Last Saturday was the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 landing on the moon. Good shit – as I watched/read/listened to documentaries and podcasts about it the parallels with MRP became apparent. Men went to the moon, men built the rockets, men were in mission control, men died on the launchpad, men willingly plunged into the unknown and achieved greatness.

Choose Motherfucker

“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy but because it is hard…” – JFK

Look at this statement. Read it and read it again. The first step is to CHOOSE. Do you want to live in a sub-par life? Or do you want to live life to the fullest? Your options are to 1) live sub-par (easy) or 2) work your ass off and become a high value man (hard). But YOU need to choose – there’s no middle ground. MRP is hard, it’s very hard, likely the hardest shit you’ll do. But you CAN do it. So, make your choice.

Once the choice was made to go to the moon the rest was simply technology, engineering, and a shitload of hard work. MRP path is straightforward, but it’s a shitload of hard work.

The biggest waste of time is sat deciding the path forward. What lifting program should I start? What book should I read next? What diet should I try?... I am of the strong mindset to pick a path and then reassess frequently and adjust as necessary. Otherwise you have non-value added time sitting there just theorizing on what you should do versus actually doing it.

Why Choose the Hard Way?

There’s more to this quote…

“… because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.” - JFK

THIS is what MRP offers – this is what we do here. This is not a “Top 10 tricks to make your wife have sex”. We work to give the BEST of ourselves – our masculine energy; we hone our unique skills as men – leadership, strength, emotional stability. We are doing this NOW. To the lurkers and those who is still looking at the RP or licking it – be unwilling to POSTPONE any longer.

Incremental Improvement

We didn’t go from sub-orbital unmanned flight to landing on the moon. We went from sub-orbital unmanned flight -> sub-orbital manned flight -> orbital flight -> extended orbital flight -> space walks -> docking with another spacecraft -> lunar orbit -> dress-rehearsal to land on the moon -> landing on the moon.

This is the area I struggle with and see it in a lot of posts lately. It’s the thought of: “How do I accelerate my lifts/diet/frame to be the best in the shortest possible time?”. Rephased: “What cheat codes are there to get the quickest improvement with the least amount of work?” The answer is: there are no cheat codes. You build a realistic plan, execute, and make small incremental improvements.

If you look at the steps going to the moon, each one really wasn’t much difficult than the previous one. The key is to continually have small successes. You don’t go from never lifting to /u/red-sfspplus level. You go from being able to bench the bar -> benching the bar +5 -> bar +10 -> etc. Do you still suck in comparison to others? Sure… but do you suck AS MUCH as you did before? Hell no. So… stop comparing yourself to others.

The only question you should be asking yourself every week is “Am I better than I was compared to last week?”.

Failure

In reaching the moon - men died. Equipment failed. Shit happened. No one threw up their hands and said “this is too hard we quit”. They figured out what went wrong, why it went wrong, corrected it, and moved on.

You will fail. You will have a bad week. You will fail across the board – shit tests, lifts, diet, comfort tests, maintaining frame. You’ll be butthurt, go Rambo, get angry, create covert contracts (and not even realize it). You’ll take two steps forward and one back. Sometimes it will be two steps forward and three back. This is why the OYS thread is so critical – you have the opportunity every fucking week to reassess yourself, look at what you failed on and elicit feedback to tweak your plan as needed. Shut down your ego and listen to the advice. Objectively look at what’s being suggested and really consider it.

If you want to know what the secret is to success? It’s moving forward after failure and not fucking dwelling on the failure. That’s it, that’s the secret.

When you screw up:

  1. What went wrong
  2. Why did it go wrong
  3. How do I fix what went wrong
  4. Then you fix it/tweak it/take a different approach and move on

You screwed up – it’s in the past, you learned something from it and now you’re better.

Don’t Stop Improving

If you look back at sci-fi movies from the ‘60s and 70’s, the thought was we’d be much much further along in terms of space exploration than today. Colonies on the moon, colonies on mars, travelling to the outer solar system, space hotels, space tourism. So, what happened? What the fuck happened? The pace we went from effectively nothing to the moon was less than 10 years.

We said “it’s good enough”. Why would we want to improve more? Hell, America doesn’t even have a viable spacecraft right now. This is not the place to argue the merits or money in the space program, but what happened was we grew complacent.

Don’t grow complacent. Always be striving to improve. Keep setting new goals and work to achieve them. The moment you stop improving is the moment you start deteriorating. Always choose to improve yourself.