People leave,
Failure happens
Silence is communication
Your mindset shapes reality
21 skills that will pay you forever:
- Ability to sell and negotiate: Pitching ideas, closing deals, and influencing outcomes.
- Ability to convey thoughts and feelings: Articulating ideas clearly and expressing emotions constructively.
- Ability to break down processes: Deconstructing complex projects into manageable, step-by-step plans.
- Ability to listen and learn: Actively absorbing information and perspectives from others.
- Ability to adapt, improvise, and overcome: Adjusting strategies when faced with obstacles.
- Ability to read, understand, and memorize: Retaining and applying knowledge from what you read.
- Ability to walk away: Knowing when to exit a bad deal or a toxic situation.
- Ability to manage time effectively: Prioritizing tasks and meeting deadlines to avoid burning out.
- Ability to stay positive and optimistic: Maintaining a hopeful outlook, even when facing challenges.
- Ability to make decisions based on facts: Using data and logic, rather than emotions, to guide choices.
- Ability to speak in front of an audience: Confidently presenting ideas to groups.
- Ability to keep trying after failure: Demonstrating resilience and perseverance.
- Ability to invest money: Understanding and managing your own finances.
- Ability to act irrespective of situation: Acting and maintaining productivity in various circumstances.
- Ability to analyze: Reflecting on your own behavior and performance.
- Ability to learn how to learn: Developing the meta-skill of acquiring new knowledge efficiently.
- Ability to understand what others feel: Developing empathy and emotional intelligence.
- Ability to remain consistent: Following through on your commitments.
- Ability to master your thoughts: Gaining control over your internal dialogue.
- Ability to write to persuade and influence: Crafting compelling written messages.
- Ability to ask for help: Recognizing when you need assistance and seeking it effectively.
Aristotle
We don’t raise boys into men by accident.
It’s taught. It’s modeled. It’s lived.
Here are 10 lessons every father should pass on:
1. Your word is your bond. If you say it, do it. Integrity is everything.
2. Shake hands firmly, look people in the eye. Respect is earned in small moments.
3. Stand up for those who can’t stand up for themselves. Never be the bully. Never be the bystander.
4. Gratitude first. Say thank you. Appreciate what you have before chasing what you don’t.
5. Work hard when no one is watching. Discipline is doing the right thing in silence.
6. Service over self. Real strength is using your power to help others.
7. Learn to fight, so you don’t have to. A man who can protect, but chooses peace, is dangerous in the best way.
8. Don’t chase shortcuts. Build slowly, brick by brick. The foundation matters more than the finish line.
9. Honor your mother. How you treat women starts with how you treat her.
10. Carry yourself with pride. Shoulders back, chin up. The world will test you, meet it like a man. One of the most important things I’d pass onto my son is the only opinion that really matters in this world of him, is his own. Only he knows his true intentions, the effort, struggle and moments he did the right thing despite no one knowing. That energy carries his self-esteem.
Raise sons who know these truths, and you raise men the world can count on.
Discipline over feelings”
You consciously choose to act based on a commitment to your goals rather than being dictated by your current emotions. It’s a skill of acknowledging feelings without letting them control your actions, leading to consistent progress and success. To practice this, you can build routines, make clear decisions, and use strategies like mindfulness and positive self-talk.
Key concepts
- Action over emotion: Discipline prioritizes doing what needs to be done, regardless of whether you feel motivated or inspired in that moment.
- Consistency builds habits: Relying on discipline instead of motivation creates consistent actions that build lasting habits and lead to results that emotions alone cannot.
- Intentional decision-making: Instead of reacting to your emotions, you make a conscious decision to follow your plan and commitments, which is different from suppressing or ignoring your feelings.
- Emotional resilience: This skill helps you build inner strength to face challenges and achieve goals by providing a more stable foundation than fleeting emotions.
How to practice discipline over feelings
- Create a routine: Establish consistent routines to reduce decision fatigue and make it easier to perform tasks, even when you don’t feel like it.
- Identify triggers and thoughts: Become aware of what triggers your emotions and the self-talk that accompanies them, which helps in managing the situation more intentionally.
- Practice self-awareness: Acknowledge your feelings without judgment. This could involve naming the emotion, noting its physical sensations, and accepting it without letting it derail your actions.
- Break down tasks: Overcome a lack of motivation for a large task by breaking it into smaller, more manageable steps to build momentum.
- Use positive self-talk: Encourage yourself with positive and realistic self-talk to shift your mindset and push through resistance.
