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Enemies are Useful

I – Positive emotions provide nothing.

For true, lasting fuel to motivate your endeavors, you need enemies. When you are knee-deep in the comforts of life and the world, you can forget what made you work hard in the beginning. Sometimes you will not be willing to work hard out of ambition or the desire for gain, sometimes you need more. You need the energy that comes from having an opponent.

Comfort provides no energy. But if you have an enemy, you have a wellspring of eternal energy. There is nothing more motivating than having someone who wants to go to war with you. At that moment you can channel your natural warlike nature and convert it into energy for success.

You do not have to go to war with people directly. That may bother the sensitive conscience of many Christian people. You can, however, use the emotional fuel from that enemy to motivate yourself to success.

Take advantage of the fact that people will inevitably want to go to war with you. If you do this, you will have limitless power. Having an enemy gives you purpose, direction, and a clear-cut destination. Every one of your actions begins to have real meaning. All of your work is energized. What once fatigued you is now nothing more than a bump in the road. Take advantage of the energy reservoir that comes when you are at war.

II – Having an enemy is a part of life.

Sometimes it is a consequence of our poor decisions, other times people just want to go to war with us. There is no need to complain about this because it is actually a useful tool. Use enemies to your advantage.

Look at the stories of David. This was a man at war for his entire life. This was a result of his own actions (2 Samuel 12:10). He wrote many psalms about his enemies. He would write about them surrounding him at all sides. And he would also write about crushing them in battle.

Make no mistake about it, those who hate God and hate our religion are our enemies. They hate the Bible and they hate everything that Christians stand for.

III – Do not make enemies directly unless absolutely necessary.

By biblical law, we need to be at peace with all men, as possible. However, if someone decides to make war with us, we should use that energy to our advantage.

“If possible, so far as it depends on you, live in peace with all people”
Romans 12:18

We should not go out of our way to start wars. But if wars are started against us, we have the right to defend ourselves.

There is this popular notion in Christianty that tries to paint Christians as pacifists. People think that Christians will do nothing as their families are tortured and killed by governments or other enemies. This is not true. Christians have the right to self-defense just as much as anyone else. We should not go out of our way to attack others directly, but we can retaliate to protect ourselves.

Some Christians twist “do not resist an evil person” (Matthew 5:39) to mean that we should never lift a single finger to protect ourselves or others from war. This is not true. We have the right to go to war. Humans will always go to war and we may have to be a part of it. There will be war from now until the end of time, it is in human nature. It is built into the very DNA of men.

You do not have to go to physical war yourself, but you must take advantage of this programming that you have. You need to learn to channel this natural warlike nature into productive pursuits. That Is how you begin using enemies to your advantage.

IV – Be at war with the devil

If it bothers your conscience to wage war with enemies who started a war with you, you have options. We are all at war with the devil and his angels. This is an inescapable part of life. He hates you and wants you to fall, and you are at war with him all the days of your life.

Activate your apparatus of hatred. You were given the emotion of hatred for a reason, for there is a proper use for it. While we should not hate our fellow men, we are to hate sin and the devil. That is the greatest possible outset for this emotion of pure hatred. It is one of the most valuable emotions we have.

Oftentimes the Bible gives parameters around hot emotions such as anger. For example:

“Be angry and do not sin” ~ Ephesians 4:26

We are allowed to experience these emotions, but they must be controlled. Using our hatred and directing it towards sin and the devil is the parameter that we must follow.

V – Recognize Camoflagued Emenies

We have more enemies than we think we do. This is a sad and unfortunate reality, but we need to be aware of it. Others hate us and we may never know it, but we should be on the lookout for it.

Even inside religion, there are people who teach principles that oppose what we know to be true from the Bible. They teach that the Bible does not mean what it says. Or they teach that there is no need for you to behave with the extreme discipline that you do.

Either way, they are teaching contrary to what the Bible teaches. Paul writing to the church at Galatia has the following to say about the men who teach principles that oppose the Bible:

“As we have already said, so now I say again: If anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let them be under God’s curse!”
Galations 1:9

That sounds like a serious bit of phraseology. The Bible makes it clear that those who teach another gospel are cursed. They are our enemies, and there is no way around this.

