s emotions.

The following are a few of the interesting (read:insane and crazy) rite of passage rituals that existed (and in some cases still exist) around the world. While they be quite offensive to our modern, Western sensibilities, each was born of different cultures’ beliefs of what made a man, a man. And you thought your Bar Mitzah was stressful.

Vanuatu Land Diving

Bungee jumping is for wusses… at least compared to the men who live in Vanuatu, a small island nation in the middle of the South Pacific. Here the men take place in a yearly harvest ritual called Land Diving.

Around April or May, villages will build crude wooden towers reaching heights of 100 feet or more. After the tower is completed, a few men will volunteer to scale it. The men then tie a vine first on a platform on the tower and then around their ankles. Summoning all the courage they have, the men dive from the platform headfirst. The divers reach speeds of 45 miles an hour as they plummet to the ground.

The goal of the jump is to land close enough to the ground that the diver’s shoulders touch the ground. Any miscalculation on the length of the vine means either serious injury or death.

Land diving among the Vanuatus goes back nearly 15 centuries. The purpose of the ritual is twofold. First, it’s performed as a sacrifice to their gods to ensure a bountiful yam crop. Second, it serves as a rite of passage to initiate the tribe’s boys into manhood. Boys as young as five years old will take part in the ritual which is often preceded by circumcision. The boys start out jumping low, but will work their way up as they get older. The higher a man goes, the manlier he is considered by the tribe.

Watch the divers make their plunge into manhood:

Mardudjara Aborigines Subincision

The rite of passage from boyhood to manhood of the Australian Mardudjara Aborigines consists of two parts: circumcision and sub-incision. Don’t know what sub-incision is? Read on. You’ll be wincing in pain.

When an Aborigine boy comes of age, usually around 15 or 16, the tribal elders will lead the boy to a fire and have him lie down next to it. Tribal members surround the boy while singing and dancing. Another group of men, called the Mourners, wail and cry while the circumcision is performed.

The tribal elder in charge of the circumcision sits on top of the boy’s chest facing his penis. He pulls up the foreskin and twists it so it can be cut off. Two men take turns cutting away the foreskin with knives that they’ve imbued with magical qualities. The boy bites down on a boomerang as the operation takes place.

When the circumcision is complete, the boy kneels on a shield that’s placed over the fire so the smoke can rise up and purify his wound.

While the boy sits there dazed and in pain, the tribal elders tell him to open his mouth and swallow some “good meat” without chewing it. The “good meat” is actually the boy’s freshly removed foreskin. After he’s swallowed a piece of his own wiener, the boy is told that he has eaten “his own boy” and that it will now grow inside him and make him strong.

Now comes the second part of the initiation- the sub-incision. A few months after the circumcision, the tribal elders take the young man again to a fire. An elder sits on the boy’s chest and takes ahold of the boy’s penis. Again, there are singers and men mourning at the ceremony. A small wooden rod is inserted into the urethra to act as a backing for the knife. The operator then takes a knife and makes a split on the underside of the penis from the frenulum (underneath the head of the penis) to near the scrotum.

After the sub-incision, the boy stands above the fire and allows his blood to drip into it. From now on the boy will have to squat when he urinates, just like a woman. In fact, some anthropologists posit that the sub-incision ceremony is done to simulate menstruation, allowing men to sympathize with the females of the tribe.

The ceremonies of the Mardudjara have slowly disappeared as contact with the modern world has increased and each successive generation becomes less willing to make a snack of their foreskin.

Hamar Cow Jumping

Imagine sitting down with your girlfriend’s dad to ask for his daughter’s hand in marriage. You’re nervous. Sweat gathers on your forehead. You make small talk, but finally manage to get the question out while your voice cracks.

The dad responds, “Sure! But you’ll have to jump over some cows first.”

If you’re a man living in the Hamar tribe of Ethiopia, this is exactly what you’d have to go through before you can get hitched.  To become a man, you’ll have to jump over a herd of cattle.

The ceremony starts off with the tribe’s young girls jumping in unison. Usually these girls are relatives or good friends of the boy who is about to be initiated into manhood. Their metal jewelry clinks and clacks in a rhythmic beat. The girls will jump towards the maza – men who have already gone through the rite of passage — and hand them a green stick. The men use this green stick to lash at the backs of the girls while they continue to jump up and down. The lashing continues until blood is drawn. When the men are finished, the girls bow to them and jump away. The scars that form show that the women endured pain for the initiate during his passage into manhood.

After the whipping ceremony, the tribe forms a circle around a herd of cattle. Singing and chanting fills the air. Four of the biggest bulls are lined up side to side.  In order for the ceremony to be valid, the bulls must be castrated. The initiate is brought to the cattle, naked except for a few cords he wears around his chest. The boy must jump onto the first bull and then run back and forth across the backs of the cattle three times. When he’s done, a shout is given and the boy is a maza, or man.

The Ancient Spartan Helot Killing

For ancient Spartans, becoming a soldier was the only way one could be recognized as a man. Military training began at age seven when boys would be taken from their families and placed in the Agoge system. For the next 10 years Spartan boys learned the skills necessary to become a trained killing machine.

When a Spartan youth turned 18, he completed his training. To graduate and be recognized as a man in his community, the boy had to undergo a cruel rite of passage called the krypteia. The young man would be sent to the countryside with only a knife and his wits. His object? To kill as many state-owned slaves, called helots, without being detected and return to his school in one piece. The young men would often hide during the day and make their attacks at night. In order to complete this rite of passage successfully, the young man had to call on all the training he received in the Agoge.

After successfully completing the krypteia, a Spartan man was expected to marry and continue killing for the state.

Satere-Mawe Bullet Ant Glove

Deep in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon lives the Satere-Mawe tribe. To become a man in the Satere-Mawe, a boy must stick his hand in a glove woven with bullet ants and withstand their stings for over 10 minutes without making a noise.

According to the Schmidt Sting Index, the bullet ant has the most painful sting in the ant world. It’s described as “waves of throbbing, all consuming pain” that continues for over 24 hours. In fact, the locals call the ant, hormiga venticuatro because the pain from the sting lasts 24 hours.

Now if the sting from one bullet ant is that painful, imagine the pain you’d experience if you put on a glove made entirely of pissed-off bullet ants.

To make the glove, the tribesmen will knock out the bullet ants with a natural sedative. While the ants are docile, the elders proceed to make their torture device by weaving the ants into a glove made of leaves with the ants’ stingers facing inwards.

When the ants regain consciousness, the boys put on the gloves and face 10 minutes of pure, unadulterated hell. The copious amounts of venom the boy receives during the ordeal will temporarily paralyze his arm and leave him shaking uncontrollably for days.

This isn’t a one-time deal, either. A young boy may have to stick his hand in the bullet ant glove several more times before he’s considered a man. Each time he experiences the ordeal, the object is to remain as quiet as possible. It’s a test of manly endurance and stoicism that’s necessary to be effective warriors for the tribe.

Watch it in action:

Maasai Warrior Passage

The Maasai of Kenya and Tanzania have a series of rites of passage that carry boys into manhood. Every 10 or 15 years a new warrior class will be initiated into the tribe. Boys between the ages of 10 and 20 are brought together from all across the country. Dozens of houses are built that will serve as the place of initiation. The night before the ceremony, the boys sleep outside in the forest. At dawn, they return to the little makeshift homestead for a day of singing and dancing.  They drink a mixture of milk, cow’s blood, and alcohol and eat piles and piles of meat. After the festivities, boys who are of age (12-16) are ready to be circumcised.

The Emuratare is the most important ceremony in the life of a Maasai boy. Once circumcised, the tribe will consider him a man, warrior, and protector of his village. As the young man makes his way to where the elders will circumcise him, friends and family members will taunt the boy by saying things like “If you flinch, we will disown you.” The Maasai value bravery in their warriors and the circumcision is a boy’s first way to prove his courage even in the face of severe pain. It takes about 3 months for the circumcision to heal and during that time the young men wear black clothing and live in huts built by the women of the villiage. The Maasai boy is now warrior.

For the next 10 years the young men live together in an Emanyatta, or warriors camp. There they learn fighting, oratory, and animal husbandry. After 10 years, the young men take part in the Eunoto ceremony that marks the transition from warrior to senior warrior. After a Maasai has passed through the Eunoto, he can marry. The ceremony is basically several days of festivals, which ends with the initiate’s mother shaving his hair.

Mandan Hook Hanging

Native American tribes each had their own unique coming of age rituals for the men in the tribe. But few were as intense as that of the Mandans. Before his rite-of-passage, a Mandan boy fasted for 3 days to cleanse his body of impurities. Then, on the day of the ritual, elders of tribe would pierce the boy’s chest, shoulder, and back muscles with large wooden splints. Ropes, which extended from the roof of a hut, were then attached to the splints, and the young man was winched up into the air, his whole body weight suspended from the ropes. Despite the pain, the boy was not to cry out in pain. While hanging in the air, more splints were hammered through his arms and legs. Skulls of his dead grandfather and other ancestors were placed on the ends of the splints.

Eventually, the young man fainted from the loss of blood and the sheer pain of the torture. When the elders were sure he was unconscious, he was lowered down and the ropes were removed. Yet the splints were left in place. When the young man recovered consciousness, he offered his left pinky to the tribal elders to be sacrificed. He placed his finger on a block and had it swiftly chopped off. This was a gift to the gods and would enable the young man to become a powerful hunter. Finally, the young man ran inside a ring where his fellow villagers had gathered. As he ran, the villagers reached out and grabbed the still embedded splints, ripping them free. The splints weren’t allowed to be pulled out the way they had been hammered in, but had to be torn out in the opposite direction, causing the young man even greater pain and worse wounds. This concluded the day’s ceremony, and the boy was now a man.

Sambia of Papa New Guinea

In the small country of Papau New Guinea, over 1,000 different culture groups exist. Among them is the Sambia tribe, a group with perhaps the most insane rite of passage into manhood in the world.

The initiation begins at age seven with the separation of the boy from the mother. The boy will spend the rest of his young life only in the presence of men in an all male hut. The gender separation is taken to such extremes that boys and women use different walking paths around the village.

After being separated from the women, the young boy is subjected to several brutal hazing rituals. The first involves ceremonial bloodletting from the nose. The procedure is crude, but effective. The boy is held against a tree and stiff, sharp grasses and sticks are shoved up his nose until the blood starts flowing freely. Once the elders see blood, they let out a collective war cry. After the bloodletting, the boys undergo severe beatings and lashings. The purpose is to toughen up the boys and to prepare them to live as warriors.

As we’ve seen, ritual bloodletting is par for the course when it comes to male initiation. What sets the Sambia apart from other groups is the second part of their male rite of passage: semen drinking.

The Sambia believe that both men and women are born with a tingu. The tingu is a body part that allows for procreation. A woman’s tingu is ready for reproduction when she first menstruates. A man’s tingu is born shriveled and dried and the only way to fill it is to drink the “man milk,” or semen of other sexually mature men. They believe that by drinking the male essence of other men, the boys will become strong and virile. Done in the privacy of the forest, a boy will perform fellatio on young, usually unmarried men between the ages of 13 and 21. The boys are encouraged to “drink the male essence” as much as possible in order to become strong.

