A Man’s Life

7 Tips for Successfully Completing Boot Camp, or Any Intense Training Experience, Courtesy of WWII Marines

by Marcus Brotherton

Picture yourself. You’re 18-years-old. It’s Monday morning, December 8, 1941, the day after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, and you’re furious. You and your friends are standing in a long recruiting line along with every other able-bodied young man in your hometown, and you’ve got a huge goal ahead of you—you want your family and all [...]

44 comments | Read the full article →

How and Why to Become a Lifelong Learner

by Brett & Kate McKay

For the first twenty-two years or so of our lives, our main “job” is learning. The bulk of our time is spent in classrooms acquiring new knowledge. And then, once we graduate, we feel like the education phase of our lives is done and now it’s time to go out into the world. Have [...]

96 comments | Read the full article →

Manvotional: Fighting

by Brett & Kate McKay

Editor’s Note: This week’s post on thumos brought to mind this Manvotional. Tom Brown’s School Days was a popular nineteenth-century novel that followed eleven-year-old Tom Brown, as he adjusted to life at a public boarding school for boys and learned how to become a young gentleman. The following excerpt introduces an account of Tom’s only [...]

59 comments | Read the full article →

How Not to Become Your Absentee Father

by A Manly Guest Contributor

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Andy Harrelson. In 1969, then governor of California, Ronald Reagan, signed into law the country’s first no-fault divorce bill. Many other states quickly followed his example. Whether his signing the bill was the cause of the skyrocketing divorce rates that were to come in the next decades [...]

61 comments | Read the full article →

Got Thumos?

by Brett & Kate McKay

Last week we explored Plato’s allegory of the chariot, which the ancient philosopher used to explain the tripartite nature of the soul or psyche. In the allegory, a chariot (representing the soul) is pulled by a rebellious dark horse (symbolizing man’s appetites) and a spirited white horse (symbolizing thumos). The charioteer, or Reason, is tasked [...]

53 comments | Read the full article →

How to End a Conversation

by Brett & Kate McKay

We’ve done several articles on the Art of Manliness covering the wonderful art of conversation, from its dos and donts, to how to make small talk, to avoiding the dreaded plague of conversational narcissism. A comment each of those posts invariably received was, “This is great. But, uh, how do you end a conversation?” I [...]

34 comments | Read the full article →

What Is a Man? The Allegory of the Chariot

by Brett & Kate McKay

What is a man? What sort of man should I be? What does it mean to live a good life? What is the best way to live and how do I attain excellence? What should I aim for, and what training and practices must I do to achieve those aims? Such questions have been asked [...]

38 comments | Read the full article →

Manvotional: Jack London on Success

by Brett & Kate McKay

Editor’s note: We’ve recently been researching the life of Jack London for a future post(s), and came across this bit of advice he gave to writers — which really applies to those in any vocation in life. From “Getting Into Print,” 1903 By Jack London Don’t dash off a six-thousand-word story before breakfast. Don’t write [...]

45 comments | Read the full article →

Personal Responsibility 102: The Importance of Owning Up to Your Mistakes and How to Do It

by Brett & Kate McKay

Yesterday we discussed the cognitive blind spots our brains generate that can make it difficult for us to honestly assess our actions and determine our responsibility for those actions and their consequences. We discovered the way in which our brains are inclined to flatter and shield our egos from blame when we make mistakes. Despite [...]

25 comments | Read the full article →

Personal Responsibility 101: Why Is It So Hard to Own Up to Our Mistakes?

by Brett & Kate McKay

“All this has been my fault. I asked more of my men than should have been asked of them.” –Robert E. Lee, after heavy Confederate losses at Pickett’s Charge “I had the opportunity and the information and I failed to make use of it. I don’t know what an inquest or a court of law [...]

46 comments | Read the full article →

Quit Being a Pushover: How to Be Assertive

by Brett & Kate McKay

Your boss consistently asks you at the last minute to come into work on the weekend. You say “yes” every time even though you have family plans. You stew with resentment as you pore over TPS reports on a Saturday. You order an expensive steak at a restaurant, but when the waiter brings it to [...]

73 comments | Read the full article →

Don’t Waste Your Twenties — Part 2: Train Your Brain for Lasting Success

by Brett & Kate McKay

In Part I of this two-part series we explored the first once-in-a-lifetime opportunity of the twentysomething brain: its propensity for deep passion, a keen curiosity about others and the world, and fearlessness in the face of risk. But these qualities are only advantages if they’re used in the way they were designed: as the motivation [...]

68 comments | Read the full article →

Don’t Waste Your Twenties — Part 1: Taking Advantage of the Unique Powers of the Twentysomething Brain

by Brett & Kate McKay

At age 20: Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard and cofounded Microsoft, and Sir Isaac Newton began developing a new branch of mathematics. At age 21: Thomas Alva Edison created his first invention, an electric vote recorder, Steve Jobs co-founded Apple Inc., and Alfred Tennyson published his first poetry. At age 22: Inventor Samuel Colt [...]

92 comments | Read the full article →

12 Vintage Instructional Films Worth Watching

by Brett & Kate McKay

Maybe you’ve seen the classic Civil Defense film “Duck and Cover” as part of a documentary about the postwar period, a clip of an unintentionally hilarious hygiene film while watching Mystery Science Theater 3000, or a vintage film we ourselves included in a post like this one. Have you ever wondered where these short instructional [...]

31 comments | Read the full article →

Manvotional: 4 Rules on How to Make the Most of Life

by Brett & Kate McKay

“How to Make the Most of Life” From Every-day Religion, 1886 By James Freeman Clarke Some persons make a great deal of life; others very little. To some it is intensely interesting; to others, very vapid. Some are tired of life before they have begun to live. They seem, as has been said, to have [...]

62 comments | Read the full article →

Trust Your Gut: Lessons Learned from Haguenau and Macy Falls

by Marcus Brotherton

I was hiking down a steep trail near Macy Falls when a cougar snarled and leapt toward my left ear. I remember the date exactly. It was Saturday, May 14, 2011, and the beast lunged from behind me and above. I spun to glimpse yellow fur and fangs heading straight toward my face. The brute [...]

47 comments | Read the full article →

I Want You….To Put Away Your Smartphone: Propaganda Posters for the Modern Age

by Brett & Kate McKay

During the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, the use of “propaganda posters” were popular for encouraging good behavior — teaching safety, boosting worker morale, and rousing wartime sacrifice. I’ve always enjoyed the art and design of these posters, and decided to have Ted whip up a set of originals to address an area of behavior where [...]

98 comments | Read the full article →

How to Use Reddit to Become a Better Man: 25 Subreddits for Personal Improvement

by Brett

Reddit. You’ve probably heard of it. The mega-site has a cult-like and ever-growing following, especially among twenty-somethings. If you aren’t familiar with it, reddit is a social news website where anybody can submit links to interesting stuff they find around the web. Users (called “redditors”) can also ask questions of the community or share experiences [...]

64 comments | Read the full article →

What’s Your 20 Mile March?

by Brett & Kate McKay

Nine years ago, business authors Jim Collins and Morten T. Hansen, along with a team of 20 researchers, set out to answer this question: Why do some companies thrive in uncertainty, even chaos, and others do not? The group analyzed seven companies that performed not just better than their industry, but ten times better. They [...]

49 comments | Read the full article →

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →