Elite Skills Towards An Elite Life

Excellence, mastery, living better. These are the pursuits of the uncommon man. Athletic basics are a good place to start. Yes, we can work in strength exercises, push ups and handstand, push ups, squats. But it's also good to be able to increase the complexity that we're able to work with. Whatever pursuit of athletic complexity that you engage with, it's going to help your life. But what else can we do with our lives? We're so dominated by the pursuit of money, the pursuit of fulfilling our material needs, that we often feel like we don't have time to get after things that are more difficult. What are we really meant to be doing? What did those who worked out generational success, where food was looked after, there was already a house, there were already animals. What did they do? Well, they pursued the arts. They made beautiful art, painting and sculptures and that sort of art, but also music. They knew multiple languages and they studied the thoughts and ideas of the great minds of the past. And it's said that Leonardo da Vinci would take anyone on in a challenge of strength. Said that he had grip apparatus where anyone could walk in and challenge him at any time and he would back himself to be the winner. You can still see the works of Leonardo da Vinci on display in Milan. That time of the Florentines yielded beautiful cathedrals, things that we still behold today. Regardless of who these people were and what their values were, they were able to produce excellent things. Surely that's what we should be doing. That's the vision, is create the opportunity for men young and old to pursue excellence and pass that on. Now, why is it that it's such a rare thing to pursue mastery, to pursue excellence across multiple endeavors? This is the concept of the Renaissance man. This is the concept of the polymath. The polyglot speaks multiple languages. The polymath has excellent knowledge across many areas. Now, to get to that status, you probably need to travel. If we look through history, if we look at the times of the ancient Greeks and Plato, it's known that many of the greatest minds of that time traveled deep into the Atlantic Ocean. Many say that they actually went to the Americas and returned. They say that in Uruguay there have been swords found from those times. So you have to travel. It's an encouragement of all men that I work with. Make sure you have a passport. But the modern form of travel is another form of toxicity. It's another form of normalizing, underachievement. Why is it that we've normalized underachievement to such an extent? Surely if our technology is getting better. We should be doing things now that we couldn't do before. Culturally, it's clear that we're declining. Where once all the food was healthy, everything was organic, now it has toxicity in it. We're polluting the water that we're drinking, we're putting all kinds of stuff in it. What if there was a better way? What if there was a place where you could get after it in life without that now for it to be its best. The concept of what happened there in Florence, it was multi generational. It's known who the mentors were of Da Vinci going back multiple generations, because it took multiple generations of extreme excellence to be able to produce a man like Da Vinci. He didn't make himself like that. No one is a self made man. We're all a product of the culture that we grow up in. You put anyone in the jungle and yeah, if you feed them, then they'll survive. But they're not going to be coming up with the great works. They're not going to be composing music that's beautiful, that brings wonder to the mind. And so life is meant to be an expression of this art of excellence, religious. And being religious is putting forth excellence in all that you do. Sacrilegious is to waste your potential. Surely if we've been gifted with infinite potential, then the more of it that we choose to explore, the better we're living. Some of it starts with these basic physical abilities. What can you do with your body? The yogis were able to put themselves into all sorts of different positions. And they also did feats like putting pins through their body and burning their skin, or putting fire and not burning. They buried themselves underground. They mastered the physical through the mind. I don't know how far we're going to get to go with this with a group of predominantly Western men exploring our potential. But the fun of it is in taking that on and seeing what happens over years, decades. To get to this fun stuff, there's probably a need to solve some basic material goals. We need to be able to feed ourselves, need to be able to look after our young. But mostly what's needed is a transition in values and it's a transition from competitive to cooperative as well. It's not that everyone's going to cooperate with each other and you learn nothing and be happy that some far off body will administer everything. That's one vision for the future, that there's a central governance that decides what everybody gets to do. But on a smaller scale, cooperative living and supporting the growth of Others businesses and supporting the growth of the children of others is the only way that we can really make big progress is to specialize and then to share the best of what we've learned. Now, on what sort of scale this works best? Does it work best with groups of 50? Does it work best with groups of 150? I don't know. But we need specialists in multiple areas and we need cooperation between them because you can't be studying the best of what's happening in AI and the best of what's happening in physical training and the best of what's happening in