- Set clear commitments: Treat your schedule and goals as non-negotiable commitments to yourself, rather than things that are optional depending on your mood.
Ending Up Alone
Keanu Reeves once said — “If you ever notice, the people who often end up alone are those who love too much, care too much, and are too gentle and kind.”
Read that again. The world doesn’t always know what to do with genuine souls. The ones who give without expecting, who listen without judgment, who stay even when others leave — often end up standing alone in the end.
But here’s the truth: being gentle doesn’t mean you’re weak. Loving deeply doesn’t make you foolish. It just means your heart is rare — and rare things are never found in crowds.
Don’t let the world harden you. Don’t stop being kind because people don’t value it. One day, your energy will meet someone who understands it — and everything will finally make sense.
Until then, stay soft in a world that’s grown cold.
Your love is your power.
Every married man learns these 5 lessons eventually
1. Peace doesn’t come from staying quiet
I used to think avoiding conflict meant keeping things calm.
But every time I swallowed my truth, something in me, and in her, disconnected.
She didn’t want perfection. She wanted presence.
And my silence wasn’t peace; it was fear dressed up as maturity.
2. Love isn’t leadership
I thought loving her was enough. That being loyal, kind, and reliable made me a good man.
But love without direction leaves her carrying the emotional load.
She doesn’t want to control, she wants to feel safe enough not to have to.
If you won’t lead, she will. But she’ll resent it while doing so.
3. Sorry doesn’t rebuild trust
I said “sorry” like it was a reset button.
But a man who keeps apologizing without changing is just rehearsing guilt.
Trust returns through action, not explanation.
Every follow-through rebuilds safety, one brick at a time.
4. Avoidance kills more marriages than anger ever will
I used to run from hard conversations, tell myself, “she just needs time to cool off.”
Truth is, she needed to see I could hold the heat.
You don’t earn respect by disappearing.
You earn it by staying grounded when things get uncomfortable.
5. You don’t become a good husband by default…. you build him
No one showed me what a healthy man looked like.
So I became the one I needed as a kid, the man who stays steady, owns his shit, and leads from heart, not ego.
That’s the work. That’s the difference.
Brother, marriage isn’t where you lose yourself… it’s where you finally meet yourself.
The question is whether you’ll rise into the man she can lean on… or keep waiting for her to carry what’s yours to hold.
Friends
How is it possible
I asked him, “How is it possible to be with one person for 50 years?”
He didn’t even blink.
He said, “We stayed. Even when we didn’t feel love.”
No poetry. No Hollywood answers.
Just the truth we don’t want to hear.
We all want butterflies, passion, fireworks.
But real love doesn’t start when everything is sweet —
it starts when everything is falling apart…
and you don’t run.
Because love is not pleasure.
Love is building.
1️⃣ Our Generation Mistakes Love for Comfort
He told me, “You young people leave too fast.”
And he’s right.
One argument? “Not my person.”
A bad month? “We grew apart.”
But he said something that hit me hard:
“If you only stay when it’s good, you don’t love. You consume.”
His marriage had everything — anger, boredom, nights they couldn’t stand each other.
But staying was a choice.
Not a punishment.
A decision to protect the bond, not the feeling.
2️⃣ We Lose Because We Need Life to Feel Good All the Time
We think love should always feel warm, exciting, perfect.
But he said:
“Sometimes you stay not because it’s easy, but because leaving would mean you’re weak — not that your partner is wrong.”
And he wasn’t being harsh.
He meant:
You don’t abandon the whole house because one room is messy.
You clean it, rebuild it, repaint it — together.
But we?
We quit at the first crack.
3️⃣ Love Is Not a Feeling — It’s the Decision to Remain Together
He didn’t count arguments.
He counted days they didn’t walk away.
He said,
“Passion fades. Commitment doesn’t.”
Our generation has manuals on “reigniting the spark,”
but nobody teaches us how to survive the dark.
How to hold on when the feelings are gone.
How to build instead of replace.
And that’s why he says we’ve lost.
Not because love changed —
but because we stopped choosing it.
Imagining a book with no way to turn back pages is
a metaphor for life, suggesting you read more carefully, pay more attention to each moment, and live deliberately because each moment is irreversible. This perspective encourages embracing the present, learning from past experiences without dwelling on them, and accepting that life’s “pages”—its events and choices—are final. It emphasizes that while you can’t edit the past, you have the power to choose how you live the future
Learn to think
⒈ Elon Musk has a degree in Physics. Larry Page and Sergey Brin have Mathematics and Computer Science. Jeff Bezos has Engineering Physics. The richest people on the planet didn’t learn “to lead” or “to manage a business”—they learned to think.
