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The Ancient Warrior Avatar

Not everyone is so fortunate to have a mentor. Especially in the modern days when mastering a trade is less frequently accomplished. Very few of us have had proper role models during our upbringing.

Sure, we had a few men who tried to suggest they were good at being men because they were religious, but we understand that is a conflation. Being a good man does not automatically mean you are good at being a man. There are plenty of good men who are not strong, courageous, honorable or have gained mastery in some skill. Yet they will still take the time to tell you that you should be like them or that you should be like one of their equally unimpressive friends.

What is a man to do if he has no mentors? I will give you two options.

The first is simple: find mentors online. There are plenty of masculine men who make and post videos or write articles online. Even though you cannot be with all of them in person, you can still be heavily influenced by them. Many of these men make themselves available through coaching or webinars where you can speak to them face to face. If you have not had a masculine mentor in religion, buying some coaching from a masculine mentor may be well worth the investment.

After all, you were going to spend that money on something else. You might waste it on the ethereal potential of a job offer. By that, I mean that many people waste tens of thousands of dollars purchasing knowledge during their college years only to have nothing to show for it. If you are willing to make that kind of investment in a system that only produces results half of the time or less, why not try investing in some personal training for your character?

Even if you decide not to do that, there are plenty of masculine men on the internet that you can learn from and begin to emulate.

This was my path as a young man. I had no mentors growing up in the church, and I luckily stumbled upon men like Greg Plitt, Elliot Hulse, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and others. By listening to the speeches and advice of these men I was able to integrate their life philosophy. The only philosophy I got in the church was that of blind obedience. I am all for obeying the commands of the God of War (Ex. 15:3), there is no need to have blind faith. If you dig deep enough you will find that the laws make sense, that they are protective measures for our wellbeing so we can live quiet lives and minimize unnecessary trouble.

Learn from the men of the world but remember to still act as a man of God.

The second option is one of my favorites. It is called the Ancient Warrior Avatar. This is a character you create in your mind who speaks to you and gives you instructions. We are already talking to ourselves, so we might as well take total control over what we are saying and make it good and positive. We can do this by using the ancient warrior in our minds.

First, he must be created. This is done by visualizing who you want to be many years down the road. Perhaps 20, 30, 40 years or more. Who will you be and what will you have accomplished? What will your eyes have seen and what wisdom will you have gathered? What perception will you have and what strategies will you employ? Decide who you want to be when you are older and create the image of that person in your mind.

This is the Ancient Warrior avatar.

He has already seen all the war and trouble of your life and has survived. Now you want his knowledge and assistance. When it comes time to take actions that you do not like, you can step into this character and act like him. When you encounter those situations where you would rather not be disciplined, you have to think about who you are becoming many years down the road. Would you as an ancient warrior fall prey to weakness at this moment? No. It would stop you from becoming that man later in life.

What you are doing here is creating an identity. You are emulating the warrior you want to be, and this makes it far more likely that you will act in accordance with those warrior values.

Whenever you begin to have thoughts creep into your mind, call upon the ancient warrior. Have an image of him in your mind. What does he look like? Does he have a long beard and walking stick? You need to be as detailed and clear in your visualization as possible. Then once you encounter difficulty, visualize the ancient warrior speaking to you.

One of my favorite lines that the ancient warrior uses to me is, “Demonstrate the power of your will”. Then as quickly as I can I initiate whatever action I was avoiding. Whether it is a cold shower, a training session, or some work for my job or the website, I immediately jump into it before my mind can generate any more excuses.

Your ancient warrior can say whatever he wants.

But you need to view him as a part of you but still as a separate entity. A person who can speak to you and give assistance when you need it like an old warrior training up a new generation of fighters. You are that new generation, so make an alliance with your mind. Make an alliance with your thinking and do not allow your mind to be a place of defeat.

One of the benefits of this character is that eventually, you do not want to let him down. If your visualization is extremely clear, you will want to become that warrior all those years in the future, so you will endure the pain of discipline today. Even though he is a fabrication, you still want to live up to his expectations.

Another legitimate visualization exercise is to seek the counsel of this warrior. I know this continues to sound more “woo-woo” and in a way it is. But that does not mean you cannot get benefits from the exercise.