Around age 13, a young man has started puberty and another stage in the initiation begins. Another ritual nosebleed takes place along with some beatings to purify the young man. The boy is now considered a bachelor and will now provide the “man milk” to young boys just starting down the path of manhood.

Around age 20, a Sambia man is ready to marry, but before the nuptials take place, the tribal elders teach the young man the secrets to protect himself from the impurities of women. For example, when having intercourse, a man should stuff mint leaves in his nostril and chew on bark in order to mask the smell of his wife’s genitals. Moreover, when a man has sex with his wife, penetration shouldn’t be too deep as this will only increase the chances becoming polluted. Finally, after intercourse, a Sambia man must go bathe in mud in order to wash away any impurities he may have contracted from his wife. Even after marriage, a young Sambia man doesn’t spend very much time with his wife, but instead continues passing the time with the other men

The final rite of passage in the life of Sambian man is fatherhood. After his wife gives birth, a Sambia man is considered to have the full rights of masculinity.

Know about any other crazy male rites of passage? Share them with us in the comments.

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This is the third part in a series designed to help you boost your resiliency. For the previous entries, see Part I and Part II.
I know Part III is a little long, but there is so much great information on this subject that I really wanted to share with you. So go ahead and read it all-I promise its chock full of worthwhile information. And what better way to build your resiliency!

“We lost 13 pilots in six months. And in nearly every case, the worst pilots died by their own stupidity.”-Chuck Yeager

Among test pilots, Chuck Yeager’s attitude towards pilots who “augered in” was universal. In The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe relates how test pilots loved to talk about flying at every chance, and how the discussion would inevitably turn to why the latest pilot to have perished in an accident had done himself in. It was always the pilot’s fault. Even if a piece of equipment had malfunctioned, the consensus was that the pilot should have double-checked it before taking off. Nearly every death was caused by pilot error, plain and simple.

To the average joe, this might seem like a callous attitude, but when you’re going to a funeral every other week, burying a guy who’s doing the same job as you, you have to believe that you’re in control of your life, 100%. Otherwise, you’re never going to get into that cockpit again.

These men had the “right stuff.” Their unshakable belief in their ability to control their destiny set them apart from other men. You may not be flying planes, but you too can stop being a victim, strap into the cockpit, and take control of your life.

Feeling in Control: The Foundation of Your Resiliency

In the last part of our series, we discussed an experiment in which dogs who had been given electric shocks and no recourse to stop the pain “learned helplessness.”

It was the experience of not being in control that left them depressed and defeated and sapped their resiliency.

The need to feel in control in our lives cannot be overstated. In Stumbling on Happiness, Dr. Daniel Gilbert argues:

“Being effective-changing things, influencing things, making things happen-is one of the fundamental needs with which the human brain seem to be naturally endowed, and much of our behavior from infancy onward is simply an expression of this penchant for control…The fact is that human beings come into the world with a passion for control, they go out of the world the same way, and research suggests that if they lose their ability to control things at any point between their entrance and exit, they become unhappy, helpless, hopeless, and depressed. And occasionally dead.”

The dead part refers to a pair of studies done to test the link between feelings of control and health.

In the first study, the elderly residents of a nursing home were each given a houseplant and divided into two groups-the high control group and the low control group. The high control group was told that the plant’s care was in their hands while the plants in the low control group were taken care of by a staff member. The results at the end of the study were startling-30% of the members of the low control group had died, compared to only 15% of the members of the high control group.

A follow-up study garnered similar results. College students were paired with residents at another nursing home. One group of the elderly residents (the low control group) could not control when the students would come; the student would set the appointment date. The high control group was able to dictate when the students would visit. “After two months, the residents in the high control group were happier, healthier, more active, and taking fewer medications than those in the low control group.”

If feeling in control of a houseplant can prolong your life, imagine the effect that feeling in control of even bigger things can have on your happiness, confidence, and resiliency.

Having an Internal vs. External Locus of Control

In the 1950’s, psychologist Julian Rotter theorized that much of human behavior can be explained by whether a person has an internal or external locus of control. Locus means “place” in Latin, so these categories denote whether a person is controlled by external or internal factors. Those with an external locus of control believe that their behavior is guided by fate, luck, and other external factors. Those with an internal locus of control believe that their behavior is guided by their own actions and decisions. People don’t fit into one extreme or the other, rather the two categories represent the opposite ends of a continuum.

Having an external or internal locus of control has a profound influence on behavior:

Those with an internal locus of control:

• Are confident that they can be successful.
• Tend to be leaders (leading those with an external locus of control).
• Exhibit greater control over their behavior.
• Seek to learn as much as they can.
• Take personal responsibility for their actions.
• Deal with challenge and stress better.
• Use challenges to come out stronger than before.
• Thrive in the midst of change.
• Are less likely to submit to authority.

Those with an external locus of control:

• Feel like they’re a victim.
• Are quick to blame everyone but themselves.
• Want to be led by others.
• Avoid responsibility.
• Are more prone to stress, anxiety, and depression

Those with an internal locus of control are achievement-oriented and more likely to find academic and professional success. Because they believe they’re in control of their destiny, they’re eager to tackle challenges, while those with an external locus of control are apt to say “Why bother? It doesn’t matter what I do anyway.”

Additionally, Dr. Siebert, author of the Resiliency Advantage, argues that “both sets of beliefs are self-validating and self-fulfilling. People who believe that their fate is under the control of outside forces act in ways that confirm their beliefs. People who know they can do things to make their life better act in ways to confirm their beliefs.”

There are online tests you can take (here and here) to get an idea of whether you have a more internal or external locus of control.

Stop Being a Victim and Take Control of Your Life

Men are more likely to have an internal locus of control than women, which perhaps explains why rhetoric about being the captains of our destiny has always deeply resonated with us. And I would personally argue that much of our current crisis in manhood can be traced to men shifting from that natural mode of behavior to handing control of their lives over to external forces. Everything today is not our fault but is rather the result of a disease, addiction, or chemical imbalance.

The good news is that while your upbringing shapes your locus of control, it is possible to change it and become more internal than external.

Rotter grounded his ideas about locus of control in something called “expectancy-value theory,” which says that a person’s likelihood of taking an action is dependent on how much the person values a particular outcome and how much the person believes that taking the action will produce that outcome.

To put it in simple terms, and I hope this will be seared in every man’s mind: We blame others and play the victim when we don’t believe that we can solve a problem ourselves.

Non-resilient men play the “if only” game. These are the guys who claim that they would be the men they want to be…. “If only I had more time to exercise.” If only my wife didn’t nag me so much.” “If only my boss would stop being such an a-hole.” Their happiness is put on hold as they wait for circumstances and people to change.

The truth is this: people aren’t going to change. And if your happiness is contingent on them doing so, you’ve just handed control of your life over to them. If you let your co-workers/friends/girlfriend “make” you feel a certain way, you’ve stopped being an active agent in your life, and become a victim.

The resilient man understands that the only thing he can control is himself. Only he can change his circumstances and only he can control how he reacts to adversity. Circumstances don’t dictate your life-you dictate your life. The resilient man waits for no one to solve his problems; he is always actively trying to solve them himself.

Taking Control of Your Life By Strengthening Your Problem-Solving Abilities

So the key to taking control of your life is to strengthen your problem solving skills. As you do so, you will gain the confidence and the belief that you can tackle whatever challenges come your way.

To do this, Dr. Siebert suggests using and strengthening 3 different problem solving methods.

Analytical Problem Solving

We as men should excel at this kind of problem solving. It involves using logic, analysis, and reason to come up with solutions. To apply these tools, Dr. Siebert recommends taking the following steps when faced with a problem:

1. Get an accurate understanding of the problem. Ask questions, research, observe. Get as much info about what’s happening as you can.
2. Ask yourself, “What do I want?” What is your desired outcome?
3. Come up with two or more potential solutions to the problem. Weigh the pros and cons of each.
4. Take action. Pick a solution and  throw yourself into carrying it out.
5. Take stock of the effects of your action. What’s working? What isn’t?
6. Learn from the feedback you get. Fine tune your approach to be more effective.
7. Modify your efforts.
   

Analytical problem solving is good to employ with a problem like getting your finances under control. If you feel like you’re drowning,  sit down, figure out what debt reduction plan you want to use, crunch some numbers, come up with a budget, etc.

Practical Problem Solving

There are people who are book smart and people who are street smart. Ideally, you want to be both. Practical problem solvers don’t get emotional when faced with a challenge. They don’t get angry and focus on “Why me?” Research done on the survivors of extreme difficulties show that instead of fighting and arguing against the new reality, and trying to stop the change, they fully embraced what was happening. You can shout, “This shouldn’t be happening!” all you want. But it is happening. And you have to deal with it.

Practical problem solvers immediately get to work on positive solutions. They choose action over words and feelings. And they plan for future challenges, understanding that if they’re prepared, they have nothing to fear.

Creative Problem Solving

When it comes to resiliency, perhaps the most important problem-solving strength is the ability to be creative. Creative problem solvers can think outside the box, come up with solutions on the fly, and generate novel ideas that haven’t been tried before.

Creative problem-solving is so vital because so much of resiliency comes down to one’s ability to deal positively with change. And goodness know there are a lot of changes going on in the world. Resilient people plunge head first into new things, while non-resilient people have to be dragged kicking and screaming.

Non-resilient people base their happiness on stability-they set up a routine and never voluntarily leave their comfort zone. When they’re forced to deal with a new reality, their world falls apart, and they find it extremely difficult to bounce back. They try to wedge their old ways of doing things into a new situation. It’s like putting a round peg in a square hole, and yet still they miserably persist.

They can’t grasp the new reality because they don’t want to. They shut their eyes and it doesn’t matter what new information they’re presented with, they refuse to change their mind. “My kid is not taking drugs.” “My girlfriend is not cheating on me.” “My job is not going to be downsized.” These people are always the last to know. They refuse to believe the truth right in front of them, and when they’re finally faced with the indisputable facts, they absolutely go to pieces.

You look at companies today and there are those that have grasped what the changing technological landscape means for doing business, and there are those that keep trying to do business the way they did 30 years ago. They’re not going to survive. You can be like the people who 60 years ago said that TV wasn’t going to hurt radio, or you can be the person that grasps the new reality and uses their creativity to remain relevant.

How do you become a creative problem-solver? The first key is curiosity.

Creative people maintain the same curiosity they had as children. You remember being a boy…exploring creeks, asking a ton of questions, tearing through book after book. Adults who retain this child-like curiosity are still fascinated with how things work and are always taking in new information about the world. They read. They ask questions. “What’s going on?” “How are things shifting?” “How are other people feeling?” “What are they thinking about?”

Creative people are open-minded and constantly absorbing information. They let information flow into their brains and observe things without labeling and judging them as good or bad. They don’t think things like, “That’s a stupid idea.” “Those people are crazy.” “That’s not how you should do things.” “That culture is backwards.”

This doesn’t mean a creative person doesn’t have opinions and believe certain things are right or wrong. It just means that they want to know how things work just for the sake of knowing; that all knowledge is good whether you agree with it or not. They file everything away in the belief that you never know when a fact is going to come in handy and something is going to give you an amazing insight.

When you saturate your mind with information and experiences, and let this knowledge swirl around in your cranium, things will just pop out of your unconscious. You’ll be brushing your teeth and a new business idea will come to you.

Creative people understand that you never know where you’re going to find inspiration, ideas, and solutions to your problems. But they do know those things won’t be generated if you’re forever stuck in the same routine, and your mind isn’t being fed and nourished. You have to look at things in new ways-perhaps even stand on you desk:

Watch new movies, travel, listen to music, read all sorts of books, visit museums, get out in nature, meet new people. You’ll be looking at some strange piece of art and all of a sudden the reason you’ve been fighting with your girlfriend will suddenly become clear.

Applying These Principles to Your Life

Do you feel like you’re waiting for your ship to come in? Do you feel like you are a helpless cog in a machine? Are you waiting for other people to change so that you can be happy? Do you check your email 100 times a day hoping that an email will show up that will change your life?

Stop placing your fate in someone else’s hands.

It’s time to take control of your life. Instead of being the ship, be the captain that controls the ship.

Having a bunch of loose ends in your life is heavy psychological baggage. It’s like an orchestra where everyone’s playing a different piece. The music would be terrible. You have to step in as the conductor and get each instrument on the same page, all working together to create something beautiful.

Start by making a list of the things in your life that you’re not happy with. Pick one of the problems and come up with a concrete plan of action on how you’re going to tackle it. This simply means sitting down with a notebook and not getting back up again until you’ve figured out a solution, a few concrete steps you can take to solve the problem. And then you follow-through with your plan with absolutely no excuses. If there’s really nothing you can do to change the situation, come up with a way that you can change your reaction to what’s happening. Don’t let other people dictate how you feel. Controlling your emotions and deciding how to feel on your own terms is one of the manliest and most satisfying accomplishments in life.

Once you successfully tackle one problem, your confidence in your problem-solving abilities will increase, your sense of being in control of your life will increase, your resiliency will be continually strengthened, and your confidence will be further enhanced. And the cycle will continue.

Your life is not fixed. It is malleable and it can be whatever you want it to be.

I know this is the part where people hope for an easy fix, but there’s no solution outside of simply being proactive. Doing instead of waiting. So go and do my friends. Go and do.

“Invictus” by William Ernest Henley

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate;
I am the captain of my soul.

Sources:

Stumbling on Happiness by Dr. Daniel Gilbert

Resiliency Advantage by Dr. Al Siebert

What Is Locus of Control by James Neill

DownloadThe Art of Manliness Free Man Cookbook
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“How we treat the dead says an awful lot about how we live. For the strong and able to serve the helpless dead, to honor frail remains, reaches deep inside us to something basic to humanity.” -Paul Gregory Alms

Funeral etiquette. Unless you’re preparing to attend a funeral, it’s a subject that almost never crosses your mind. As a younger person, funerals tend to be few and far between. It’s possible to make it into your 20s without ever attending one. The sporadic nature of funerals, and the general absence of discussion of the subject in our culture, makes it hard to learn what’s expected in terms of proper behavior. You just muddle through each funeral, hoping you’re doing the right thing, and then muddle through it again the next time.

But being a gentleman of tact, respect, and sensitivity is never more important than at the occasion of someone’s death. Instead of adding distractions and stress to the already grievously burdened, be a source of great comfort. People are at their most fragile, and your job as a man of honor is to be supportive and dignified.

Condolence Visits

If you are a family member or close friend of the family of the deceased, pay a visit to their home to express your sympathy and offer your help.

Before a wake, bring over a platter of cold cuts and rolls; the family will be hungry afterwards and not want to cook. Or bring over some pastries that they can eat on the morning of the funeral. You can also offer to watch the kiddos while they run some errands. It seems like the women folk often take on these responsibilities, but there’s no reason that the modern man can’t also lend a hand.

During your visits, it’s appropriate to offer your sympathy and share your fond memories of the deceased. There’s no need to stay too long; if it seems that you’re actually getting in the way, then drop off what you brought, chat for a few minutes and leave. Of course, if they’re alone and clearly need a listening ear, then stay longer.

If you don’t feel close enough to the deceased’s family to come to their home, wait until the wake to offer your personal condolences.

Flowers

Sending flowers is a traditional way to express your condolences. You can send flowers to the funeral home, to the church, or to the deceased’s family’s home. The card attached to the flowers should read, “With Deepest Sympathy” along with your name. If you’re sending them to the church itself for use in the service, include “For the funeral of ____” on the address. Some families ask for donations in lieu of flowers, and you should honor this request.

When it comes to sending flowers and different faith traditions, there are some considerations to be aware of:

• Some Protestant churches use only one flower arrangement-offered by the family-in the service.
• Do not send flowers to an Orthodox Jewish service. The policy amongst Reform and Conservative Jews varies.
• For a Catholic family, consider getting the family a mass card in lieu of flowers. You don’t have to be Catholic to get a mass card. You make a donation to the Church, and in turn, the Church promises to say prayers or a mass on behalf of the soul of the deceased. The mass card says when the mass will take place, and you can give the card to the deceased family. For fellow Catholics, purchasing a mass card is a gesture of faith, compassion, and solidarity. For non-Catholics, sending a mass card shows your understanding, respect, and thoughtfulness.

The Wake

A wake takes place before the actual funeral service and is usually held in the evening. If you cannot make it to the funeral, it is a good opportunity to come and support the deceased’s family. The wake may be held in someone’s home or at the funeral parlor. When you arrive, first offer your sympathy to the grieving family. This is the reason for the wake, really. It gives the family an opportunity to hear from family and loved ones when they’re prepared to deal with it and in the grieving mindset. They get it all over in a night instead of having people offering their condolences at work, at the gym, and at the grocery store-over and over, in places where they’d rather not have the emotion come rushing back and hit them like a ton of bricks.

Unless you’re close to the family, be sure to clearly introduce yourself to them and tell them how you know the deceased. Don’t leave them awkwardly trying to place who you are.

Don’t worry about not knowing what to say or being emotional. Neither eloquence nor stoicism is expected.

If the casket is present, take a moment to stand by it, saying a prayer or thinking of the deceased’s life. Then you may mingle with the other guests. You don’t have to stay too long-just long enough to make your presence felt and pay your respects. Be sure to sign the register with your name and address before you head out, as the family may wish to look it over later and/or send you a note of thanks.

The Funeral

Should You Come?

Unless the death notice that appears in the paper says that the funeral is private, or you hear that it is such, any of the deceased’s acquaintances, friends, co-workers, and family can attend the funeral.

If you’re the divorced husband of the deceased, you should almost always come. The same for the passing of an ex-girlfriend with whom you had a long or meaningful relationship. Unless the acrimony between you and your former love (or her family) approaches the level of the Hatfields and McCoys, and your presence would cause them further grief, or you hear specifically from the family that you are not welcome, attending the funeral is entirely appropriate. In times of grief, old differences are forgotten and all that matters is that you were once an important person in the deceased’s life. Be warm and supportive and don’t bring up any bad blood.

“Always go to the funeral” is an excellent motto for a man to adopt. Yes, going to funerals isn’t fun. They can be boring, somber, inconvenient and emotional affairs. You may feel awkward. But fun is the yardstick that boys use to make decisions. When you become a man, you do things because they’re right and good, and because your desire to serve others supersedes your own comfort.

It may be tempting to rationalize that the person is dead and won’t know if you’re there or not. But funerals are not for the dead, they are for the living. One of the few comforts available to the grieving is to see a full church, the pews packed with people who also care for and remember the deceased. There is power in that show of humanity. The family knows that attending a funeral is inconvenient, and that’s why they’ll never forget that you came anyway.

If you absolutely cannot come to the funeral, be sure to write the family of the deceased a sympathy note which includes your regret on not being able to make it.

Where to Sit

There’s kind of a progressive seating pattern with funerals; family sits in the first pews, followed by close friends, with acquaintances and co-workers farther back.

Dress Code

When we think of funerals, the first image that often leaps to mind is that of people dressed in black. While black is still the traditional color for funerals, this standard has loosened up in modern times to include other dark, conservative clothing. Still, the best way to go is donning a black suit, white shirt, conservative tie, and well-shined black shoes.

I know there are contingents of men who generally don’t see the point in dressing up and believe that real men dress however they want. But this is one time where no matter how rebellious you fancy yourself, you need to sack up and put on your best duds. Death is life’s most solemn occasion, and the inability to put aside comfort and personal preference to show your utmost respect for the end of a life is inexcusable.

Being a Pallbearer

Being a pallbearer is a traditionally male job. The family will typically choose six men to attend the casket (sometimes “honorary pallbearers” -who have a strictly symbolic role-are also chosen). The invitation to be a pallbearer is a great honor and one you cannot refuse except for the most serious of reasons. It’s like the somber flip side of being asked to be a groomsmen.

The job of the pallbearer was once a functional one; they were charged with carrying the coffin from the church to the cemetery. Now the role is almost entirely symbolic. The casket is typically set on a rolling cart, and you just put your hand on it as it rolls, only lifting it up when it is time to load and unload it from the hearse.

If you are chosen to be a pallbearer, come to funeral about 30 minutes early and find the funeral director. He or she will gives you instructions on what will be expected of you-where to gather, when to come into the church, and in which row to sit.

You should be dressed well at a funeral anyway, but if you are asked to be a pallbearer, make an extra effort to look presentable and respectful.

Perhaps the most famous historical pallbearer story involves Southern Civil War General Joseph E. Johnston. Johnston had surrendered to General Sherman at the end of the war and had been so impressed with that man’s magnanimity that he would not allow an unkind thing to be said about his former enemy for the rest of his life. When Sherman died, Johnston was asked to be a pallbearer in the General’s funeral. As is common for a public figure, Sherman’s funeral procession proceeded through the streets of New York City. Johnston walked alongside the casket with his hat in his hand. The freezing temperatures and rain caused fellow mourners to advise Johnston to return his hat to his head. Johnston replied, “If I were in his place and he standing here in mine, he would not put on his hat.” He soon came down with pneumonia and died several week’s later.

Be sure to check out this excellent article on the symbolic importance of being a pallbearer.

Additional Considerations

It should go without saying, but for the love of TR, turn off your cell phone during the funeral. Don’t be texting and checking your Blackberry during the service. This is the very last time this person will ask for your undivided attention. Also, having your Lil Wayne ringtone go off during the eulogy will brand you a cad for life.

Be civil, don’t come in late, don’t leave early. If you come with kids, and they cause a fuss, take em’ outside.

Driving in the Funeral Procession

Funeral processions are one of the few remaining outward signs of death in this society.

After the funeral, everyone will get in their cars and proceed as a group to the cemetery. The cars will follow behind the hearse. Turn on your headlights and emergency blinkers and closely follow the car in front of you. The procession will drive slower than the speed limit. If the procession starts through a light while it’s green and it turns red by the time you get to it, keep on going. State laws allow funeral processions to drive through red lights and stop signs.

As a normal driver, when you come upon a funeral procession, do your best to let them pass and stay together. Don’t try to cut into the procession. If safe, pull to the side of the road and let the line keep going. In the old days, men got out of their cars and doffed their hats while the procession passed. Probably too dangerous on our modern thoroughfares, but a nice thought.

Post Funeral Luncheon

Many families host a luncheon at their home after the graveside service. It’s a time to be a little more light hearted than is expected at the wake or funeral and share a laugh as you reminisce about the deceased.

Follow-Up

Perhaps the most important part of “funeral etiquette” is not to let your consideration for those in mourning be a one day affair. After all the hoopla of funeral planning is over, the grief and reality of the loss of a loved one will really set in for the family and friends of the deceased.

So don’t forget about them in the weeks and months after the funeral. Stop by and give them a call. Invite them out for social gatherings. They may say no for some time, but they’ll eventually reach the point where they’re ready to go back out, and they’ll be grateful that you kept thinking of them.

Call your friend or family member on the anniversary of their loved one’s death. They’ll appreciate that you still remember and continue to acknowledge their passing.

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We get a lot of emails from men lamenting the fact that they feel stuck in neutral and asking for advice. Many of these men have great aspirations, but that’s all they have. Aspirations. Many don’t have any results to show for all their ambitious goals in life. Some are on year seven of a four year degree, and others are stuck in a job that’s going nowhere. Maybe you know a man like this. Heck, maybe you feel like this.

Unfulfilled goals, of course, can lead to frustration, depression, and just a general dampening of your man spirit, which only makes it harder to get unstuck. When we dig a little deeper into the lives of these “stuck” men, a few commonalities appear.

First, there are the excuses. “The economy sucks.” “I’m not naturally smart/athletic/gifted.” “I don’t have enough time.” You get the idea.

The second thing we often see is that they’ve just been doing the bare minimum to coast along in life. A lot of them think “showing up” constitutes real effort, and that the chips of their dreams will magically fall into place.

We usually respond to these gents to stop with the excuses and start busting some ass. Some of these men take the advice to heart and get going. The others often counter with another excuse and ask for another way that doesn’t involve so much work

These guys will never understand a very important truth: the world belongs to hustlers.

Now, I’m not talking about hustling in the pulling-a-scam-on-the-naive-newbie sense. (Although it never hurts to have a little Fast Eddie swagger). I’m talking about the work-your-ass-off-while-your-competition-plays-Rock Band kind of hustling. Hustling=doing whatever you have to do, for however long as you have to do it, until you reach your goal.

Teddy Roosevelt Hustled and So Should You

“Things may come to those who wait…but only the things left by those who hustle.” - Abraham Lincoln

Looking at the men that I admire from history, they all have one thing in common: they were hustlers. Theodore Roosevelt accomplished an insane amount of work because he lived the strenuous life, i.e. hustled. Thomas Edison patented thousands of inventions and perfected the light bulb because he spent all day hustling. Frederick Douglass was an orator, diplomat, newspaper editor and author because he hustled. And pretty much every self-made man has the same story.

The interesting thing is a lot of these great men who succeeded through hustling weren’t born with natural talent or abilities. In fact, they were usually dealt a crummy hand from the beginning of their life. T.R. had a sickly disposition that weakened him as a child and plagued him the rest of his life. He had to hustle more than others to gain and maintain his vim and vigor.  Edison was smart, but there were plenty of other men out there who were smarter. He just worked harder than the naturally smart guys and then hired them to work for him. And Frederick Douglass was born a slave, lived in a time of extreme racism, and yet still beat the odds because he hustled.

Here’s the deal. Most of us are average. Average intelligence, average athleticism, and average looking. And most of us have had some setbacks in our life that can serve as a disadvantage. In short, we’re pretty much on the same playing field as millions and millions of people.  And yet despite our average minds and builds most of us believe deep down that we are destined for something extraordinary, that we’re special. But most men really aren’t. But not because they’re average. Because they won’t hustle to get what they want.

A man’s reasons for not hustling run the gamut from laziness to fear of failure. I think a lot of time men think, “I want what that guy has but I just don’t have his x,y, or z.” But while we don’t have any control over the number of natural talents and gifts we were born with, we do have complete control over how much we can hustle. You can’t control where you were born, how crappy or nice your parents were, or how homely or handsome you are. But nobody determines how hard you hustle but you. Wherever you are in life, you can hustle to get where you want to be.

My Personal Experience with Hustling

I can personally vouch for hustle’s ability to make up for average and even below average innate talent. Two instances in my life stick out where hard-work and hustling paid off despite my weaknesses.

The first was back in high school. Like many American boys, I played football in high school. Genetics, unfortunately, did not bless me with natural athleticism. Starting off in 9th grade I was slow, fat, not very coordinated, and weak. Needless to say, I didn’t get a lot of playing time early in my career. I was so bad that two coaches on the team made a bet with each other on who would be able to  turn me into a football player by my senior year. I didn’t discover this vote of confidence until I graduated.

But what I lacked in ability, I made up for with hustle. I volunteered to be on the scout team at practice as much as possible. I stayed after practices to work on my technique. I ate a strict diet in order to lose the fat and put on muscle. I busted butt in the weight room in order to get stronger and faster. I did anything and everything I could do to get better. It took three years, but I finally got to start a game my junior year. By my senior year I started every game and even earned some honors at the end of the season. Granted, I wasn’t a blue chipper, but that’s okay.

I remember after the season was over, one of the coaches that made the bet on me pulled me aside in the hallway and told me about his friendly wager. He then put his hands on my shoulders and said, “McKay, there are plenty of other guys on the team that have way more natural athletic ability than you. You’re not a naturally athletic guy, but what you lacked in talent, you made up for with hustle and heart. You earned your success.”

Two lessons hit home to me from that conversation. First, if you’re a coach/mentor/teacher/boss, take the time to pay a sincere compliment to whoever is under you. That conversation I had with my coach was a super confidence booster for my young, insecure self. And even though the conversation happened 10 years ago, it still has an impact on me.

Second lesson. Hustle works! It turned my un-athletic self into a decent football player.

Now hustle can’t turn you into Michael Jordan if you just don’t have the natural talent. But it will take you farther than you and those around you thought was possible.

The second instance of hustle paying off was my career in law school. I’m not naturally smart. Take a look at my Iowa Test of Basic Skills and every other standardized test I’ve taken since elementary school, and they’ll show how average I am. This was a source of frustration for me growing up because it seemed like all my friends were geniuses. I would study my butt off for a test, and they would waltz in on test day without even cracking the textbook, and still get a better grade than me. Frustrating.

Anyway, when I decided to go to law school, I made it a goal to graduate in the top 10 of my class. Pretty lofty goal for a guy who’d always ran in the middle of the pack.

I knew there were going to be some smart people in my class. Definitely smarter than me. My only chance at reaching my goal was to out-hustle everybody else. While other members of the incoming class spent their last summer of freedom hanging out and having fun, I was busting my butt reading study-guides and supplements on all my first year classes. Because your grade in a law class usually depends on a 3 hour essay exam, I studied and practiced how to write law essays that earned A’s. I continued hustling throughout my first semester. I had a study schedule that I stuck to like clockwork. I was at the law library from morning until night. I carried my law outlines and a deck of flash cards with me everywhere I went so I could study while I was waiting in line for lunch or walking to class. I went up to the library on weekends. I hustled as much as I could.

It was tiring, but in the end it paid off. When first semester grades came out, I was the number one student in my class. I was shocked. I had never been number one at anything in my academic career. I didn’t maintain the number one ranking throughout law school. But that’s because my second year I started the Art of Manliness. It required an incredible amount of work, so I couldn’t study quite as much. But I was hustling even more than before. I hustled with my classes. I hustled with my part-time job as a student rep with Westlaw, a legal research company. And I hustled with the Art of Manliness. And I wrote a book as well. I spent each day at the library from 9 in the morning until 9 at night with no breaks working on law school stuff. Then I would come home and spend several hours working on the blog and book. And then I would do it again the next day.

When I graduated from law school, I had become one of the top Westlaw reps in the country, grown AoM to thousands of subscribers, and wrote a book. And I graduated summa cum laude in the top ten of my class. I was tired. Really, really tired. But I accomplished what I set out to do. Because I hustled.

Turn Off the TV and Start Hustling

Now, I hope this doesn’t come off as some jackass, self-congratulatory, “I’m awesome!” thing. That’s not my intent at all. The truth is, I’m not that awesome. Like I said, I’m pretty average. Like most people, I have a lot to work on personally in order to become the man I want to be. My hope is that other men out there who feel stuck in an unfulfilling personal situation can see that it’s possible to do extraordinary things despite your averageness and even below averageness as long as you’re willing to hustle. And hustle hard.

If you’re tired of your crappy job, hustle your way into a better one. The economy is in the crapper and unemployment is dismal. You’re going to be competing with a lot of people for limited jobs. With all things being equal, the job is going to go to the man who hustles. Maybe you’ll need to go to night school in order to beef up your resume. Yeah, it’s going to be hard, especially if you have family, but it’s been done before. It’s just going to take some hustling.

If you’re tired of working for “the man,” start your own business. Most people that hear this bit of advice balk, because they think they have to quit their current job with all its security so they can devote themselves completely to building up their own business. But you can do both. Spend the day working your day job, but then moonlight with your own business until you’re established enough to quit your corporate job. You’ll have to hustle to get to this point, though. You’ll have to forgo a lot of sleep and spend your evenings and weekends working. No more 30 Rock or Monday Night Football or playing Command and Conquer 2.

If you want to do something more out there like become a professional blogger, writer, musician, ect. than you’re really going to need to hustle. Ignore the “get rich quickly with minimum hours” gurus out there. Take a page from a guy like Gary Vaynerchuk from Wine Library.tv. He recommends blogging way into the night, until your eyeballs bleed. That’s really what it takes. There are no shortcuts in life no matter what you dream of doing.

Whatever your goal is, you can accomplish it if you hustle. I know you can. I’ve seen it in my own life and in the lives of men around me.

The World Needs Men Who Hustle

Things are pretty rough right now. We’re facing some big problems that are going to take a lot of work to solve. We need men to step up and be leaders in our communities and families. We need more entrepreneurs to start small businesses and employees who bust butt to help get our economy going again. We need men who hustle.

So many aspects of our lives have speeded up from fast-food to the internet. So much of the world is now only a few keystrokes away. We don’t need to break a sweat to see what’s happening in China. Having the world at your fingertips is wonderful-what a privilege to live in this time. But we must vigilantly guard against “expectation-creep.” Expectation-creep is our ever increasing expectation that everything in life will come to us quicker and easier than before. That fortune and fame is only a google search away. While a lot of things in this world have changed, the need for hustle has not. The requisite brow sweat may be more figurative these days, but time, focus, dedication, and determination will remain the eternal principles of success.

So, here’s a challenge I’d like to issue to all of us: Let’s hustle more. I know if we all start hustling we can make things happen- in our own life and in the world around us. It won’t happen right away, but it will happen.

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This is the second part in a new series designed to help you boost your resiliency. For an introduction, see here.

