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13 Tenets of the Warrior Mindset

Be FEARLESS and DESIRELESS. Just Becoming. This is the condition of a warrior going into battle with perfect courage. That’s life in movement.”

–Joseph Campbell, father of the Hero’s Journey

Over the last few years, I’ve had the great pleasure to work with David DiFrancesco — the Living Warrior — who has become a great mentor to me.

David is the author of The Warrior Way and has spent his career dedicated to releasing the warrior inside every man.

After witnessing the death of a police officer as a child, David understood that a life well-lived is one with purpose. He dedicated himself to seeing that all men have the opportunity to discover and live their own purpose through his work — work that guides men through accepting their fears and inner demons and moving forward with them, rather than being pulled into inaction by them.

Coach, author, speaker and mentor, David leads men through physical and mental training designed to strip away the lies and myths they hide behind; coming through the fire of battle into the strong, powerful, masculine hero all men are called to be.

After over 30 years working with Navy SEALS, as a gym owner and mental toughness trainer, here are the top things David says men need to hear. A succinct mastercourse on the Way of the Living Warrior:

1. You are owed nothing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvrm5chs9Zw

Life is not fair, you make your life a success through hard work, not because you’ve earned some imagined right to it. Similarly, you are not entitled to be loved, respected, or anything else you’ve convinced yourself is your entitlement simply because you exist and are being a well-behaved, well intentioned, good boy. You and you alone are responsible for making sure your needs are met.

2. Positive thinking will get you nowhere

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBWtiEjRwwE

Determination and perseverance wins the day. Determination takes the place of dreaming. Willpower takes you through the work. Self-discipline takes you through the pain (when you no longer feel like doing the work).

3. We are not all equal or capable

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJPXCMVMuWg

…but we all are flawed and limited.

4. Failure is part of the process of improvement

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uA0CeAm8_nI

Expect failure, but don’t accept it. You must be prepared for a lengthy time of poor or mediocre performance before you can become world-class.

5. You need more haters in your life, not supporters

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTz8g7Szieg

6. Embrace the suck

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-fR5CCQq5s

Life is struggle. Don’t put your effort into living a life without pain, instead choose your struggles and work on raising your pain threshold. Seek pain, not comfort, for pain is the barrier keeping those who haven’t put in the work and time in from the success that lies on the other side.

7. Men do not try

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O73ubIEVeFs

Either decide not to do something, or have the determination and discipline to see it to its conclusion.

8. Actions not words

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NysXd8R-klA

What you intend to do means shit. What you are doing now means everything. Don’t tell other men what you’ll do, show them the results of what you did. Winners do, losers dream.

9. Success comes from hard work and time

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jnfj0iwOPs

While you can compress the time needed by working with other men, but only you can do the hard work.

10. Seek the battle

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtQQs2yV-e4

Men thrive on hardship. Comfort, pleasure and instant-gratification feminizes men. Men seek struggle, battles and prove themselves through hard work and effort. Always seek the harder thing.

11. Not everyone is good deep down

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxN9uRs6Erw

There are people who truly want to harm you. Learn to defend yourself and build the confidence necessary to minimize the chance of attacks. Become a strong, virile man capable of determining your own destiny. Show others that you are a man of strength, power and confidence simply by looking at you.

12. Seek a tribe of men

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSJfAzWhY44

Camaraderie in its support of fellow brothers knowing we are all striving to become the men we were meant to be and Competition in that it drives us to continually improve and not settle.

13. It is good to be a man

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0nP_d6T1xc

BONUS: Men need Rites of Initiation

This one is so true. I spent my teens pulling all kinds of pranks with my close circle of best friends, some of them trending towards dangerous, got into street racing, got arrested twice, then the challenge moved on to women, seeing how much I could drink for years, and far worse.

Instead of leaving my children to figure life out on their own, I aim to provide some kind of rites of passage for my son.

If you’re interested to learn more about the Warrior Way of Living, grab your copy of David’s book The Warrior Way: Conquer Your Inner Battles and Level Up Your Life.

July 8, 2017/by Cody McKibben

Jordan Peterson and the Rules to Win the Game of Life

Freedom

Ever since I lost two of my best friends at age 20, Chris and Kareem, I’ve spent the last 14 years looking — around the god forsaken globe mind you, in every dark corner I could find — for hope.

This man helped set off a chain of events that helped me find my misplaced faith again, and take important responsibility for certain things in my life.

The process was not easy. It cost me everything I had. But I am rebuilding myself stronger than ever and with a much clearer understanding of why I’m here than ever before.

Jordan B. Peterson is a controversial professor at the center of the sociopolitical culture war erupting in the West right now who has been vilified in outrageous ways by his critics.

But I believe Peterson — of all the wildly different people I’ve encountered across four continents — I believe this man may be the most important living intellectual of our time, akin to a modern-day Joseph Campbell.

You may disagree with his views, but what the professor of psychology at the University of Toronto is doing just may tip the scales in humanity’s favor and help warring tribes and hostile brothers come to understand each other.

Right when we most need a miracle.