To seek the counsel of the warrior you need to imagine yourself walking down a path towards the home of this warrior. He lives in your mind, yes, but you need a place for him to live. A place you can travel to and seek out his wisdom. So, decide where he will live. Will it be a cabin, a temple, a fortress, a dojo, or some other place? I would recommend that it be a place that represents the intersection of discipline and serenity.

Once you have built your ancient warrior’s dwelling place with as much detail and clarity as possible, you can then travel there in your own mind.

For this exercise, we will say our warrior lives in a secluded cabin in the woods. Imagine yourself walking along the edge of a river that parallels a forest. You continue along until you come to a well-worn path leading directly into the forest. You walk along that path, admiring the oaks and enjoying the scent of the pines, enjoying the deer and other wildlife that run through the trees. To the side, you can hear the sound of a babbling stream that shoots off the side of the river you traveled beside earlier.

In the distance, you begin to see a slight clearing with a cabin in the middle. There is smoke rising from the chimney and hot coals in the forge. You walk up to the door, open it and enter. There is the ancient warrior, sitting comfortably in a chair with complete peace, but you can see in his eyes that he could leap into a warlike frenzy in just a moment. You sit down, and state your problem, asking a question from him. Then simply listen to his answer. Perhaps it does not come immediately, but you will get an answer.

This is just a very detailed visualization exercise with the goal of giving a problem to your subconscious mind for solving. The detail is very important because it tricks the mind into thinking that it is real. You need to have this level of detail in your own exercise. And after you complete it, eventually an answer will come “bubbling up” from the back of your mind, as many great insights do. Even though it seems a little strange, there is no doubt you are handing off a problem to your subconscious mind, which will produce a solution much faster than the conscious mind usually can. All of this can happen through the simple power of visualization.

Become the ancient warrior you visualize and then assist others.

If you did not have good mentors growing up, you have all the more responsibility to be a mentor to other men. Most of the young men around you are growing up with weak, beta male fathers who do not know how to lead. It is going to be your responsibility to make whatever impact you can on those young men. Be the mentor that you would have wanted but were never able to have. This will give you peace, and you will have become the Ancient Warrior.

Isolate and Annihilate

When the Romans were laying waste to the Gallic tribes around them, they frequently utilized an important strategy. It was the strategy of “Divide and Conquer”. We will learn about another strategy: isolate and annihilate.

Now when we hear this phrase, sometimes we do not think of it the way the Romans would have thought of it. We hear “divide and conquer” and think about splitting up a task and working together with our team to finish it. We think it means to separate our forces and send them in all directions.

What the Romans meant was that the enemy must be divided if they are to be conquered. So, when it came to the tribes of Gaul, the imperative of the Romans was to split them up. Cause them to break their alliances or fight amongst themselves and they could be destroyed one by one. The Romans would cause internal division so that their enemies could be more easily defeated.

Today I propose to you a slightly different idea but with a personal development application. I call it “Isolate and Annihilate”.

What it means is that we are going to list all the faults we want to eliminate in our lives and start attacking them one at a time. We will split them off from each other, not viewing our faults as one giant mass, but instead as tiny individual parts adding up to a pseudo-powerful whole.

This may seem simple, but the classic religious approach to personal development has always been the “flash in the pan” method. Apply a massive amount of effort for approximately four days and then give up and remain the same for the rest of the year. It is the New Year’s resolution of the church.

This is why year after year, people in the church make no progress on themselves. Think about it: how many people in the church do you know who have actually improved areas of personal weakness in their lives? Perhaps 2%?

While there are plenty of people who talk and preach about changing themselves, in reality, no one is willing to put in the effort to change.

It is an element of human nature, and change is expensive for the human organism. Just as most people are not interested in the general concepts of self-improvement, most people are also not interested in spiritual improvement. They are interested in it enough to talk about it, but not enough that they take action.

Here is our protocol for actually making improvements in ourselves. Isolate and Annihilate.

I – Identify the Enemy

It is hard to fight an enemy if you do not know who the enemy is. War is difficult if the enemy is dressed like civilians and you cannot tell the two apart. You need to have a firm idea in your mind of what you are trying to improve before you can actually start to improve it. Most people make mistakes right here! They go to war with the vapor and are surprised when they get lost in the fog.

Perhaps they want to get in better physical shape, so they just mindlessly start exercising and “eating healthy” with no real direction and end up going in circles. They have not identified specifically what their problem is. Is it a lack of muscle, excess fat, or lack of heart health? It could be any number of things, but without identifying exactly what the enemy is, every attempt at change will be ineffective at best and will fail at worst.

To correct this, we need to make a large list of all the faults and undesirable character traits we currently have.

Write down everything from character flaws to sins you are at war with. Make this list exhaustive; leave nothing out. You are going to total war, and everything must be considered. Do not be alarmed if your list seems massive and unconquerable. That which can be identified can be destroyed, and you have just identified every enemy you have.

Draw a line down the center of a blank piece of paper. On the left put character flaws and, on the right, put sins. The right side should have more behavioral components while the left should have personality components.

Just by making this list, you are ahead of the majority of people in the world. Because now you have a written list of enemies and by virtue of that you have a written list of goals. Once you have your list, move to part two of the protocol.

II – Avoid Taking on Too Much Change at Once

As mentioned before, the classic error of most people is attempting too much change at once and burning out. When it comes to their health, they try to change their diet, weight training, cardiovascular exercise, and sleep habits all at once. They do this even though in every one of those areas they have not practiced discipline for years. The result is that they burn out, quit everything, and are back where they started.

What we want to do is select just one behavior, flaw, or sin to focus our efforts on. So, on your list, take a pen and circle the biggest bottleneck trait or behavior. Circle the most prominent character flaw or sin you are dealing with. This should be the one that, if crushed, will have the greatest impact on improving your overall character. Most men have “that one thing” holding them back from being truly excellent. It could be gossip, a bad temper, or a drinking problem. They may have many other smaller level evils, but there is always one behavior that is so prominent even the people around him can see it.

After circling the biggest problem, put a box around the smallest problem.

This can be some habit or behavior that is annoying despite being quite small. If you fix it, it should give you a certain sense of pride and confidence that you can change other aspects of your life.

So, in the end, you should have two flaws identified: the biggest and the smallest.

III – Attack One Flaw at a Time

Do not try to tackle your whole list at once. You need to systematically destroy one fault at a time. What would have happened to the Roman legions if they have tried to conquer every single tribe in Gaul at once? It would have been a disaster. They would have needed to spread their troops so thin that they would have been overrun at every battle.

Rather, they needed to systematically break down the oppositions so they could be crushed. You must do the same. Forging your character is a systematic process that will take time and persistence and will not work if you attempt to change everything about yourself at once.

IV – Choose the Dragon or the Wasp

Now you get to make a decision: do you attack your largest or smallest fault first? While you can do what you want, I would encourage you to try attacking the small fault first, especially if you have never tried to change yourself in any major way up until now.

The reason for this is that once you crush that small, annoying part of who you are, it will fill you with a small dash of confidence. The net value of your character increases and you begin to think positively. You start to believe that you actually do possess the power to change yourself, and that belief will lead to even more change.

Begin to work your way up the list of personal defects that you made earlier.

Systematically crushing them one at a time from weakest to strongest. All along the way you are building confidence and positive pride in your character. You are developing the inner belief that is going to allow you to face the dragon with a ferocity that you did not even know you possessed. You will have built the strength of character by forging your own path and improving yourself. Once you get to the dragon, it will not even be a problem. Through the strategy of isolate and annihilate, you have demonstrated the power of your will.

Of course, you always do have the option to attack the dragon first. I think for a great many people that would simply be too much to ask. They cannot muster the willpower and long-term discipline to stay focused on an enemy for that long. They will begin to break down, lose focus and doubt themselves. Then they will question why they even tried to change in the first place. Finally, they will quit on themselves, because they had not developed that level of inner strength necessary to face the dragon.

I will not deny that if you can attack the dragon first and crush it, it will do wonders for your mind. Then you can enjoy an easy descent as you systematically crush your character flaws in reverse order, moving from the strongest to the weakest.

Continue repeating this process until you have the character you want. Truthfully, you will likely never be where you want to be. You will never believe you have arrived, but that is okay. It does not mean you should not work to improve yourself. The rewards of wisdom and character that come from correcting your behavior are valuable beyond measure.

V – Hold the Line

After your character is established, when you are finished with your isolate and annihilate strategy, it needs time to solidify. You do not want all your hard work to fly out of the window. Yet how many people lose fifty pounds for a wedding just to gain it all back over the next year? How many men quit smoking, drinking, using drugs, or looking at pornography only to fall back into that pattern of behavior time and time again? To avoid this, we need to hold the line.

Holding the line is primarily mental. The reason is that most people relapse into their old behavior because they think, “Well, I’m in shape now so that means I’m good to go! No need to keep training and managing my nutrition”. That attitude is a recipe for disaster, but it is the most common attitude in human beings. We like it when things take care of themselves after we have done our part. Unfortunately, character will always require some degree of upkeep. It will not be a large amount of upkeep, but it will still be required.

I submit a different mentality to you today. Once you correct your behavior, you should double down on your discipline. Become even harder and more aggressive about your training. Become more militaristic about your self-discipline. Not in a self-flagellating type of way but understanding that this attitude allows for the maintenance of gains.

For at least a few weeks, you need to train the mind to never let its guard down.

You are at constant war against the enemy, and he is waiting for you to look away or fall asleep at your post just for a moment so he can strike. Prevent this by being hyper-vigilant and intense.

Maintenance is mental, simply do not let your guard down until you have made your new character or behavior completely automatic. You need time to establish any new behavior as a habit. Once you are automatically performing the way you want to, then you can slowly begin to transfer your attention to the other parts of yourself that you want to change.

To isolate and annihilate is to split your overall character into small components, select the areas that need change the most, isolate them and crush them. Through this practice, you will gain limitless personal control and strength.

Become The Strongest Link in The Chain

Strength must be built alone. Whether it be physical, mental, or emotional strength does not matter. All that matters is that you do the vast majority of your training by yourself. I talk about this often because to become the strongest link while you are alone is so critical to becoming a powerful man.

Most people make the mistake of always training with and around others. When they do this, they may be able to build strength and perhaps even perform better with the help of their friends. But that is not true strength. It is not true strength because it is borrowed strength.

If I strength train with a partner and feed off his energy, I am not solely responsible for my strength gains. Because I needed to borrow his strength to perform because I did not have the strength to do it myself.

Now there is nothing wrong with getting that type of help on occasion. But If I only ever train with partners and with teammates, I will never develop my own strength. I will get into the habit of borrowing their strength instead of developing my own.

This will not be a problem in the present moment and maybe not for months or years, but eventually, it will be a problem.

Eventually, I will find myself in a situation with the team where I am the weakest link. I am the weakest link because even though I improved my strength in training, I was using borrowed strength of my teammates. And as a result, I never developed my own inner strength of mind.

The cure is to train alone. The only way to be the strongest link is to build your strength in isolation. When you have no choice but to rely completely and entirely on yourself in training, you develop far more than your physical strength. You develop the inner strength of the mind. You develop the valuable asset of self-reliance. This is vitally important because you cannot rely on anyone in this world, not even on your Christian brethren. The church preaches teamwork, but the Adversary never attacks you when you are at your strongest. He never attacks you when you are with your team. He waits until you are alone and have taken your armor off, and at that moment he strikes.

See Mark 4

Who are you in those moments? Who is the man you see in the mirror when you are all alone? Do you see a man who has built his own strength from the inside out or do you see a man who is weak but has created the illusion of strength by constantly training around strong people?

Make no mistake about it, it is useful to be around teammates, to train with others, and to rely on their strength especially during difficult times. But it is equally important to develop your own strength. Religion does not teach you this so I am telling you about it now, hoping that you will begin to learn the importance of solo training.

How do you apply this principle?

It is quite easy, but something no one does. Train alone. 80% of your training time should be done alone. This ensures that you build authentic strength of character. This means you are never the weakest link in any situation.

When you are doing your exercises, you need to do them alone. Does this make training more dangerous? Absolutely. What is life without a little danger? But it also guarantees that you will give a much greater effort than you would if you were training with someone else. Or even if you would give the same effort, at least you are relying on yourself instead of borrowing your partner’s strength. When there is no one there to help you, you have no choice but to give maximum effort or injure yourself.

I know this may be beginning to sound like an absurd, isolationist philosophy. But I assure you the only purpose of this is to motivate you to spend more time developing your own strength by yourself.

If all you ever do is train around teammates, their strengths can cover your weaknesses.

Because of this, you may never even know what your weaknesses are much less improve them. Getting away from the team puts you in a position where you are forced to take inventory of your physical, emotional, or mental strength, look for areas of weaknesses and begin to fix them.

I continue to use the physical strength analogy because it is easy to understand and relate to. But these principles apply just as much to mental and emotional strength. You cannot always rely on others for emotional or mental strength. Those people will not always be there for you. You need to be training for a worst-case scenario. And in every worst-case scenario, you are completely alone. So, train alone so you can be the strongest link. Do not mistake group strength for individual strength. Who cares what two people can do while working together? Tell me the story of the man who overcame the odds all by himself and did something spectacular.

Tell me the story of the man who becomes the strongest link by training in some isolated dojo for years.

You will not always have allies to form a shield wall with. You will need to be confident enough in your own abilities that you have no fear should you have to walk alone.

Fearlessness in walking alone is developed by first training alone. Then by improving alone. And finally, by mastering yourself alone. You have to strengthen yourself before you can help others. All help, whether physical, emotional, financial or otherwise can only come from a position of strength.

So, put yourself in that position, give yourself that strength by training alone. Then once you have become a great warrior or mind and body, then rejoin the ranks of the team. At that point, you can contribute far more to the team than you could because, because you have become the strongest link. Train alone so you can be more powerful when you train with others.

What Causes Depression in Christians?

It surprises many people to hear that depression is common among Christian populations. This may lead them to ask questions like, “Well what is the point of faith if you are still going to be depressed? What causes depression in Christians?” Good question.

Religion is not an anti-depressant. While it does give meaning to suffering and provides the standards of behavior that lead to peace, it cannot magically cure depression. Religion is not a magic pill that makes everyone’s problems go away. While it is common for religion to be depicted that way, there is still work that must be done on an individual basis. And this is what most people do not want to hear. They want religion to be the one-size-fits-all cure for every negative emotion and malady known to man. While that is a noble desire, they want this for the wrong reasons. They want religion to remove their need to work on themselves and remove the burden they have to work through their own problems. They approach religion with a socialist mindset, expecting to receive without first having to give.

Still, even with all the benefits of Christianity, you may be wondering why Christians can be depressed.

What causes depression in Christians? How can people with the hope of salvation be tormented in mind? This is no exhaustive list but let us look at a few common reasons.

I – Chemical Depression.

I think these are generally the minority of depression cases, but many people have chemical imbalances that require medicine to be treated. While I always admire people, who at first try to manage their depression through non-medical means, for a small percentage of the population this simply will not work. Unless they are willing to take the time to identify each hormone and neurotransmitter that may be responsible for their depression and then find out how to increase them naturally and repeat that for a period of months, they likely will remain the same and their depression will be unchanged. It is hard to tease out which hormones can be responsible for depression.

One of the big ones is serotonin. Almost every hormone has multiple jobs and one of the jobs of serotonin is mood regulation. Many of the common anti-depressants you may have heard of impact serotonin in some way. Selective-Serotonin reuptake Inhibitors, known as SSRIs, stop the body from reabsorbing serotonin before it has had its full chemical effect on the mood. Another class of drug is the Serotonin-Norepinephrine Reuptake Inhibitors, or SNRIs, which act in a similar way but also impact the uptake rate of norepinephrine, which is a chemical cousin to adrenaline.

The point of that was not to drown in details of drugs but rather to identify one of the big hormones/neurotransmitters responsible for depression.

Given that we know serotonin can play a role in depression, perhaps we can find a way to increase serotonin without the use of these drugs, which are overprescribed and often have annoying side effects.

The Journal of Psychiatry and Neuroscience in an article entitled “How to increase serotonin in the human brain without drugs” identified four possibilities: Meditation, bright light exposure, exercise, and a diet with increased tryptophan content. You can glance through the paper yourself for more details. But if you think you are low in serotonin, try these interventions first before moving on to more powerful alternatives.

Jordan Peterson also notes in his first rule for life that standing up straight with your shoulders back naturally produces serotonin.

Serotonin is not the only hormone involved in chemical depression, but it certainly is an important one.

II – Expectations

The world expects Christians to be happy, floaty, perfect human beings. The second Christians do not match the world’s idea of them, they are ridiculed. “I thought you guys were supposed to feel, act and think in X, Y, Z ways. Wow, you guys sure are a bunch of fakes”. There is no tolerance in this world for Christian people even from those who demand tolerance for themselves. Especially not when it comes to mental health.

If word gets out that a significant percentage of your local church is taking some sort of mind-altering drug to manage depression, the secular culture will have a field day with it.

Even in the church, there is no safety (as we will mention more in the next section). Christians expect their fellow Christians to be strong and powerful. Men expect other men to be masculine and never struggle with mental challenges. While it is noble to aspire to that level of extreme mental control and to hold high expectations, this comes at a cost. Now if a man does not stack up to the expectations of others, he is isolated and thinks he cannot even seek help from other men. Men should be inspiring one another to get there instead of expecting perfection from the womb.

Men must be forged from fire and steel over a period of many years.

We should not expect them to be perfected the moment they begin to take their first steps on the earth.

With heavy expectation comes two possible responses: the first is that a person lives up to the standard and succeeds. The second is that a person completely rejects the standard and everyone who imposed expectation on him. This may not happen instantly; it could happen over a period of years. Many Christians hold a shaky faith for years only to be crushed by some outside event later in life. This causes them to reject the faith and to do so with indignation.

High standards are good, high expectations are less good. A standard shows us what we should stive for while expectations tell us to get there or suffer the consequences. What cause depression in Christians? Unrealistic expectations.

III – Isolationism

Many Christians feel the need to hide this struggle. Depression is right up there with pornography in regards to the size of the stigma associated with it. Men feel that they cannot talk to other men about depression. Jim Kwik has noted this stigma as well and stated the following about mental health, this is my paraphrasing of his words: “It is okay to say that your knee or arm is hurt. But there is much less social support and acceptance if you say that your soul or mind is hurt”. He is absolutely right. There is very little support for “fake diseases” like depression and anxiety. So, men resort to suffering alone.

There is an even greater stigma when it comes to men being depressed. Again, men are expected to be impervious to all outside forces and have unbreakable wills. I would love if that were true for every man, but it is not. It is part of the reason Spartan Christianity exists, to provide tools and resources for men whose religious upbringing failed to make them the men they need to be in today’s world. Men should aim to have iron minds and be immune to depression and every struggle, but it will not happen instantly, and it will not be a fun process.

What causes depression in Christians? Isolation. Feeling like they are the only ones with their struggle.

IV – Helplessness

The majority of religion provides no tools for men to create themselves beyond “just have faith and pray”. Another chip off the religious socialism block.

Religion expects men to have iron wills but does not give them the tools with which to create those wills. You cannot treat every single mental, physical, or spiritual impairment with faith. There is still work that must be done on the part of the individual to create his own strength through the power of his thoughts. His church rarely gives him direction in that work, so he floats aimlessly on the waves of life and fails to improve himself. He is the same helpless, depressed man year after year. What causes depression in Christians? Helplessness. An attitude that is wrongfully encouraged by modern religion.

2nd and 3rd Order Consequences

A mark of a man is the ability to think beyond the present moment and consider the 2^nd and 3^rd order consequences of an action. While most people make all their decisions while stuck in the present moment with no thought for the future, a man looks ahead to see how his present action may affect future outcomes.

2^nd and 3^rd order consequences are the results that come after the main action (with its 1^st order consequence) is taken. And it usually happens that actions that are enjoyable at the moment have painful long-term results and vice versa.

Food that is bad for you tastes delicious (1^st order) but the result is that it makes you fat and lethargic (2^nd order). It just so happens that food that does not taste the best is typically good for you, especially in the long run.

The ability to look past the present moment and whether it is enjoyable or painful is how a man thinks.

You too must develop this ability. When you are going through your life and trying to make decisions, always look past the here and now. Look forward to the 2nd, 3rd, and 4^th order consequences. You need to be in the habit of thinking about how your decisions impact you long-term.

If you look around you at your peers, you will often find them doing the opposite. In college you will find them studying some simple subject matter, staying up late playing games, and hanging out with friends. They have the time of their life for a few years but later realize that they have no marketable skill. They have nothing to offer the marketplace so they end up with a low income. Then they sit around complaining about the “greedy rich”, how they are righteous for being poor and how college days were the “good ole days”.

But you have the chance to take a different route.

It is not that you never have any fun or relax, but you are focused on your time. Instead of studying an easy subject, you decide to learn a difficult STEM field or a trade. For a few years, you focus, gaining skills that the marketplace actually values and making yourself more and more of a man. A few years later and you can already see how much farther ahead you are than your peers.

They took the easy path and it led them to mediocrity. You took the difficult path, and it is leading you to wealth. All of this is because you were able to look beyond the immediate gratification of the moment and concentrate on the future. This single skill will make you more successful than 80% of your peers.

So, what are some tips to help you along this path of thinking long-term and delaying gratification?

I – Start Working on Your Vision for Yourself

You have probably heard this tip thousands of times in the self-help community, but it is no less true. In fact, you probably already have a vision for yourself. To even possess the ability to delay gratification, you must have the ability to visualize in your mind a 2^nd and 3^rd order result that is more desirable than the 1^st order pleasures. That alone is a great secret to success, but also is the reason many people fail in various pursuits.

The lack of a compelling future vision can spell the difference between giving in to immediate gratification or pressing on with discipline. Nowhere is this more clearly demonstrated than in the practice of sexual discipline until marriage. Among many reasons men do not wait for marriage is the fact that no one in religion paints a desirable picture of marriage. No one can describe marriage in a way that appeals to men.

You can blame society for perverting marriage into a high-risk/low reward deal for men. You can blame 2^nd and 3^rd wave feminism or the government. Or you can blame the feminized men running your local church for portraying marriage in a way that placing women as the objects of worship.

Either way, the disastrous result is that men do not have a compelling vision of marriage. And as a result, they have no reason to commit to it.

They hear marriage praised in vague, non-specific terms from the pulpit, but degraded in crystal clear terms from other men. Everything they hear from other men is negative, and everything they observe through their behavior is negative as well.

This clarity of speech about the negative aspects of marriage paints a crystal-clear image in the minds of young men. And that image is one of pain and suffering in marriage. But every time some man wants to say something good about marriage, it is shrouded in vaguery. Marriage is described as “Fulfilling”, “holy”, “The best thing I ever did”, “wonderful” but are never provided with any specific evidence to support those claims. Not only is marriage described in words that are so poorly defined that they would cause even a seasoned religious man to be confused, but they are never supported with any real-life evidence.

The result of this is that the negatives of marriage are easily and clearly portrayed while the positives are vague and lofty.

When the vision is not clear, the actions do not follow the vision. Actions follow the clearest vision and avoiding marriage seems to be the best decision because the negatives are extremely clear.

This is just an example of the effect of the vision, which underscores why it is so incredibly important for you to create a compelling vision in your own mind of a future you want to live. The clearer you are about your vision, the more meaning you will ascribe to the seemingly insignificant actions it takes to get there.

Get as clear as you can about your goal. Write down everything you want to achieve. Just start with your work so you do not get overwhelmed. Write down what you want to do. How do you want to spend your days? What do you want to experience mentally while you work? How do you want to feel when you come home? How much money do you want to make? What will you wear on the job?

Write down everything you can. The more you write the clearer your vision becomes. When your vision becomes clearer, your actions become easier.

Spend some time visualizing yourself doing exactly what you want to do. See yourself in your mind’s eye working, being excellent at your craft, and earning fantastic money as a result. Train your mind to see yourself as a success before you even become one. Get your mind accustomed to self-confidence and esteem. Clear visions produce clear results.

II – See the Consequences of 1^st order pleasures

You likely do not need help with this tip because if there is anything religious people are good at; it is about threatening you with consequences. While they tend to get carried away and focus exclusively on the negative, what they are saying is important.

It is necessary to understand the price we pay for actions we take, whether good or bad. Write down all the consequences of not taking action or of taking the wrong action. You can probably look around you at your peers to collect evidence for this. How often have they taken the easy road and had it come back to bite them? Likely often enough for you to notice.

They waste several years studying liberal arts and earn the same $10 per hour 5 years after graduating. They laughed and giggled their way through college and then walk around wondering why they are not successful, blaming everyone but themselves for their situation.