Starting in 1967, Dr. Martin Seligman began a series of experiments involving 3 groups of dogs. The first group of dogs were given electric shocks, but were able to press a panel with their nose to make the shocks stop. The second group of dogs were given the shocks as well, but had no recourse to make them stop. The third group was the control and received no shocks.

The dogs in the first and third group recovered well from the experiment. But the dogs in the second group, those that had been helpless to stop the pain, developed symptoms similar to clinical depression.

In the second part of the experiment, the dogs were placed in an enclosed box separated by a low barrier over which they could see. When the shocks were administered, all the dogs had the opportunity to easily escape the pain by jumping over the partition, and this is what the dogs in the first and third group did. But the dogs in the second group, those which had previously learned that there was nothing they could do to escape the shocks, simply lay there whimpering and took it. They had come to believe that nothing they did mattered; Dr. Seligman called this behavior “learned helplessness.”

The experiment was repeated with other animals, babies, and adult humans, and the results were the same. Once subjects had been exposed to a situation over which they had no control, they would continue to feel helpless, even in situations where they did have control.

Learning Helplessness

You were an awesome boyfriend, but still got dumped or a wonderful husband who still got cheated on. You’ve always been a good person, but your father died when you were in college, while the jackasses out there still get to go on fishing trips with their dads. You put your heart and soul into your job, but got passed over for the promotion. You worked your butt off in law school, but you still can’t find a job.

When these kinds of things happen, you lose an important sense of control over your life; you stop believing you’re the captain of your destiny. You followed the rules, but you still got screwed. You feel disillusioned, and it becomes easy to develop a jaded, passive “What’s the point?” philosophy that informs all areas of your life.

But having such an experience doesn’t guarantee that you’ll develop “learned helplessness.”

During his research, Seligman noticed a curious phenomena; in all the experiments, a consistent ratio emerged: 2/3 of the test subjects which had experienced a situation over which they had no control developed “learned helplessness,” while the other third did not. They were able to see the helpless situation as an isolated event, and bounce back to proactively face future challenges.

Dr. Seligman wanted to know the secret of the 1/3 who felt helpless in one situation, but didn’t carry this feeling over to new challenges. Why did the exact same events produce such different responses? The answer turned out to be something called explanatory style.

Explaining Explanatory Style

Dr. Seligman discovered that the difference between those who were able to bounce back and those who were susceptible to learned helplessness was rooted in the different ways people explain the things that happen to them.

Seligman argues that our interpretation of events can be broken down into three categories:

• Personalization (internal vs. external)
• Pervasiveness (specific vs. universal)
• Permanence: (temporary vs. permanent).

The authors of The Resilience Factor helpfully rename these categories in an easier to remember way and explain their meaning:

• Me/Not Me
• Always/Not Always
• Everything/Not Everything:

“A ‘Me, Always, Everything’ person automatically, reflexively believes that he caused the problem (me), that it is lasting and unchangeable (always), and that it will undermine all aspects of his life (everything).When problems arise, a “Not Me, Not Always, Not Everything person believes that other people or circumstances caused the problem (not me), that it is fleeting and changeable (not always), and that it will not affect much of his life (not everything).”

For obvious reasons, studies have shown that those with a “Not Me, Not Always, Not Everything” explanatory style are the most optimistic, while those with a “Me, Always, Everything” explanatory style are prone to pessimism and depression. Once MAE’s fail at something, they are susceptible to experiencing “learned helplessness” for a long time and across many areas of their life.

The effect of your explanatory style not just on your resiliency but on your whole life cannot be overstated. Those with a pessimistic, “Me, Always, Everything” explanatory style are more prone to depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, and paralyzing inertia in the face of setbacks. Those with an optimistic, Not Me, Not Always, Not Everything style, on the other hand, experience improved health and happiness and significantly more success in the workplace, at school, and on the playing field.

An Example of Explanatory Style

Let’s examine one situation and see how a Me, Always, Everything man reacts compared to a Not Me, Not Always, Not Everything man.

Len gets fired from his job:

• If Len tends to a Me, Always, Everything thinking style then he might explain this event by saying, “I’m such an incompetent accountant. I was always out of my league at the office (Me). I’ll never be able to find another good job. (Always). My wife is probably going to leave me now. Man, my life is so screwed up. (Everything).”
• Now if Len has a Not Me, Not Always, Not Everything explanatory style, then he might explain this event by saying, “I got fired because there just isn’t very much work for me to do anymore, and the company is trying to be more efficient. (Not Me). The economy is really making holding a job difficult. But things will eventually turn around. (Not Always). The job wasn’t a good fit for me anyway; I really wasn’t using my true talents. At least I have a good wife at home to help me through this (Not Everything).”

Flexible Optimism

None of use the same explanatory style with everything in our lives. For instance, while optimistic people tend to use a Not Me, Not Always, Not Everything approach when dealing with bad events, they use the opposite style when good things happen. And vice versa for pessimistic people. And we can give into “learned helplessness” even when we know it’s not our fault-it’s not “Me” but it is “Always” and “Everything.” Ie., you worked your butt off in grad school but you can’t find a job because the job market is crap. It’s not your fault but you find yourself feeling like things will never get better and responding passively to everything in your life.

Also, while a “Me, Always, Everything” approach can cause a person significant problems, always using a “Not Me, Not Always, Not Everything” style can also be unhealthy. Because sometimes it is your fault. You can slough off all of your personal responsibility for failures to keep from getting depressed, but you’ll also keep yourself from ever being successful in life. You can admit it’s your fault without going farther and believing the problem is pervasive and permanent.

Finally, sometimes you’re right to be pessimistic. A bit of pessimism keeps you vigilant and prevents you from taking foolish risks. There’s no need to be blindly optimistic; Pollyanna was never an icon of manliness.

So the key is not to wear rose-colored glasses all the time, but to be what Seligman calls a “flexible optimist.” This means seeing the world accurately, reacting appropriately-using the right explanatory style at the right time-and not letting pessimism obscure the things you legitimately have going for you.

Relearning Your ABC’s

So the bad news is that having a pessimistic explanatory style can have a big negative impact on your life. The good news is that you can change your explanatory style for the better. And it’s as easy as ABC. How we encounter and react to life’s setbacks can be broken down like this:

A: Adversity. We face a setback or challenge.

B: Beliefs. Our thoughts, feelings, and interpretation of the setback. These beliefs lead to:

C: Consequences. How we act because of our beliefs about the setback.

So we can’t change the A. But we can change the B, which will lead to a new C. It’s not adversity itself that creates our reactions, but our beliefs about our adversity. If your beliefs have been leading to negative, non-resilient responses that are dragging you down, you have to short circuit this reaction by changing your beliefs about challenges.

Here’s an example of a pessimistic ABC in action:

Adversity: James frequents a coffee shop because he has a crush on the girl at the register. He finally works up the courage to ask her out. But instead of saying yes, she turns him down.

Beliefs: James thinks: “Geez, I’m such a freakin loser. I’m not attractive and don’t have anything to offer women. I’m never going to find a girlfriend.”

Consequences: James alternates between feeling depressed and angry for the next week. He can’t muster up the courage to ask another girl out for over a year.

James’ beliefs about what happened led to an overly negative reaction. To get a better outcome, he needs to change his beliefs by disputing them.

Disputing Your Beliefs

Just because you have certain beliefs, even if you have held them for as long as you can remember, that doesn’t make them true. False beliefs will limit your ability to get to the root of your problem and will limit the solutions you are able to come up with. If you have some beliefs that are sabotaging your resiliency, you need to dispute them, challenge them, and have an argument with yourself.

Dr. Seligman recommends judging your beliefs on 4 criteria. Let’s take a look at them and explore how James could have reacted more resiliently to the rejection he received:

1. Evidence. What are the real facts in the situation? Does the evidence support your belief or vanquish it?

• James could think, “I’m not a loser. I’m an Oxford scholar, I’ve done an Ironman, and I’ve got a great job at a prestigious law firm.”

2. Alternatives: Pessimists have a tendency to latch onto the most dire of explanations for a bad event, ignoring more positive alternate explanations.

• James could think, “Maybe she had a boyfriend and that’s why she said no. Maybe she just got out of a bad relationship. It might have nothing to do with me personally at all.”

3. Implications. When faced with a setback, pessimists have a tendency to jump to more and more catastrophic implications. But what are the chances of these implications really happening?

• James could think, “Just because a girl at a coffee shop turned me down doesn’t mean I’ll never have a girlfriend. I’ve had a girlfriend before and I’ll have one again.”

4. Usefulness. Just because a belief is true, doesn’t mean it’s useful. Clinging to useless beliefs keeps you from working on the things that you actually can change about yourself.

• James could think: “Yeah, I’m not that attractive. But I have a lot going for me otherwise. Girls like confidence, so what I really need to work on is coming off as more confident and self-assured. Thinking about my unattractiveness is sabotaging that.”

Whenever faced with an ABC, practice disputing your beliefs; have a knock down drag out fight with yourself and figure out what’s really going on. It may be beneficial to journal it, as writing can help you sort through why you’re feeling the way you are, and whether your beliefs are distorting what is really going on. It can also be helpful to have a spouse or trusted friend do the disputing for you. Tell them what you’re upset about and have them challenge you on your beliefs, asking you questions to figure out just how accurate your beliefs actually are.

While at first it will take some effort to stop in the midst of your negative reaction and work on disputing your beliefs, over time it will become natural and will help you respond appropriately, positively, proactively-and resiliently to your challenges.

Sources:

Learned Optimism by Dr. Martin E.P. Seligman

The Resilience Factor by Dr. Karen Reivich and Dr. Andrew Shatte

• Building Your Resiliency Part III: Taking Control of Your Life
• Building Your Resiliency-Part V: Recognizing and Utilizing Your Signature Strengths
• Building Your Resiliency Part IV: Iceberg Ahead!
• The Art Of Manliness Weekly Roundup: There Will Be Blood Edition
• The Weekly Round-Up

Here in the States, February is Black History Month. So we decided to commemorate the month with a special edition of our motivational posters series, featuring some of history’s most influential African-Americans and their powerful words of wisdom. An excellent way to start off your week! Enjoy.

• Motivational Posters: Winston Churchill Edition (Part I)
• Motivational Posters: Ernest Hemingway Edition
• Motivational Posters: Theodore Roosevelt Edition
• The Art of Manliness Weekly Roundup: Devil’s Den Edition
• The Art of Manliness Weekly Roundup: Indiana Jones IV Trailer Edition

One criticism that is occasionally leveled at this site is that we are “overly nostalgic.” The critic will say that we are promoting the false idea that everything was better in the past.

Now you won’t find anywhere on the entire site where we argue that everything was better in the “good old days.” Anyone who’s not a fan of the plague, slavery, or World Wars understands the fallacy of such an argument. What we do argue is that the last few generations, eager to break away from what was wrong with the past, ended up throwing out the baby with the bathwater. The mission of the Art of Manliness then is to let that which was wrong with the past remain in the past, while recovering the positive things that could benefit today’s men.

