Tag Archive for: suffering

Just a quick message today before I go fire up the grill with my brother-in-law and jump in the pool with my son:

242 years ago, the Second Continental Congress unanimously declared the sovereignty of the thirteen united States of America from the British Empire. The Declaration of Independence, written primarily by Thomas Jefferson, listed colonial grievances against King George III and asserted an individual’s natural rights:

Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness

Today, I believe that no matter where you come from, you and I are entitled to the same natural rights now more than ever.

Though (some) governments certainly serve a few useful purposes (sometimes), bloated bureaucracies tend to prioritize their own survival above your individual freedoms, no matter what the cost.

When it really comes down to brass tacks, it’s up to you to protect yourself, your family, your empire, and your freedom from those who would try to take them away from you. As history has shown many times, nobody else will hold them sacred for you.

There may come times when you will have to FIGHT for your life, FIGHT for your liberty, and certainly you will have to FIGHT for your own happiness.

Freedom is a paradox, because it comes with RESPONSIBILITY. You are responsible for defending your own life when the rubber hits the road, and you are responsible for the consequences of your chosen pursuits.

So while true freedom is the opportunity to make your own choices, living a truly free life REQUIRES taking full responsibility for your choices, your behaviors, and your results.

And if you don’t like your current results — your current reality — there is nobody to blame but yourself.

This can be a hard pill to swallow. Believe me, I understand.

When my business collapsed and my world came crumbling down, I wanted to blame ISIS. I wanted to blame repugnant sex traffickers and martial law in my wife’s home country. I wanted to blame Homeland Security for insisting that we uproot our family and relocate internationally in order to get travel documents. I wanted to blame the partner who betrayed me and cooked the books.

I wanted to blame my mother for getting cancer. I wanted to blame my wife for giving me a child. I almost wanted to blame my son for scratching my cornea during roughhousing and landing me with an eye infection that took me out of commission for a month.

Hell, I even wanted to blame the flesh eating parasites burrowing intolerably slow and painfully through my feet.

I was laying in the fetal position on the tile floor of my 4-bedroom condo in Chiang Mai, Thailand one night cursing God Himself.

But the Truth was that too much avoiding responsibility caught up with me.

It was me — I had made every choice that got me there on that cold hard floor, pulling my hair out, crying and throwing a tantrum like my toddler.

Declare Your Individual Freedom

I used to think that chasing “freedom” meant running away from responsibility.

For 10 years I wanted nothing but more time freedom, more financial independence, and more freedom of location.

And I got it. For almost a decade, I lived in 8 countries across four continents.

I built and experimented with five small companies. We sold two of them.

I dated women from around the globe, and enjoyed all kinds of travel misadventures across at least 35 countries. But I allowed myself to get too comfortable, I let myself become a “victim” of my own success, and bought into the lie of the “four hour work week”, pleasure seeking, fleeing from commitments, and basically drank and smoked away a literal fortune.

In the pursuit of riches, I wrecked my health, and then I carried on abusing my body probably out of sheer self-hatred.

But it was when I realized my real RESPONSIBILITY to show my son a good example, to do my damnedest to be a good role model, to teach him everything the world will neglect to teach him, to be involved in his life and guide him any way I can, that was when my own results began ever so slowly to turn around.

In order to achieve true freedom, YES, you must cultivate an ability to control your money, control your time, and eliminate the mindset that you are subject to any higher authority (at least not here on earth).

But avoiding responsibility, perhaps counterintuitively, will ensure your failure. It will ensure that your health and vitality go down the drain. It will ensure that you create strained, stressed, and broken relationships. It will ensure you create chaos all around you.

You must take RESPONSIBILITY for your Mindset, your Health, your Wealth, and your Relationships.

This Fourth of July, take stock of where you’re at, appreciate what you have, and accept radical responsibility for your current situation. Some things will be great. Others may be a trainwreck.

This is not about guilt or shame. We are all screwups.

For my fellow Americans, be grateful that you ARE the privileged 1% of the world. The USA is an imperfect mess, but it’s one of the safest, most functional places in the world. For my Canadian friends to the north, happy belated Canada Day to you!

Wherever you are, I invite you to accept the challenge to take responsibility for cleaning up whatever areas of your life that are lacking, to realize the necessity for balance in your life, and how your mental health, your fitness, your finances, your spirituality and your connections with people around you are all interconnected.

If you go through life on autopilot, chances are you are going to let at least one of these dimensions of your life completely deteriorate.

So take responsibility to give each of these areas of your life attention, to go through your life consciously, to craft a plan for how you can maintain balance in your life, and always be vigilant looking for opportunities where you can seize MORE responsibility for things around you.

Declare YOUR personal freedom from the mistakes you have made in the past, from your baggage, from your stories, and FIGHT for your life like the men who built America had to.

Declare your freedom from the TYRANNY of victimhood. Choose not to accept the role of “victim” in this life. There is nobody holding you down. Choose to rewrite those negative stories. Trust me.

It is Time for You to Choose FREEDOM, Sovereignty, and Personal Responsibility.

If you are ready to commit yourself to a higher purpose, to double down on yourself, and have accountability, systems, and structure to help you find balance across your Mindset, Health, Wealth, and Relationships, join us as we embark upon a 12-week Dragon-slaying challenge inside the Foundry accelerator this month to turboboost your progress toward your dream goals in Q3.

Normally $333, you can register for one of our remaining 12 lifetime seats in the program today for just $76! Nearly 80% off, in honor of the Founding Fathers (1776).

America homecoming

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

 

 

“We’re in a freefall into the future. We don’t know where we’re going. Things are changing so fast, and always when you’re going through a long tunnel, anxiety comes along. And all you have to do to transform your hell into a paradise is to turn your fall into a VOLUNTARY act. It’s a very interesting shift in perspective, and that’s all it is. Joyful participation in the sorrows, and everything changes.”

Joseph Campbell, Sukhavati

Embrace your pain, go to the places that scare you, take joy in life’s terrible challenges as they burn away your weaknesses in a baptism of fire, nail your old Self to the cross and die through your own terrible crucifixion to be reborn as something more, turn your suffering into something beautiful, share your Truth, and live on PURPOSE.

Join a group of living heroes courageous enough to walk the path:

Join the HERO Project >