Because of this, we should work hard to understand the true principles of God so we can crush these arguments. Notice I do not say we should crush the people making the arguments, but rather the arguments themselves.

Crushing others directly does nothing but give us a few seconds of satisfaction. But we set ourselves back by damaging the relationship and damaging rapport. When it comes to people who are already religious, we have to be more careful with how we handle them. They may not know that they are fighting for the enemy with the things they are teaching and preaching.

Take advantage of your enemies. You are going to have them all the days of your life. All you can do is make the best of it.

Conduct Yourselves Like Men.

Liberalism is the Planet Fitness of Faith

Popular gym franchise Planet Fitness has made a name for itself by providing affordable training grounds to the common man. The business model is genius. Owners can expect upwards of 2000 people to register for their $10 per month membership. At the same time, the total capacity of each gym is actually a fraction of the membership number.

Planet fitness functions and profits as a business because most of the members never show up to train. And the membership fee is so low that it would be more of an annoyance to drop the membership than to just passively allow a few dollars per month to come out of your bank.

I have nothing against that business model. It is brilliant. Trap human beings between their own laziness. Too lazy to train and too lazy to cancel the membership to the gym they never use.

Besides the business model, the culture and mentality of Planet Fitness are one of no judgment and no excellence. You are allowed to do whatever you want and look however you want without being punished for it.

All this makes planet fitness look a lot like religious liberalism. Here are a few reasons why planet fitness is liberalism incorporated.

I – It is a “no-judgment zone” – where people are very judgemental to those who are on the outside.

Like many of the modern groups who espouse tolerance and goodwill towards your fellow man, they can engage in some serious hate towards those who are outside of their group.

I’ve rarely met people more hateful than homosexuals, liberals, and ethnic people, yet they sling accusations of “hate crimes” at everyone who so much as looks at them funny. This is arguably another one of the projections of liberalism. You hate that which you truly are.

Just like Planet fitness tries to create a judgment-free zone, churches of liberalism do the same thing. They do not want to be judged for anything but will judge you with vicious intensity if you speak one wrong word to them.

They talk about grace mercy and peace, but if you decide you want a lifestyle that involves a little more discipline and effort, you are ridiculed. “Everyone is going to heaven“, except the people who take the harder paths.

II – No accountability

Even though I am not a fan of accountability as a long-term intervention for enforcing good behavior, its usefulness as a short-term tool is apparent. The church of liberalism is uninterested in accountability. They are uninterested in it because it requires two things that the effeminate men of this world hate: a standard of behavior and confrontation.

Accountability requires a clear-cut definition of what is right, what is wrong, and of a man’s duty and responsibility. It also requires us to hold one another’s feet to the fire when we are failing to live up to that standard. It is for this reason that for all the time we spend talking about accountability, no one ever enforces it.

No one holds his brother accountable because most people care more about being liked than they care about their brother. This sounds dark and cynical, but it is true. If “He who spares the rod hates his son“, then he who spares the confrontation component of accountability hates his brother.

III -No personal standard of excellence

As mentioned before, the church of liberalism has no personal standard of excellence. “You are perfect just the way you are, bro“, each man says to his friends as they collapse into a bro hug complete with the tears of pseudo-repentance.

When you decide to become a Christian, you accept that there is a certain standard of behavior you are expected to maintain. As much as the church of liberalism hates to think about it, there are several “Thou Shalt Nots” and “Thou Shalts” involved in Christianity. There is a degree of discipline that you must have at all times if you are to maintain your faith properly.

The church of liberalism hates this because they are not interested in working and improving. Their philosophy is one of hippie-like laziness and complacency. They see no need to improve, so they waste no time doing so.

The reality is that Christianity has a hard standard of behavior. It requires discipline to maintain the lifestyle and not everyone can handle that. Everyone understands that reality. Just like not everyone can handle the discipline required to train the body and improve themselves, so they go to a place where they do not actually have to train, where they do not actually have to improve themselves, and where they are accepted and even applauded for doing so.

The church of liberalism is the same – They do not want to work to improve themselves. They are uninterested in personal discipline, but they still want to get all the good emotional feelings associated with the church they have transformed into a social club.