Still, there will be those that say even this sort of nostalgia is misplaced. They argue that every generation looks back on the past as a golden age, and that every era was really just as good and just as bad as every other, and if anything, we live in the best period in all history. Nostalgia seems to be taking a beating lately, so I’d like to mount a defense for it. I will argue that some ages were better than others, and that not only is nostalgia not misplaced, but that a healthy dose of it, even if you already think the world is a grand place, is the key to making things even better.

What Is Nostalgia?

When putting forth a thesis, it’s best to first define your terms. While I’m not a fan of citing Wikipedia as a source, it can be a good place to look for succinct definitions. Here’s the entry for nostalgia:

“The term nostalgia describes a longing for the past, often in idealized form. The word is a learned formation of a Greek compound, consisting of νόστος, nóstos, “returning home,” a Homeric word, and ἄλγος, álgos, “pain” or “ache.”

So let’s say that nostalgia is an aching for the past, a longing to return “home,” to a place or time where we feel things were better. So now let’s proceed.

Nostalgia as the Catalyst for Progress: The Example of the Renaissance

Some would argue that looking back and idealizing the past is unproductive, but history has shown that the opposite is true. This can be clearly seen in the origins of the Renaissance period. We have to get through some history to understand how this is so, so bear with me; I promise I have a point.

The Crises of the 14th Century

At the dawn of the 15th century, Europe was in a foul mood. The 1300s had been a tumultuous and ghastly period.

The English invaded France in 1337, setting off the Hundred Years War. But it was only one of the long, protracted wars of the 14th century, each leaving corpses strewn across bloody battlefields.

In addition to the sword, people were being mowed down by disease. The Black Death wiped out a mind-boggling 1/3 to 1/2 of the population. The plague was not only disastrous to people’s health but also decimated the economy, leading to a depression that would last nearly a century (and you thought the current recession was bad!).

The final blow to the people of the 14th century was a schism that developed in the Catholic Church. Between 1378 and 1417 there were 2, and for a time 3 different popes, each claiming to be the legitimate head of the Church. The popes excommunicated all the people under the opposing pope’s control, thus cutting them off from salvation.

There is much to be said about each of these three crises, but suffice it to say that at the end of the 14th century, the people of Europe (if they weren’t dead) were bitterly disillusioned and greatly pessimistic about the future. People’s faith in government, in the church, and in their fellow man was badly shaken. Apocalyptic thinking reigned and many believed they were living in the last days.

At this point Europeans could have given in to the hopelessness, resigning themselves to the idea that the world was going to hell in a hand-basket.

But instead, they decided to proactively and courageously meet the challenges of this crisis of confidence; they sought a revival, a rebirth and renewal of society. They idealistically believed that they could build a new world.

There have been moments like this at other times in history, most recently the 1960’s where idealistic hippies believed they could form a new world where peace and love ruled the day. That project was largely unsuccessful and in many ways led to the cultural excess and stagnation we are currently experiencing. But the result of the European project was one of the greatest cultural flourishings in world history: the Renaissance period. The difference? While the movement of the 1960’s was built on the idea of starting with a clean slate, the Renaissance was founded on….yup, you guessed it, nostalgia.

Nostalgia and the Birth of the Renaissance

The intellectuals of the 15th century came to see the Middle Ages as universally a time of disaster, decay, and corruption. This was not actually true; despite what you heard in your history class, the Dark Ages were not a complete wash. Yet they knew that many aspects of their society had declined and regressed and that their culture had stagnated.

These intellectuals began to look back on Ancient Greece and Rome as the golden age of world history, a great period of culture, joy, and learning. Those were the “good old days!” they said. With this new historical vision, they began to work out a plan to revive their society, using the golden age of antiquity as their template and inspiration.

Italian scholars began to rediscover and pore over texts from ancient Greek and Roman authors. As they studied the ancient sophists, they digested the Greek idea that truth was relative when it came to rhetoric, that if someone is convinced by an argument , then it is true for that person. As they thought through the idea that there could be different truths for different people, they began to apply it to the subject of history and discarded the idea that all history could fit under one overarching plot and could be measured by the same rubric. They concluded instead that every era was unique and different, each with its own characteristics and circumstances.

This led them to understand that bringing back the classical period wholesale would be impossible,  that you couldn’t simply replicate an entire age. While they still saw antiquity as a golden age, these new humanists realized that the ancient era would not match up exactly with theirs and instead decided to resurrect antiquity in a modified version, taking what was best about the Greek and Roman societies and adapting them to their age and circumstances.

The humanists’ vision of this remade world was to be something both ancient and modern. They looked back to the past while moving forward into the future. It was both historical and progressive, and this brilliant combination led to a profound cultural flowering in art, architecture, music, and writing, the cultural outpouring that many still consider second to none in world history. The “Dark Ages” were left behind and a new world was born.

Applying the Lessons of the Renaissance to Our Modern Age

So anyone see where I’m going with this? By romanticizing a period as a “golden age” and yet being flexible enough to understand that not everything from the past should be brought back, the Renaissance was born.

These days we’re in need of a Menaissance. And we can bring one about with a healthy dose of nostalgia-idealizing a golden age while modifying it to fit the modern age.

Like the late 14th century, we’ve woken up from a bad period, and many are feeling pretty depressed about the state of things. Now I know some people think the world is in total decline and some think we’re getting better and better-but bright minds can disagree on this issue, and I’m not particularly interested in that debate.

What I don’t think can be argued against is that cultures do rise and fall-you either believe that cultures rise and fall while the world as a whole gets better, or as the world as a whole gets worse. And no matter whether you think we’re currently going uphill or downhill, I believe that the ability to look back in history and take lessons from the cultural peaks of the past is essential to the continued progress and health of our society. While our problems might be small compared to the plague, our age does struggle with serious issues and our confidence is pretty dang shaky these days.

We’ve been in this kind of place many times in history, and we can either sink into cynicism and despair, or we can courageously rise to the challenges of our age by looking to the past and resurrecting what was best about it.

Moving Forward by Looking Back to Another Golden Age

While it’s true that every generation romanticizes the past, it’s not true that every age is equally romanticized. Who gets very nostalgic for the 70s and 80s (the pang you feel in your heart when you hear Journey notwithstanding)? When’s the last time you heard someone wax poetic for the 1910s or 1890s? And surely no one in the future will look back on the “oughts” with longing in their heart.

And there’s a reason for this! While some things, maybe most things, get better with the progression of time, some things, even if only a few things, get worse and become utterly lost. And the period we get nostalgic for typically represents that which we feel is missing in our current culture. It’s not as if we wish to return wholesale to that period, but that we wish to bring back those characteristics which were most salient about that time and which seem absent in ours. The intellectuals of the 15th century longed for the intellectualism, the philosophical reasoning, the political participation, the elevation of the human form and the rhetoric of classical antiquity, the things which had largely gone missing during the Middle Ages.

These days we “ache” for our last “golden age,” the 1940s and 50s. Postwar prosperity created a tide that lifted nearly every boat, a man could make a middle-class living with a blue collar job, corporations looked out for their employees (back then the ratio of CEO pay to the average worker was 24:1, it is now 275:1!), and people still believed in the importance of dressing well, having manners, and respecting others. It was a classy time. And it was a stylish time. On TV, Father Knew Best and on the silver screen Cary Grant was suave manliness incarnate. Look at any old photo from the time, and the men look back with confidence and purpose.

It was not necessarily a more moral time-there was still crime, babies born out of wedlock, and adultery galore. But there was an enormous difference in the celebration of ideals, in the idea that being good and doing good was, if not totally attainable, still a worthy pursuit. This is in contrast to our age, the Age of Irony and Cynicism, the motto of which may be, “Why bother?” The corrosive effect that cynicism has had on our culture and on men is so important that we’ll be devoting a whole post to it in the future, but for now all I can say is thank you Conan, for saying cynicism is your least favorite quality. It’s mine too (even though I struggle with it myself).

Now again, the idea is not that 40s and 50’s were perfect; they weren’t. No the idea is to take inspiration from the period in order to create a revival of modern society. The idea is to admit that it doesn’t make sense to be relativistic about everything, to be willing to admit that some things, even if only a few things, really were better in the past.

Three years ago, Tulsa unearthed a 1957 Belvedere that had been buried as a time capsule 5 decades before. The unearthing of the car was news around the world and people were fairly giddy with excitement to see this beautiful automobile reemerge from the ground (unfortunately, water had gotten into the vault and rusted it out). Tulsa buried another car that year, this one to be unearthed in another five decades. What car? A Dodge Prowler. A Dodge Prowler! Who will give a crap in 2057, will have an aching, a longing to see the Prowler lifted from the ground? Very few. Why? Because the cars of the 1950s were beauties and we haven’t produced anything since then that inspires the love and devotion that those long lines and beautiful styling did.

All of which is to say again, that some things in the past really were better. And if we want to move forward, what we should do is embrace and resurrect those things. Not necessarily to bring back cars with fins, of course. But things with quality. Things that were made to last and that you wanted to take care of.

This sturdy, lasting quality was not simply present in products. It was an a by-product of a culture that meant something, a culture with rules. I think Matt Higgins explains this best in his article, “The Comeback of Construction“:

“Mad Men” never forgets to show us that this culture was socially and behaviorally homogenized, racist, sexist, and severely limited opportunity for many. But it was something. A shared something hanging over everything, inflecting life by its mere presence, inescapably shaping you by your relationship to it. It was constructed and agreed upon and provided a stable narrative and worldview based on shared mythologies, dreams, and values.

And in the midst of our aggressively egalitarian politically correct efforts to erase society as our grandparents knew it, people are finding that they miss something about the good old days. The sophistication of a man in a suit and top hat, the elegance of a lady in an evening gown, the chivalry of a traditional date. The cultural codes that shaped our world for so long have been replaced by a one-size fits all code of jeans and whatever-you-want. A deconstructed, post-modern, supply-your-own meaning culture.

And it works. To an extent. Because it offers people ample freedom to do their own thing. But people are finding that they miss some of the benefits of construction. We are living in an age of overwhelming and disorienting freedom. Freedom is a great thing, but like music without measures there comes a point when the absence of structure leads to the dissolution of meaning. Music becomes noise.

And as a society we’re getting tired of the noise. Young people shaping culture today are making important efforts to bring back rhythm and meter from the void. Costumes, customs, ways of standing and moving and speaking, a return of construction is in progress all around us.”

Conclusion

An unhealthy nostalgia thinks everything was better in the past, and impedes cultural progress with constant hand wringing about the modern age. Healthy nostalgia is grateful for the modern advances that have made life better, but misses some things from the past and works to bring them back.

For the last few decades, every generation has wanted to reinvent the wheel, wiping the slate clean to make society new from scratch. But just as dangerous as hyper-nostalgia is hyper-presentism. This postmodern world sees only the current moment with no sense of history and of what came before. We’ve thrown out all the old rules but failed to make any new ones.

Scrapping the project every decade in favor of building on the latest societal fads and winds of change only results in a ramshackle shell of a culture, one which shivers in the wind until the next generation knocks it down and gets to work on its own shaky edifice.

Ideally, what should happen is that each generation should take what was best from the generation before it and add it as a brick in the foundation of the culture, discarding the dross and ever stacking together the lessons we’ve learned, the things that have really worked best. This way the culture becomes stronger and stronger over time.

So I say that I unapologetically get nostalgic for the postwar period and that I believe it can be a source of inspiration for us today. And I humbly submit that when you’re seeking a revival, a renewal, a real renaissance, looking back is the best way to move forward.

• Become a Renaissance Man Without Spending a Dime
• What Can Manly Men Expect of Women?
• In Praise of Sprezzatura: The Compleat Gentleman Giveaway
• Getting Over Your Glory Days
• Manliness: The Baby and the Bathwater

How did you do on the hardihood quiz?

Not so hot? Well join the club.

There are a lot of virtues lacking in the current generation of men, but I think an argument can be made that our lack of resiliency is the most critical.

And I say that as a man who has himself struggled to live this virtue.

In law school, I engaged in a pathetic routine each semester. After finishing my finals, I would initially feel pretty confident in how I did. But then I would sit and think about the exams in detail, remembering questions that I missed, issues that I failed to raise. My confidence would quickly evaporate, replaced by a sense of utter doom and despair. I would become convinced that I had gotten a C or even failed the test. I wouldn’t get my grades back for several weeks, but I would spend that time in a state my wife called “logging out,” which, as the name suggests, involved me laying on the couch like a depressed log.

When my grades would finally come in, I would be relieved to find I hadn’t flunked out, Kate would chide me for my irrational behavior, and I would swear that I wouldn’t waste my time doing that again. But come finals time the next semester, the The Log Man would make another appearance.

I was in serious need of some resiliency. And I still am. For reasons I’ll explain in future posts, law school really did a number on my resiliency, and I’ve had to go to work on regaining my hardihood. So I decided to do some research on the subject and share it with others who might be struggling to be resilient too.

What is Resiliency?

Studies have shown that boosting your resilience increases your resistance to stress and can greatly lower your chances of becoming depressed. It can even reduce the chances of getting PTSD. You may not be living in a war zone, but the trials of life, even the weight of many little setbacks, can leave a man feeling shell-shocked.

We all have times when life makes us want to crawl into a hole; resiliency is what helps us dust ourselves off and climb back into the saddle instead. But just what is resiliency, anyway?

Resiliency is a quality that helps us both act and react in appropriate and productive ways. Let’s take a look at both of these areas.

Resiliency as a Reactive Quality

Resiliency is the ability to face setbacks, failures, crises, and pain (both emotional and physical) with confidence and courage.

It is the ability to quickly bounce back from our trials and tragedies.

It’s the quality that keeps us from giving up, even when the going gets rough. It’s the ability to stick with something through thick and thin and the power to overcome the temptation to bail put when things stop being easy.

Resilient men don’t let their worry about the future, about things that may or may not come to pass keep them in a funk. And they don’t let mistakes from their past eat them up inside. Instead, they concentrate on the present and the things that they do have control over.

Resilient men take personal responsibility for their actions. They don’t whine and blames others. And yet they do not blame themselves so much that shame and guilt paralyze them from moving forward and trying again.

We see resiliency in the guy who gets cancer but remains optimistic and upbeat. In the man who gets a divorce, but doesn’t get bitter. In the guy who is fired from his prestigious job, but is able to make the best of becoming a stay-at-home dad. He’s the rock who keeps his composure when bad news hits and is able to take care of his loved ones when everything’s going to pot. He’s both strong and flexible.

Resiliency is a quality that not only helps with the big crises of life, but also allows you to weather the mundane daily annoyances that threaten to grind out your vitality. Resilient is the man who can face his annoying co-worker without anger, argue with his wife without exploding, and have his kid disappoint him without flipping out.

Resiliency as an Active Quality

While we most often think of resiliency as a quality that helps us react to challenges, resiliency is also essential to the proactive aspects of our lives. It is the virtue that allows us to face the world head on like daring adventurers, to strike out into the unknown like courageous explorers. It is the quality that enables us to take risks, to reach out to others, and to live deeply and powerfully.

Without resiliency we forever dwell on our setbacks instead of making progress in our lives. The hurt from our past disappointments (or even the hurt we imagine could befall us) is so debilitating that we cannot muster up the courage and desire to take chances and seize opportunities; we’re afraid of experiencing pain and embarrassment. Without resiliency we become content to play it small; we hide from the world, keeping ourselves from hurt but also removing our chances of joy, excitement, and satisfaction. The fear of trying something and failing looms large in our minds. Yet we ignore the even bigger failure-the failure to make an attempt, to try and to risk.

Every man wants to know the secret of the man who is able to walk up to any woman and strike up a conversation. Who can saunter into his boss’ office and ask for a raise. Who takes the trip everyone else says is crazy. Their secret is resilience. They’ve got a thick skin; they don’t walk around feeling like the next disappointment might be a fatal blow, a wound to their ego and happiness that will take forever to recover from. They’re not crippled by fear of embarrassment. They know that if they get rejected, if things don’t work out, they’ll hardly miss a beat; they know they won’t shrivel up like a daisy; they’ll simply take the setback in stride and keep on truckin. They don’t shrink from forming relationships in fear of the potential pain of a break-up; they know that pain is a possibility but they are confident in their ability to manage it and move on.

Do you want to be a man that lives with gusto, seeing the world as your oyster instead of a minefield? Well, good news: It’s possible for every man to develop iron-clad resiliency.

While some men may have been born more resilient than others, or had parents that helped them develop this quality, it, like all virtues, is like a muscle that can be strengthened by regular exercise.

Building resiliency among men is such a vital and important topic, that we decided to turn it into a multi-part series. During the next several weeks, we’ll be giving you the knowledge and skills necessary to boost your resiliency. Stay tuned.

• Building Your Resiliency-Part V: Recognizing and Utilizing Your Signature Strengths
• Boosting Your Resiliency-Part 2: Avoiding Learned Helplessness and Changing Your Explanatory Style
• Building Your Resiliency Part IV: Iceberg Ahead!
• Building Your Resiliency Part III: Taking Control of Your Life
• Manvotional: Boys Wanted

“In this fraternity…the world was divided into those that had it and those who did not. This quality, this it, was never named, however, nor was it talked about in any way. As to just what this ineffable quality was…well, it obviously involved bravery. But it was not bravery in the simple sense of being willing to risk your life. The idea seemed to be that any fool could do that…No, the idea here (in the all enclosing fraternity) seemed to be that a man should have the ability to go up in a hurtling piece of machinery and put his hide on the line and then have the moxie, the reflexes, the experience, the coolness, to pull it back in the last yawning moment-and then to go up again the next day, and the next day, and every next day, even if the series should be infinite-and, ultimately, in its best expression, do so in a cause that means something to thousands, to a people, to a nation, to humanity, to God. Nor was there a test to show whether or not a pilot had this righteous quality. There was instead, a seemingly infinite series of tests. A career in flying was like climbing one of those ancient Babylonian pyramids made up of a dizzy progression of steps and ledges, a ziggurat, a pyramid extraordinarily high and steep; and the idea was to prove at every foot of the way up that pyramid that you were one of the elected and anointed ones who had the right stuff and could move higher and higher and even-ultimately, God willing, one day-that you might be able to join that special few at the very top, that elite who had the capacity to bring tears to men’s eyes, the very Brotherhood of the right stuff indeed.” Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff

Tom Wolfe believed Chuck Yeager, test pilot extraordinaire and breaker of the sound barrier, to be the “most righteous of all the possessors of the right stuff.”

But Yeager did not like the phrase himself. To him it implied that a man’s skill in the cockpit was a matter of luck-you were either born with it or you weren’t.

But Chuck knew better. He hardly discounted the luck factor in a pilot’s career, but he understood, understood better than perhaps any pilot of the time, that the “right stuff” was really attained through hard work, focus, and experience. It was not some ineffable quality that allowed him to rise from buck private to brigadier general, that allowed him to clock 10,000 flying hours in 180 different aircraft, which helped him break the speed of sound. No, it was his passion and his grit, his all-consuming love for flying and his desire to understand everything about his aircraft “down to the smallest bolt.”

There are different kinds of manliness. There is the manliness that is quiet and subtle, that you gain an appreciation for slowly, as you spend year after year with a man. And then there is the kind of manliness that hits you upside the head like a 2X4. Which bowls you over from 40 yards away. Chuck Yeager had the latter. His life embodied the various qualities of manliness writ large.

He lived for risk and excitement and could remain as cool as a cucumber in the face of it. He did not relish killing, but found the speed and strategy of dog-fighting thrilling. He loved the structure of the military and yet from time to time would brazenly break its rules. His rebellion was rarely of the serious or sullen variety but that of a natural-born prankster who would go to great lengths for a laugh. He was fiercely competitive but never petty. He was not one for navel-gazing, but focused on getting the job done and doing it right.

He was simply the best at what he did. A flying legend. He was the first Army Air Corps pilot to become an ace in a single mission (shooting down 5 planes in one run), and would go on to become a double ace. He was selected at age 24 to attempt to break the sound barrier, leaving dozens of more senior pilots pilots shocked and jealous. But the selection paid off when he became the first to fly faster than the speed of sound.

When in-flight refueling was instituted, units of planes struggled to cross the Atlantic without errors and pilots aborting and ditching their planes in the ocean. Yeager was the first to execute a flawless trans-Atlantic deployment of a jet fighter squadron in the history of the Tactical Air Command.

And he was unsurprisingly the youngest person to be inducted into Aviation Hall of Fame.

And he did it all with the kind of style and grace under pressure that made it look easy and gave his rivals fits.

Chuck Yeager’s Lessons in Manliness

“But, like Dad, I had certain standards I lived by. Whatever I did, I determined to do the best I could at it. I was prideful about keeping my word and finishing what I started. That’s how I was raised. I never got into fights, but no one pushed me around, either.” -Chuck Yeager

Do Your Best with What You’ve Got

Chuck Yeager was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He grew up in a small town in West Virginia as 1 of 5 children. His family lived for a time in a 3 room house in which Chuck and his brother slept in the living room on a pull-out couch. His mom cooked cornmeal mush for breakfast, with the leftovers from that meal being fried up and served for dinner. The idea of Chuck going to college was never even considered.

Instead, when the boy turned 18, he joined the US Army Air Corps as an airplane mechanic. When the opportunity came up, he applied to become a “Flying Sargent.” Once he was accepted, he found himself in a position he would remain in his whole career-the odd man out. Almost all the other men were college graduates who would become commissioned officers.

At first Yeager was intimidated by his well-educated peers, worried he would not be able to keep up. But in the air the men were “all created equal,” and Yeager’s humble background gave him skills that compensated for his lack of a degree and quickly moved him to the head of the pack.

Everyone agrees that one of the qualities that made Yeager into a legendary pilot was his exceptional eyes. With 20/10 vision, he could see tiny specks 50 miles away from the cockpit. He saw the enemy coming long before anyone else did.