0:30 Introduction/Rise to Fame & Gender Pronouns
3:28 “Radical in a Conservative way”
5:54 Jung/Archetypes/Collective Unconscious
10:30 Integrating of the Logos
15:45 Bringing yourself into Alignment
19:06 Nature of Responsibility & Rights / Message for Men
22:00 Masculinity in the West
25:50 Post-Modernism
29:40 Integrating your Shadow, “You are the Locus of Evil”, Mind and Body alignment
34:50 Relation to the Raising of Children
37:50 Piaget’s developmental model and continual integration vs Freud
39:00 Speaking the Truth
41:02 On Atheism, Rationalism, Morality, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins etc.
44:10 Intellectualism, embodiment
45:20 Motivation for true understanding

Following along with his Maps of Meaning and Personality & Its Transformations courses at the University of Toronto was a transformational process that helped me understand a lot of the deeper wisdom in the value system I was raised within. Not only that, but working through the Self Authoring program he and his academic colleagues created is also helping me create a much more accurate mental map to navigate the trials and challenges of life.

Along with the work of many others, including Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung, Peterson’s work has helped me through the most challenging times of my life, and helped me learn to navigate incredible failure, suffering, pain, and face immense terror with a newfound zen-like faith in the process.

Life is suffering.

Love is the desire to see unnecessary suffering ameliorated.

Truth is the handmaiden of love.

Dialogue is the pathway to truth.

Humility is recognition of personal insufficiency and the willingness to learn.

To learn is to die voluntarily and to be born again, in great ways and small.

So, speech must be untrammeled, so that dialogue can take place; so that we can all humbly learn, so that truth can serve love, so that suffering can be ameliorated, so that we can all stumble forward, so to speak, towards the kingdom of God.”

–Jordan Peterson

May 7, 2017/by Cody McKibben

A Christmas Miracle, and Happy Wishes for 2017

Notes from the Road

Dear friends,

Another lap around the sun comes to a close. 2016 was filled with its share of challenges, but we’re grateful for several opportunities for healing and growth, and lots of quality family time.

My son Chris turned 2 years old in February. Thankfully his Lolo and Lola were able to make a visit to Thailand to be present for his birthday!

We put 4 stamps in Chris’ passport — taking the family to Malaysia, to the Petronas Twin Towers, spending some months in overcrowded Manila, working tirelessly to get travel documents to visit the USA.

We flew Jam’s mother on her first airplane in her life to meet us in Cebu, Philippines, for a family weekend on the beach.

After 3 attempts we finally secured Jam’s US visa, and we spent 3 months in America, giving Chris the chance to finally meet his sick Grandma and the extended family for the first time! We had many fun adventures and got to spend lots of time with my mother, helping her through some intense cancer treatment in Arizona over the summer.

Chris went to classes at a local school in Sacramento for a few months, and fell in love with another young Filipino-American 3-year-old Thea Rosa! 🙂

We had a nice family holiday in Lake Tahoe with Great Grandma and Auntie Jaime. We roadtripped down the Pacific Coast Highway from Santa Cruz to Santa Barbara, through Hollywood and across the Palm Desert, past Joshua Tree National Park, and into Arizona, just outside of Phoenix to be with Mom during her major surgery.

Mom’s spirits remained high through many months of difficult trials. She recently completed treatment and is finally back in the comfort of home. My sister told me on Christmas Day (and I just confirmed with Mom on the phone Wednesday) the doctors say they can’t find any trace of cancerous cells from the scans!

Thanks to many of you for your warm support and invaluable help during our lengthy struggle to get travel documents and get the family back home to support Mom.

Now we’re back home in Asia, settling down and making our home in Chiang Mai, Thailand. I’ve spent 2016 straightening out an injured spine, getting off pain pills and going 100% natural, I did a mountain of inner work, and I’ve just done my second 30-day meditation challenge.

On the Work Front:

Currently I’m working like I haven’t done in years. My book concept is coming along slowly (tentatively called Chasing the Sun), and in 2017, I’m hoping to team up with my good friend Dwight Turner and his organization Courageous Kitchen to finally launch my dream project!

I call it The HERO Project — iterating an exciting new learning framework with our supporters, based around Joseph Campbell’s perennial “Hero’s Journey” monomyth. It’s an early-stage conceptual educational model that I want to develop into online courses, homeschooling curricula, and maybe one day a brick-and-mortar school here in Thailand.

We’ll aim to provide free skills training and experimental educational programs to empower underprivileged children and young adults in Bangkok with entrepreneurial skills, while we also develop a practical online personal development & learning platform with a fun, interesting storytelling style for our supporters. You can read more and support the project here.

I’m also excited for our upcoming Nomad Summit here in Chiang Mai on February 4th! Last year was an incredible event with 230 enthusiastic attendees, and this time around promises to be twice as impactful! Hope to see one or two of you for a visit to sunny Thailand! 🙂

I’ll continue writing here at Thrilling Heroics about all these developments and more in 2017, and sharing the behind-the-scenes journey with Hero Project patrons!

I pray for great opportunities in the New Year for YOU to chase your biggest, wildest dreams! We wish you a very happy holiday season and a prosperous, transformative 2017!

Wherever you are in the world, we hope you’re happy and thriving! Thank you for your love and continued support ️❤️

-Cody, Jam Milcah, and Christopher (from Thailand with love)

December 28, 2016/by Cody McKibben