IV – No congruent lifestyle decisions – pizza night

Planet Fitness has pizza nights on occasion. Basically, pizza nights celebrate the antithesis of what the building is supposed to be encouraging. Instead of promoting personal improvement, they promote blatant hypocrisy and the celebration of that hypocrisy. They reward people for pretending to work out by feeding them food in direct opposition to their goals.

The church of liberalism also does the same, by celebrating failures and encouraging and rewarding you for failing to live up to your standards of behavior. Not only do they not even work to try to improve themselves, but they actually wallow in the failure and turn it into a pity party.

I’m sure you can think of more ways that the church of liberalism is like planet fitness, and feel free to leave those in the comments section below.

Conduct yourselves like men.

Identity – A Tool For Behavior Change

Everything in the universe has an identity. It is controversial to say with certainty who postulated the Law of Identity. Nevertheless, it is a powerful law, stating that “A=A”. The letter A can only be the letter A. It cannot be the letter B or C. Everything follows this same law. It must be what it is and can be nothing else.

That sounds like an obvious statement, but it is one that most people, including Christians, never think about or take advantage of once they realize its power. If you know the principle of identity, you can control much of your behavior naturally and with minimal effort. This is because not only do we have identities, but we strive to act in accordance with those identities at all times.

The principle of identity allows you to behave in specific ways without constantly having to make large decisions in your mind. Identity eliminates the need for arbitrary decision-making by giving you the answer to every decision in advance.

The man whose identity is one of a non-smoker knows exactly how he will respond every time he is offered a cigarette. The racks of cigarettes on the walls of the store melt into the background – he does not even notice them. They are not consistent with his identity.

One of the greatest human needs is the need to be consistent with one’s own identity. This is one of the greatest benefits of Christianity. It provides individuals with a perfectly clear-cut and well-defined definition of their identity. Every Christian does or should know exactly who they are, what they believe, where they are going, and what they are doing – because each of these things can be linked back to the identity of the Christian.

If you are a Christan, you have specific beliefs which you support with specific actions. You know how to behave and what is required of you if you have taken the time to firmly establish your identity and decide what you believe.

Clearly identifying yourself as a Christian makes it easier to live and make decisions because it eliminates the gray zones of spirituality. These gray zones are what make the philosophies of liberalism so problematic for personal discipline.

The philosophy of liberalism teaches that humans are essentially always going to fail, that sin is practically interwoven into human nature. So far, the philosophy is mostly true. Where it goes off track, however, is with its lackadaisical approach to sin.

Sin is considered to be inevitable, therefore, why fight against it? It is at that moment that the liberal philosophy, with all its good intentions, becomes very weak.

The identity of the liberal scoffs at and accepts sin. The spirit and identity of the hardcore Christian should be one of hatred of sin. The spartan Christian at all times possesses an extreme distaste for evil and self-imposes a rigorous standard of behavior. The normal Christian lives this way as well but is less extreme.

One of the benefits of a hardcore outlook on Christianity is its clearly defined identity.

With a clearly defined identity, choices increase in clarity as well. The difference between right and wrong is not blurred as it is with the philosophy of liberalism.

The person who is a world-class athlete became that way because he/she had a firmly established identity of who they were. They then backed up this identity with belief and efficient action in the direction of their goals. With the identity in place, it becomes more difficult to skip a day of training than it is to train. It is more difficult to cheat on their diet than to stay on the path of discipline.

Because as enjoyable as it would be to skip training or eat poorly, it simply does not align with their identity or with their long-term goals. The powerful pull of human nature to be consistent with the identity will allow them to stay disciplined and choose to train and eat correctly day after day after day.

That is the power of the principle of identity.

With Christianity, you have a natural identity that you can use to direct your life. On top of that, you can leverage the innate human need to be consistent with the self in order to motivate proper behavior.

Hypocrisy is not a natural state for human beings. Unless we are truly evil and self-motivated, we want to be consistent with ourselves. When we discover that we are not consistent with ourselves, we either go into denial, make excuses and rationalize, or we change our behavior to match our identity.

But notice that even excuses and rationalizations are attempts by human beings to change the definition of their behaviors so that they can stay consistent with their identity. If they can rationalize the sin, then they are still consistent with their Christian identity, even if only in their minds.

The more difficult path is to change the individual behavior instead of rationalizing it – and changing it to match the clearly established and defined personal identity.

It is also critical to include the clear-cut identity of sin. When we refuse to call sin what it is, we give it power. Because then eventually we lose the ability to differentiate between sin and good behavior. This is playing out to the detriment of all mankind at all times.

When you do not know that you should not pick up and play with venomous snakes, you end up picking one up and having it bite you in the face. Not because the snake was not dangerous, to begin with, but because you did not know the difference between a venomous and a non-venomous snake.

Ignorance and lack of ability to clearly identity danger can result in disastrous results. The same applies to sin. The inability to recognize and call out sin results in serial sin. If you do not know it is wrong, then what is to stop you from participating in that evil?

With a clearly defined identity, you give yourself the power to know exactly what behaviors are beneficial and which ones are not.

Also, with a clearly defined definition of sin, you give yourself the presence of mind to recognize evil for what it is and avoid it. You elevate your perspective as a general elevates his vision over the battlefield. With his enhanced viewpoint, detachment, and emotional control, he can make the most rational decisions possible. He can take advantage of terrain and the various strengths and weaknesses of his units. Without the understanding of the identity of his men, the identity of the enemy general, and the identity of the terrain, his battle would be disastrous.

You must take advantage of the principle of human identity when it comes to your own life. If you have a Christian identity, you already have the answer to many questions. You have a written and recorded standard of behavior in the Bible. Enclosed in its pages are the ways that you must behave as a human being. You no longer have to engage in the mentally arduous process of discerning moral truth. You can do that if you want, but you have the answers laid out already.

I am not encouraging you to avoid thinking for yourself and making your own decisions.

But many times people are placed in a situation where they do not know what to do, they have to answer those questions in the heat of the moment. That is not the best time to try to understand the underlying moral laws of the Bible. At that point, you simply need rapid decision-making.

Are you going to have sex with that woman or not? You have to decide in seconds, there is no time for moral and philosophical debate.

Are you going to drink to the point of drunkenness or not?

Do you steal or not?

You can work out the fine details of moral law later. But the war is coming for you.

And you will not have time to think about all those things in your soft, plush robe while reading your watered-down version of the Bible in your climate-controlled home on your day off from your cushy job. You will have to answer those questions in the heat of battle, with your sword drawn and your teeth clenched. At that moment you will rely on the strength of an identity carved in stone.

Without that identity, you will not know how to act. Without knowing how to act you will fail. Having your identity clearly defined and understood can prevent this from ever happening.

It allows you to engage in binary decision-making. Just answer yes or no. Every moral decision can be boiled down to a yes or no question that is simple to answer if your identity is established. If that identity is not established, you will be unsure and wavering. The unsure warrior loses his footing and falls. Do not place yourself in that position.

Conduct yourselves like men.

Should Bible Study Be Fun?

If fun is the goal of your bible study, you will get nothing out of the study except fun. You will forget everything you “learned” and you will not benefit.

Nothing has to be fun in order to be productive.

I have been to a few bible studies where it became very apparent that the purpose of the “study” was socialization. We “studied” for about a half-hour and followed it up with two and a half hours of socializing. Now there is nothing wrong with socialization, but that is not the purpose of something called a study.

The goal and purpose of a bible study is to increase the knowledge of the Bible. Sometimes that is enjoyable and sometimes it is not. It does not matter either way. This is because study and training, even the study of biblical subjects, can be likened to your training in the gym. Sometimes it is fun to train and other times it is a drag. Sometimes you are motivated and the process is enjoyable, and other times training is simply focused work. At times you may have to spend most of your focus and energy just to maintain a moderate level of effort.

None of that matters. How you are feeling before, during, and after your study is irrelevant.

What matters is if you accomplished the goal you set or not. Did you complete the appropriate volume of work or not? Are you making progress towards your end-state goals or are you becoming stagnant?

The philosophy of liberalism teaches you that you are good just the way you are. The philosophy of the hardcore Christian should be one of constant improvement. Day in and day out you are taking steps towards your goal. No matter how small or insignificant those steps may seem, you are taking steps. That puts you miles ahead of the person who believes they are fine just the way they are. Those people have sat down and may never get back up to work towards their goals.

Productivity in the study of the Bible will never be limited based on the fun-ness of that specific activity.

You have to study hard enough to induce learning, and that is not always fun.

Neuroscientist Andrew Huberman talks about effort and learning in the podcast linked above. One of the most interesting things he notes is that when you are studying or trying to learn something new if you want to enter a period of time of aggressive, focused learning, you have to first walk through a barrier of mental discomfort. When you are first settling in to learn and are getting frustrated with the material, your brain releases epinephrine, which is also called adrenaline. This epinephrine release is what gives you that feeling of frustration and mental agitation.

But if you continue to press on and work through that feeling, you can enter a period of relative smoothness. It is not that your work suddenly becomes effortless, but you are no longer “out of the groove“, so to speak. You are in the groove and ready for efficient action.

Imagine that, in order to enter a state of hard focus, you must walk through that initial period of agitation and frustration.

And any human being who has attempted to learn something and has hit that wall of frustration knows that it is not fun.

But when it comes to our Bible study, we want everything to be all happy and fun and fine and dandy. But if our goal is results, mental improvement, and an increase of the knowledge of the Bible, we need to acknowledge that we will have to walk through those moments of frustration in order to get in the groove of working.

You have to train hard enough to induce muscle growth, and that is not always fun.

How does muscle growth relate to bible study? Here’s how:

Most people are familiar with the fact that if you want muscle growth in your body, you have to train hard enough to trigger the muscle growth process. In Exercise Physiology this is called the “stimulus threshold“. The basic idea is that you have to push to a certain level of effort in order to “flip on the light switch” of protein synthesis – otherwise known as muscle growth. And below this threshold, you will see very little, if any, muscle growth for your alleged “efforts“.

I postulate to you that your Bible training must be the same way. It must be to a certain intensity so that an increase in Bible knowledge is stimulated. You must push yourself so you can “flip on the lightswitch” for learning any subject, most importantly the subject of the bible.

If you decide not to train hard in the gym or in your study, you simply will not improve, it is as simple as that.

And this is where those who subscribe to the philosophy of liberalism find themselves time and time again. Theirs is a philosophy of comfort and ease. “Why push yourself to improve when you were built to fail?” the liberal may rhetorically ask. The merits of that argument can be discussed on another day, but the results of that attitude are brazenly apparent.

When you approach your study with a lackadaisical attitude motivated by the hippie-like philosophy of liberalism, you will not make any improvements for years. You may “read your bible every day“, allegedly, but you will make no progress. Because you simply did not push yourself hard enough to give your mind the necessary stimulus for growth and improvement.

When fun is prioritized over faith, you have the dysfunctional youth group model where no one knows anything.

The priority in the Bible study training model should be the improvement of biblical knowledge. When fun is made the priority, no one improves. And people fail to improve for years at a time while being around others who fail to improve for years at a time.

We call this the “youth group” – where fun is prioritized over faith. Where parents believe that 2 youth activities per week will stop their kids from having sex before marriage. And it comes as a great shock to them when their kids leave the church because they had no substance or foundation for their faith. They had no intensity imposed on them by their teachers. There was no need for the improvement of the individual because there was no enforced accountability – as low-value as accountability is.

But what will always happen is people will resort to the type of “work” that provides them with the most comfort in their lives. They will never pursue what seems overtly difficult or what will require the most effortful work.

This is why people gravitate towards the philosophy of liberalism – because it is one of ease and comfort. It is a philosophy of social acceptance and personal acceptance. There is no need for you to work on yourself and improve in those groups. Everyone is just as broken as you are, why move on and improve yourself and your life?

Fun should never be prioritized over your faith. The priority should be discipline, personal obedience, and personal improvement. The priority should be on the systems that create results rather than on the social events that provide nothing.

Set rigorous standards for yourself. Push yourself to read and focus more.

I – Start with the reading – read a small volume of Bible each day.

A small amount of Bible reading is better than no Bible reading. Even better is a small amount of bible reading combined with intensity. Arnold Schwarzenegger has famously stated that he could do one set of one exercise for one muscle and have it be more productive than someone else’s entire workout. He attributed this to the focus and intensity with which he would approach that single set. Another bodybuilder, Mike Mentzer, popularized a training protocol of one set per muscle per workout, as few as 2 times per week. Each set consisted of an all-out, max intensity effort that pushed the muscles to absolute failure.

Your Bible study can be the same way – put massive effort into a smaller volume and you will make progress. An extremely intense reading of ten verses will be more effective than a cursory reading of 4 chapters.

II – Incorporte memory work – you need to be writting the commands of God in your mind.

Do this through the focused work of memorization. Start with the aggressive bible verse collection.

It is popular in Bible study to do these cross-reference exercises where you link various passages to other passages in the Bible. This is a good exercise. But even more valuable is the memorization of Bible passages. There is no faster way to cross-reference the Bible than to have the entire length of the passages in your mind.

III – Hold yourself to a higher standard of behavior. Do not associate with people who mock at the strenuous life.

Enjoy the strenuous life as a man. You need to dive into the work with focused intensity. Others may look at your effort and what you are doing and try to discourage you. Some people will always try to discourage you from training too hard, working too hard, or trying too hard to succeed. This is only because your work ethic makes the feebleness of their work ethic painfully obvious to them. They never want to work, so they do not want you to work either.

If you start working you call into question their lethargy. They are forced to acknowledge that they are either lazy or that you are crazy for your effort. And much of the time people will remain in their fixed mindsets and call you crazy for your effort.

You must reject these people. Split from the pack. Do not worry about being a part of the group, you do not need the group. Your main concern is with the improvement of the self. If the group comes into conflict with that goal, you need to separate yourself from the group. Invest in your effort and it will pay you dividends always.

Conduct Yourselves Like Men.

Exogenous Motivation – 3 Ways to Be Internally Motivated

Most people are aware of medical treatments like exogenous TRT (Testosterone Replacement Therapy). As men age, they no longer produce the same levels of testosterone that they once did in their youth. Married men with children have this happen even earlier in life, which is one of the attributing causes to the reasons why many Christian men don’t get the frequency of sex they want.

Many men today have turned to the miracle drug of TRT to make up for these reduced levels. One of the consequences of this therapy is that the natural production of testosterone in your own body is essentially eliminated for life. If you decide to go on TRT, you will be on it forever. You will no longer be able to produce your own testosterone in your own body.

Here is a little bit of vocabulary for those who are interested. When your body produces something like testosterone naturally within your own cells, it is said to be “Endogenous” production. “Endo” means “in, inside, or internal” and “gen” means “formed” or “created“. So endogenous means “formed internally” or “formed inside“. When Leydig cells in your body create testosterone, they are doing so endogenously.

Exogenous, however, means that something is being introduced from the outside, in this case, testosterone.

“Ex” means “out of” or “outside“. So exogenous literally means “created outside“. When you inject testosterone, you are injecting an exogenous compound. That exogenous compound will shut down the endogenous production of testosterone.

Many people think that if they introduce something like testosterone exogenously, it will just stack on top of their natural testosterone production. But this almost never happens. It does not matter what the compound is, if it is introduced from the outside, the body will shut down its natural production of that same compound.

The body is smart, it never wastes resources.

So there is no reason for it to continue making a compound that it is able to get from the outside. The body also self-limits resource production. If it detects that there is enough of a compound in your blood or body, it won’t produce it anymore, at least until it detects low levels again. The optimal levels of that compound in the body have been reached, and the body could spend energy on more important functions rather than adding to an already sufficient level of testosterone.

All of that is to say that if you are in the habit of getting your testosterone from an outside source, you eliminate the ability to create it naturally. This is a metaphor for life.

Also, if you are in the habit of constantly looking outside of yourself for motivation, you are getting motivation exogenously and damaging your ability to create your own motivation.

It should be every man’s goal to learn how to create the motivational fire from within. The motivation for your actions must be internal and driven from a place of personal goals. If you chronically supplement your own externally generated goals with externally generated motivation, you will never be able to motivate yourself.