He sharpened those eyes as a boy in West Virginia. He knew how to shoot a .22 rifle by the time he was six. He would get up at dawn before school, go out in the woods, kill 3-4 squirrels, and then skin them and leave them in a bucket of water for his mom to cook up for dinner. Calm and steady, he was a real crack shot, and learned to hone in on the smallest things moving in the brush; he once shot a deer at 600 yards.

From his dad, he picked up a love and aptitude for engineering and mechanical skills. His father was a natural gas driller and would take Chuck out into the field to fix machinery and shoot wells. His father also taught him how to take apart and put back together an engine. This hands-on training gave Yeager a passion for understanding absolutely everything about how planes worked and a leg up on the competition-

Know Your Job Inside and Out

Being a test pilot was a dangerous and deadly career; little mistakes and oversights left dozens of pilots dead. There was no room for error.

Test planes were trailed by chase planes that radioed information to the pilot. But Chuck knew radio could stop working and that a situation could arise in which he’d have to make a lightning fast decision; waiting for advice could be deadly.

So Yeager wanted to know everything he could about every single plane he flew. He pored over the manual, studied the plane’s parts, and asked question after question of the flight engineers. When something went wrong at 800 mph, Yeager knew how to address it and what decision to make. He became one with the machine; he knew his plane like a cowboy knows his horse:

“Everything about airplanes interested me: how they flew, what each could or couldn’t do and why. As much as I flew, I was always learning something new, whether it was a switch on the instrument panel I hadn’t noticed, or a handling characteristic of the aircraft in weather conditions I hadn’t experienced. Unlike many pilots, I really wanted to learn the various systems of aircraft…it was a terrific advantage for me when something went wrong at 20,000 feet. Knowing machinery like I did, and having a knowledgeable feel for it, I knew how to cope with practically any problem. I knew what was serious and manageable. All pilots take chances from time to time, but knowing-not guessing-about what you can risk is often the critical difference between getting away with it or drilling a fifty-foot hole in mother earth.” -Chuck Yeager

Be Smooth

“What a character. There was just no one else like him.” -Maj. Gen. Fred J. Ascani

Soon after Yeager became a pilot in the Army Air Corps, he was sent to Oroville, CA for training. While stationed there, he sauntered over to the local USO office and struck up a conversation with 18 year old Glennis Dickhouse, the organization’s social director. New in town, Chuck and the other boys were in need of some entertainment, so Yeager asked Glennis to organize a USO dance for the squadron that night. Greatly annoyed with this stranger’s bold request, she asked him, “You expect me to whip up a dance and find thirty girls on three hours notice?” He replied, “No, you’ll only need to come up with twenty-nine, because I want to take you.” Sha-zam!

Yeager would soon be sent to fight the war overseas. But he named his plane “Glamorous Glennis” and wrote home to that USO gal twice a week. Glennis and Chuck would be hitched for 45 years.

Leave No Man Behind

After flying 18 missions in the war, Chuck Yeager was shot down over German-occupied France. Yeager studied the silk map that had been sown into his flight jacket and plotted an escape route over the Pyrenees mountains and into Spain.

Wounded with shrapnel, alone in an area riddled with Germans, Yeager kept a .45 gripped in his hand and slept under his parachute in the cold and rain until he was picked up by the French Resistance.

They kept him safe while the snow in the Pyrenees melted (for his part, Yeager helped them make bombs for their covert ops). When it was finally time for him to make his escape over the mountains, he was given maps and supplies and dropped off at night in the middle of nowhere. Together with other downed pilots, Yeager hiked up and over mountains, slogging through snow that was up to his knees. Ambushed along the way, the fellow pilot he was paired with was shot in the knee by a German. Only a tendon was keeping the pilot’s leg on, and Yeager sliced through it and tied off the wound.

All day and all night, in the dark, in the cold, and in the snow, Yeager dragged the wounded man up an imposing mountain. Part of him wished the man would die, but he didn’t, and Yeager would not leave him behind. Every muscle in his body was burning, and he was nearly delirious with fatigue. But he pushed ever up the mountain with the man in tow. The two pilots made it to a small village in Spain; the legless man lived because of Yeager’s Herculean effort, and Chuck was awarded the Bronze Star.

Finish What You Start

When Yeager was brought back to Leiston, England, he became the first evadee to make it safely back to Allied lines.

But the military had a rule that any man who made it back had to be sent back home to the States. They were worried that a returned pilot could be shot down again and tortured by Germans for information about the French underground.

But Chuck Yeager insisted that he be allowed to finish what he had started. The other men in his unit thought he was out of his mind, but he was determined to stay at the cold, dark base in England. Why? He felt he owed it to the military; he had not yet carried out his duty. He wanted to “make worthwhile all those hard and expensive months of combat training” the Air Corps had invested in him. He made his request to his commanding officer who told him that the rule was unchangeable and that there was nothing that could be done. But Yeager kept appealing his case up the line, all the way up until he spoke with the Supreme Allied Commander himself, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Eisenhower spoke to the War Department and granted him special permission to stay.

Follow Your Passion

“Yeager was the best. Period. No one matched his skill or courage or, I might add, his capacity to raise hell and have fun.” -Bud Anderson, leading ace of the 363rd Squadron

Chuck Yeager was good at what he did because he loved his job. He lived and breathed flying. His success followed naturally from his passion. In his own words:

“If you love the hell out of what you’re doing, you’re usually pretty good at it, and you wind up making your own breaks.”

“I never did understand how a pilot could walk by a parked airplane and not want to crawl in the cockpit and fly off. I could not honestly claim to be the best pilot, because as good as you think you are, there is always somebody who is probably better. But I doubt whether there were many who loved to fly as much as I did. Nobody logged more flying time.”

“I wasn’t a deep, sophisticated person, but I lived by a basic principle: I did only what I enjoyed. I wouldn’t let anyone derail me by promises of power or money into doing things that weren’t interesting to me. That kept me real and honest. Job titles didn’t mean diddly. Assistant Maintenance Officer might not be a title that would really impress Aunt Maude, but if it meant that I could fly more than anyone else, I’d stick with it for as long as I could.”

Push on Through

“He was now involved in what was surely the grimmest and grandest gamble of manhood.” -Tom Wolfe

Some thought the sound barrier was like a brick wall in the sky, and that whoever reached Mach 1 would disintegrate upon “impact.” Other pilots had approached it but backed down from fear. As they closed in on the sound barrier, the plane began to violently shake, and it truly felt as if going any faster would rip the plane to pieces. It was at that point that pilots would get scared and slow it down. But Yeager bit the bullet and pushed on through, finding that once you “broke” the barrier, the shaking stopped and the ride smoothed out. You just had to keep going. How often is life just like that?

Be Tough

Two days before he broke the sound barrier, Yeager and his wife were racing horses in the desert at night. Chuck crashed into a gate, got thrown from his horse and broke two of his ribs. Instead of going to the base doctor, who he feared would scratch his upcoming flight, he went to a doctor in a nearby town. The doc told him to refrain from any physical activity for 2 weeks and to keep his right arm immobilized. That was Monday.

Chuck decided to go forward with the flight scheduled for the next day, telling only his flight engineer, Jack Ridley, about his injury. They decided that handling most of the controls in the X-1 wouldn’t be too bad, but that closing the cockpit door would pose a problem.

The X-1, or the “Orange Beast” as Chuck called it, did not take off on its own but was instead attached to the bottom of a B-29 and then dropped from the sky like a bomb. When it was time for the drop, Chuck would climb down a ladder at 12,000 feet and get into the cockpit. Once Chuck was inside the Orange Beast, Ridley would come down and close the door behind Yeager, who then had to reach a handle with his right arm to lock the door.

His broken ribs now made this move impossible. So he and Ridley rigged a broomstick in the handle to allow Yeager to use both arms to close it.

When Tuesday arrived, Yeager’s right arm felt useless, but he climbed in the cockpit, took off, and pushed the plane so hard he broke the sound barrier.

Experience Matters More Than Luck

“There is no such thing as a natural born pilot. Whatever my aptitudes or talents, becoming a proficient pilot was hard work, really a lifetime’s learning experience. For the best pilots, flying is an obsession, the one thing in life they must do continually. The best pilots fly more than the others; that’s why they’re the best. Experience is everything. The eagerness to learn how and why every piece of equipment works is everything. And luck is everything, too.” -Chuck Yeager

By all counts, Chuck Yeager was a lucky guy. He was born at just the right time to take part in the “golden age of flying” in the 1950s. Yeager bridged two eras-the subsonic and the supersonic. He got to test nearly all the prototypes that would develop into modern aircraft. As Yeager put it, “The old air force was being scrapped, and a new air force was being born right on our doorstep.”

It was a time before planes became so automated that a pilot could overshoot an airport for an hour without noticing. The pilot was in control of every detail, and was more like a matador than a driver.

And when that bull was charging at him, it was experience, not luck that saved Yeager’s hide. That experience came particularly in handy while he was testing the X-1A . On this next generation of the X-1, the canopy was bolted into place; there was no door and no ejection seat. If there was a fire or a malfunction, the pilot was trapped inside.

While out on a test run, when Yeager hit a new speed record-2.4 Mach- the plane went haywire, ferociously rolling, pitching, and spinning towards the earth like a frisbee. The plane fell 51,000 feet in 51 seconds. Yeager was thrown around like rag doll in the cockpit, and his helmeted head cracked the canopy. His pressure suit inflated, the face plate of his helmet fogged over, and Yeager felt like he was a goner. But with less than a minute before impact, Yeager flipped the X-1A into a normal spin, evened it out, and landed battered but alive. Yeager said of the experience:

“To survive took everything I knew and had ever experienced in a cockpit, so that maybe one hour less flying time could have been the difference between drilling a hole or landing safely. I saved myself from sheer instinct based on hundreds of previous spin-tests. Experienced at spinning down to earth, I was less disoriented than others who had done it many fewer times, and was more likely to make the right moves to save myself.”

At 86 years old, Chuck Yeager is still going strong, hunting, fishing, giving speeches and of course, flying. He doesn’t believe in slowing down in retirement. At age 62, he had this to say:

“You do what you can for as long as you can, and when you finally can’t, you do the next best thing. You back up but you don’t give up…I know too many people who have erected barriers, real brick walls, just because they have gray hair, and prematurely cut off themselves from lifelong enjoyments by thinking, ‘I’m too old to do this or that-that’s for younger people.’ Living to a ripe old age is not an end in itself; the trick is to enjoy the years remaining. And unlike flying, learning how to take pleasure from living can’t be taught. Unfortunately, many people do not consider fun an important item on their daily agenda. For me, that was always high priority in whatever I was doing…

I’m definitely not a rocking-chair type. I can’t sit around, watch television, get fat, and fade out. And there’s so much more I want to do; I’ve never lost my curiosity about things that interest me…I haven’t yet done everything, but by the time I’m finished, I won’t have missed much. If I auger in tomorrow, it won’t be with a frown on my face. I’ve had a ball.”

Sources:

The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe

Chuck Yeager: an Autobiography

• So You Want My Job: Air Force Pilot
• Building Your Resiliency Part III: Taking Control of Your Life
• So You Want My Job: Rocket Scientist
• So You Want My Job: Road Test Driver
• Lessons in Manliness: Jimmy Stewart