⒉ Management teaches you how to work within an existing system. Law teaches you how to comply with rules. But Physics and Mathematics teach you how to create systems from scratch and explain how the world works.
⒊ These subjects teach one thing: breaking down a problem into elements, seeing connections, searching for a solution, not a reaction. This is not about “studying.” This is about a model for perceiving reality. When Musk builds a rocket, he doesn’t use management. He takes basic principles, calculations, interactions, and assembles a solution.
⒋ The problem is that you were hammered with: “Physics is difficult, Mathematics is boring.” But the real difficulty is life without thinking. When you don’t know how to decide. When you can’t verify a fact. When you don’t see where you are being deceived. Mathematics and Physics are what make you autonomous.
⒌ The wealthiest didn’t get rich because they learned “business.” They created because they knew how to analyze, simplify, and build. This is the essence of an engineer’s mindset. And an engineer is not someone who works with wrenches. It is someone who can assemble something new.
https://www.instagram.com/p/DREGXiHgQxy
Major Cheat Code
Most of your mistakes happen in the rush.
That text demands an immediate response.
That meeting invites you to accept without thinking.
That favor you say yes to before considering the cost.
You’re reacting. Not deciding.
There’s a gap between what happens and what you do about it.
Most people skip it.
I did this for years:
→ Agreed to things I didn’t want to do
→ Sent messages I regretted an hour later
→ Took on commitments that wrecked my week
All because I thought fast response meant good response.
It doesn’t.
The pause is where the clarity lives.
Before you respond to the text: pause.
Before you accept the meeting: pause.
Before you say yes to the favor: pause.
Ten seconds. Two hours. Overnight.
Whatever it takes to get out of reaction mode.
Fast doesn’t mean smart. It just means fast.
Slow down. Decide deliberately.
Most of what you’re rushing to do doesn’t need to be done at all.
My Husband
https://www.instagram.com/p/DRC3e6xjkaW
Negotiate
In clay archives from Sippar and Uruk, scholars found something strange: over 600 trade tablets, not one contains the word “discount.” Babylonian merchants didn’t beg for lower prices — they made sellers compete for moral standing. The tactic was called “tamartu šīmti” — the price of fate.
2. When a trader wanted to buy, he said one sentence carved on multiple tablets: “I wish to buy it at the price the gods would bless.” It sounds poetic, but it was a lethal psychological move. It turned bargaining into a spiritual test. If the seller insisted on more, he risked being seen as “against divine fairness.” The social shame was worse than a lost sale.
3. The effect was documented in the Code of Hammurabi’s commentaries: merchants who overcharged after hearing that phrase lost trade licenses in temples — the era’s version of blacklisting. Every transaction carried a layer of ethical leverage, not economic pressure.
4. Modern negotiation studies show the same pattern. Harvard Business Review calls it “value framing” — anchoring a deal to principles bigger than money. When people feel morally observed, they concede faster than when logically cornered. The Babylonians mastered that 4,000 years ago.
5. Next time you negotiate, do not plead or justify. Anchor the deal in principle. Say: “I only work at a price that stays fair when repeated.” That line does what Babylon discovered, removes greed from the room and replaces it with judgment. And people always fear judgment more than loss.
Philosophy’s greatest quotes:
1) “What are you afraid of losing, when nothing in the world actually belongs to you?”
– Marcus Aurelius
2) “If you deeply observe, everything is your teacher.”
– Buddha
3) “The road to heaven feels like hell. The road to hell feels like heaven.”
– Unknown
4) “He who blames others has a long way to go on his journey. He who blames himself is halfway there. He who blames no one has arrived.”
– Chinese Proverb
5) “We often suffer more in imagination than in reality.”
– Seneca
Sometimes it’s not that people hurt you.
It’s that they acted in a way that didn’t match what you expected. You thought they would care the way you care. You thought they’d react the way you would. But they didn’t. And that’s where the sting comes in. Not from betrayal, but from the surprise of difference.
You had a version of them in your head. A version that would always choose you. Always show up. Always know what you need without saying it. And when they didn’t, it felt like they broke something sacred. But they didn’t break anything. They just weren’t who you hoped they were.
The truth is, people don’t live in your mind. They live in their own. With their own pain, past, needs, fears, and reasons. And sometimes, those reasons won’t make sense to you.
But that doesn’t make them wrong. Or you are unworthy. It just means they’re human. Like you.
It’s hard. Watching someone drift from the picture you painted. Realizing you were holding up a mirror, not seeing the real person. You wanted them to reflect your values. Your choices. Your way of loving. And when they didn’t, it hurt.
But the pain isn’t proof of failure. It’s a sign of expectation. Silent, unspoken, heavy expectation.
So now just breathe. Let the picture go. Let them be who they’ve always been, not who you imagined they’d become.
Less assumption.
More observation.
Less control.
More clarity.
They weren’t supposed to complete your story. They were just passing through it.
And that’s okay.
Stop Defending
Stop Government Demand Letters
1. He worked for 18 years in administrative law. When I asked him how citizens can protect themselves from deadlines, penalties, or sudden “urgent replies” demanded by ministries, he laughed and said: “Most people don’t know the system has a pause button.” Then he wrote one sentence on a notepad:
“Please provide the legal basis for this request, including the specific statute and clause that obligates my response.”
2. He explained why this works. Government offices run on procedural compliance, not speed. When you ask for the statute and clause, the burden shifts instantly: they must prove the request is lawful before you must comply. And 70% of government letters — he showed me cases — rely on implied obligation, not actual obligation.
3. In one example, a family received a letter demanding extra documentation “within 5 days.” The lawyer sent that single sentence. The office took 46 days to reply — because they had to internally verify whether the demand even had legal grounding. It didn’t. The request quietly expired.
4. Another case involved a business owner threatened with fines unless he submitted “updated records.” The lawyer used the same sentence. The agency froze the penalty process because the internal auditor couldn’t locate the statutory basis. “Government machines hate risk,” he said. “The moment you ask for legality, everything slows.”
5. His final line was ice-cold:
“Bureaucracy feeds on citizens who react. It stalls when citizens require proof.”
Please check with a lawyer before following any advice.
Trying
The word “trying” can be viewed as negative because it implies a lack of confidence, suggests a failure plan, and provides an excuse for not committing fully. It can be seen as a weaker alternative to “doing,” as it implies the possibility of failure or giving up rather than a definitive commitment to succeed.
Reasons why “trying” is considered negative
Implies doubt and lack of confidence:
Saying “I’ll try” can indicate that you are not sure of your ability to succeed, whereas “doing” suggests confidence and commitment.
Sets up a failure plan:
It can be interpreted as having a plan for failure or giving up, rather than having a plan for accomplishment.
Allows for excuses:
It provides an “out” or an excuse for failure without full commitment. It gives you the option to fail without feeling like you have truly committed.
Suggests half-hearted effort:
The word can imply a lack of seriousness and intention, especially when contrasted with the word “do”.
This is seen as a strong, positive alternative that shows commitment and intention to succeed.
This is a good alternative that still allows for realism but focuses on maximum effort rather than a possible failure.
Focus on the process, not just the outcome:
Framing the situation around what you can control, such as your effort and attitude, can be more productive.
Even if you don’t succeed, you can learn from the experience. This is a more positive way to frame the outcome than a simple “I tried”.
UNLEARN CONTROL
Comment “UNLEARN CONTROL” below to access episode 197: Brainwashing & Influence: What Breaks the Human Will, What Restores It & The Future of Ethical Persuasion with Chase and Adam Schell@brainsupreme).
In this episode, we break down how social media quietly trains us like zoo animals—how every notification, headline, and emotional spike shapes our self-concept without us ever noticing. Chase Hughes (@chasehughesofficial) exposes the sysops-level mechanics behind feeds engineered to keep us hooked: outrage, certainty, the illusion of our own cleverness.
Since this is, after all, The Great Unlearn, woven through the whole conversation is the unlearning—how we can stop letting our emotions be programmed by an algorithm and start reclaiming our attention and our agency.
What happens when we step away from the media “feed” trough and reconnect with the deeper part of us that exists under our conditioned identities?
https://www.instagram.com/p/DRlBvREAP_s
What’s meant for you
What’s meant for you never leaves.
It waits.
It circles back again and again — through new people, new chances, and new lessons — until you’re finally ready to receive it.
The timing may change.
The form may shift.
But destiny never gives up on you.
So breathe.
You haven’t missed anything that was meant for you — it’s just aligning with the version of you who can hold it fully this time.
What makes Marriage Work
Wonders of the Heart
Gary Hogg is a voice for good. His new book, Wonders of the Heart, offers validation, inspiration, and gentle motivation to bring the value and potential that lie within us all to the forefront. This isn’t a self-help book or how-to manual.
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/121421.Gary_Hogg