That is not to say that external motivation is worthless or useless, it isn’t. It is very valuable to occasionally look outside ourselves for motivation. But it must be an occasional thing. We must internalize enough of those motivational stories and images so that we progressively reduce the need to go outside of ourselves for motivation. By doing this we turn ourselves into self-sustaining machines that can work for extended periods of time without rest and without the need for motivation from an external source.

Learn to develop your motivation from within.

1. Learn from outside examples

Acquire motivation externally at first, but reduce this over time by internalizing the stories and lessons you learn. It should be your goal to wean off of external motivation as a baby weans off of milk. You must also get to the point where when you are not as motivated as you want, instead of looking to YouTube or to mentors, you can look into your own mind and create that motivation.

This does start by having many mentors and many external sources of motivation. But you must acknowledge now that it is your primary goal to develop internal motivation. Reduce your need for external help over time. We never get to a place of complete independence as men, but it should act as an ideal nonetheless.

We will always have teachers, mentors, and people who motivate us and help us improve, but we should not be reliant on them to the point of weakness. If we cannot even get off the couch and into the gym without watching workout motivation videos, then we are too dependent on that external motivation.

If you cannot open your Bible and train without being motivated in your Bible study group, then you are too dependent on social structures for your own discipline.

At the end of the day, every man is forced to rely on himself. You can depend on, no one. You can rely on no one. And sadly, you can trust no one but yourself. You are the only one who is going to have the ability to do your own work. You can watch all the workout videos you want, but you have to put in your own work and soak your own shirt in your own sweat if you want to look in the mirror and see any changes in your own body. No one is going to be able to lift you up, you must do everything for yourself.

Your goal is to be a self-sustaining powerhouse of a man who generates his own mental food and energy. That must and always will be the ultimate goal. Then you are no longer just a student, but you are a teacher and mentor to other men who must do the same thing in their own time.

2. Visualize and create those same motivating images within your own mind.

When you watch those motivating workout videos on YouTube, what is happening in your mind? You are filling it with images of the possibilities in this world. You are clearly and vividly reminded of what the body is capable of when men are willing to push it and force it to work. Why can you not do the same thing in your mind?

While it is true that there will almost always be something more motivating about a video compared to what you can visualize in your mind, that is no excuse to avoid developing the powers of visualization and internal motivation. You can vividly create or recreate the same images that you see on the screen in your own mind. You can play the same music, create the same camera cuts and hear the same words as you hear from an external source.

When you notice that you are running low on energy and motivation, instead of running to external sources, try visualization first. Imagine all the same things that normally motivate you. Create them in your own mind. Start working on building images now and it will become progressively easier to do so.

3. Establish identity

Make your identity congruent with your goal. Force yourself to believe that you are acting in accordance with your truest nature when you work towards your goal. This will create more motivation.

One of the greatest human drives is the need to be consistent with one’s self-generated identity. We hate being inconsistent with ourselves.

Hypocrisy is unnatural, but it exists because hypocritical behavior is often dormant. We do not realize that we are violating the very same principles that we preach. Once we realize this, we have two choices. Most people choose to go down the path of denial and rationalization. Somehow their behavior is different or they have a special circumstance. The other path is one of recognition and immediate change. We can take advantage of this powerful human need to be consistent with ourselves and use it as the impetus to adjust our behavior.

To create your identity – who do you want to be?

Imagine vividly the person you want to become and examine your choices now. How are your current choices violating your personal identity? If you can force yourself to see the incongruency and inconsistency, you can spur yourself on to change. Humans hate being incongruent with themselves, so this is an excellent tool for change.

Establish clearly who you want to be and refuse to accept any behavior that violates that identity. This is one of the great benefits of Christianity. It provides a clear, black-and-white identity for human beings. That identity then drives human behavior.

If my identity is that I am a Christain, I am forced to act the way Christians act if I want to be consistent with that identity. I cannot engage in behaviors that violate that identity. If I do, I again, am a hypocrite who will either live in denial of his behavior or realize his asynchronicity and change. A clear and well-defined identity is a tool of massive power.

Try these 3 tools to increase your internal motivation. Reduce your intake of exogenous motivation and become a man of power.

Conduct yourselves like men.

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