language learning and the best of what's happening in crypto. No one can be the expert in any of these things alone. So by definition, if you want to be uncommonly successful in the modern age, it must be done through collaboration, through cooperation. The common man can't comprehend that the common man thinks it's him versus the world and he's going to do it on his own and that no one really wants to cooperate. And that's the plight of the common man. He can never get far because he can't learn and he doesn't really want to learn. And that's the decision. But if we do decide to learn, and we do decide, okay, well, I want to solve something, so I've got money, so I've solved that. It shouldn't take more than a year to get to a position where, okay, the money thing, solved, making $10,000 a year, solved. But to be able to sustain that, to be able to make that a long term thing, there probably needs to be a local physical economy as well. Because there's no guarantees that this digital economy that we're all moving into. I love online business and I love being part of the digital economy and being able to travel the world and having geographically independent income. But at the moment I'm very vulnerable to that because if someone decides, okay, we're going to shut down certain type of accounts, we're going to shut down a certain type of business account or businesses, if things change in certain countries, then that opportunity is lost. And so we need to also have a physical, local economy that is robust and has strength. That's very, very, very difficult to do in the Western world because the Western world is being taken apart. So we need to get creative, but we need the individuals to be on a path of development, of understanding psychology, understanding themselves, physical development, discipline. We all have potential, but most have not been encouraged to explore that potential simply being disciplined. I'm disciplined. I get push ups Every day I go in ice baths. You're not addressing anything serious with that. It's a reasonable foundation. Yeah, okay. I can persist through pain, I can show that I can be consistent. These are good foundations. But there's a much bigger conversation to be had on the side. Other side of that. Okay, well, I've solved the financial thing. 12 months. Solve the financial thing and then what are we going to do? How do we express excellence and beauty in our actions every day? This is the challenge. When you return to the arts, the smarter is the last part of the mars first thing is mastermind. Get around others who've decided to live excellently athletic. In the second part, prove that you can be consistent physically, have an excellent physique, show that you're disciplined, be like the ancient Greeks, athletically, you choose your area of mastery, but master something. Be great, solve the richer thing, have a food supply, local food supply sorted, have financial capacity, have stores of wealth, have various forms of income. It's not that difficult. And then the smarter thing is the big one. How do we get deeper into the consciousness? How do we get deeper into the psyche? How do we produce beautiful works of art, things that will last for centuries, for millennia. The reason the cathedrals are so magnificent, the reason classical music is so magnificent, the reason the art of that time is so magnificent is because they were transcribing, they were living religiously, they were living beauty into an ageless form, something that would be retained. And you look at the art, you look at the music, you look at the entertainment of the modern time, which really means to take your attention away from yourself and you can see that they're clearly destructive forces. Now, whoever's deciding to put those destructive forces out, that's a different conversation and it doesn't really matter that much. But you don't have to listen to them, you don't have to listen to the devil's music, you don't have to engage in building more of the same living in those locations, squashing people together in little boxes. You can choose to, that's fine, but there's another path and the other path is worth exploring. So in the comments, love to hear from you. What are you doing in terms of mastermind? Are you around people who are doing things better than you? Interesting people getting after it, who have a pursuing athletic richer and smarter. If you're not, you cannot achieve anything like what you could achieve if you were around the people with those values who are getting after things athletic. What's the current challenge? What's next? But know that it's a stepping stone. Don't get overly wrapped up in it. Solve the financial thing. It's very important to solve the financial thing. And it will initiate you into greatness itself. The process of building a business, of being able to bring a service to the market. You join the mercantile class, you leave the slave class, or you leave the. The worker class who are unable to bring an idea to market. It doesn't make them bad people who just haven't been through that stage of development. These are levels of development. Stages of development. And then the smarter thing. Where do we get to when we've solved those basics? And we'll always continue to work on each of them, but this is going to be the fun stuff. So we need to pursue that art. What is your art? Music, languages, sculpture, painting, books. Create. If your life doesn't look like a work of art, if you can't express art through your physicality, through your business, something's missing. Challenge you to find that something, to pursue that something for the rest of your days. Most men won't. Are you like most men?