This is a guest post from Taylor, owner of The Path Of Spartans. Taylor is an Englishman who writes about the importance of strength and discipline in a man’s life and how those two virtues can lead a man to achieving greatness and freedom. You can follow his shenanigans on Instagram and twitter. In this article Taylor writes about how men can create order in their lives for further development and masculinity.
What does a successful civilization and a successful man have in common? They are both a result of order defeating chaos.
Order and chaos need a balance in your life, too much order and you will become tightly wound and stuck in your ways. Too much chaos and you will spin around in circles. The 80:20 rule needs to be applied here, 80% order and 20% ‘chaos’. By chaos i mean a less organised way to spend your time.
When you live a mostly ordered life those good habits that you form become second nature so that even on your off days you can’t help but follow some type of structure. Become your own George S. Patton and run your life like a military campaign.
1. Write down 3 important lists.
The first list contains your own personal values and virtues. Things such as strength, honour, discipline, persistence, courage, integrity and tenacity. Write down up to 10 of these attributes that you will make your own.
The second list is a list of daily tasks you must complete and include tick boxes for each task. My personal list contains things like, wake up at 5am, have a cold shower, do 100 press ups, read for 20 minutes, live confidently, stay well groomed, ignore online distractions. Think about what is important to your day and act accordingly.
The third list is a list of long and short term goals. Write down what you want to achieve within the next few years and set deadlines for each. If you had a goal of writing a book you could set the deadline for the end of the year for example.
2. Remember that laziness invites chaos.
Being lazy is to avoid the little jobs that need doing until you have amassed days of undone work. Persistent laziness is a form of weakness and weakness in a man cannot be tolerated.
Learn to do jobs as and when they come up, so don’t walk past that flyer you dropped on your living room floor, don’t ignore the squeaky hinge on your kitchen door and stop binge watching Netflix and start reading a book.
In the past i have rationalised my own laziness by claiming to not have the time to do the little jobs. The other word for this is denial. Accept that you have been lazy and then don’t accept it again. If you have important work to be doing, it is better to work in an ordered environment than a chaotic one.
3. Keep it in your pants.
Unless you are about to take your pants off in front of an attractive and attracted female, keep that thing out of sight. Order has never come to a man that spends his free time dick in hand and waving it around.
Lust is an extremely powerful emotion and has gotten countless men divorced, made into a laughing stock, jailed and even killed. There is a time for lust and it is never whilst alone.
4. Realise there is freedom in discipline.
Conventional wisdom would have you believe that to be disciplined is to restrict your freedom. Get that idea out of your head. Mainstream sources sell you that idea to keep you on your fat arse and ‘free’ to watch or buy whatever you like.
I feel the best and most in control when i have a rigid structure to follow. This disciplined structure prevents me from becoming a drained and rabid consumer.
To use an analogy, you are a steam train, discipline is the track, ambition is the next station and your energy levels are the coal. Without discipline you would veer off the track, down a verge and eventually grind to a halt. A train needs tracks like a man needs discipline.
5. Wake up early.
I mentioned in point 1 that i like to rise early, this is to have a controlled start to the day. Instead of rolling out of bed 5 minutes before you need to go out, try getting up 2 hours before you need to go out.
Spend that time forming good habits like reading, writing, lifting, cooking a decent breakfast and getting yourself groomed and presentable. Chaotic people leave the house without washing and they sacrifice a high quality breakfast for an energy drink. A bad start to the day is the start of a bad day in most cases and a bad day meaning a chaotic one.
6. Associate order with greatness and chaos with loserdom.
Without order we would not know the names of Theodore Roosevelt, King Leonidas, Alexander the Great, Benjamin Franklin, Richard Wagner, General Montgomery or Napoleon Bonaparte.
Great achievement is not possible when all you do is smoke weed, eat shit, look like shit and spend your free time consuming instead of creating. You can’t be 16 forever no matter how hard you try and why would you want to be?
The people that deploy the ‘YOLO decision making process’ are the ones that become jealous of the great and successful. They have not made the connection between order and high achievement. A chaotic society is akin to a scene from The walking dead whereas an ordered society is akin to 15th century Florence, the same is true of individuals.
Conclusion
Order is the light and chaos is the dark. Civilization is proof that human beings thrive living a structured life. If chaos was our destiny then we would still be shitting in holes and living in stick huts.
We need order and if we don’t give it to ourselves we will find it else were, whether that be in religion, the military, from our parents and other relationships or from our occupation. Those who have order thrust upon them by an external force are the ones most likely to fail when presented with any sort of free time or choices. Once again the ultimate lesson here is, it is up to you!
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I wake up at 5 am, but never eat until I do some exercise, or manual labor, should earn your food. Good article!
Yeah it encourages gratitude, even if you only put yourself through 10 minutes of discomfort. Thanks!
“I wake up early cause my opponent is asleep ” mike Tyson
another thing I’ve noticed for a couple of years now, it seems that being in control of your own destiny is masculine, or it’s just something men are expected of way more than women, Women simply don’t control their life destiny as much as guys, heard that on another blog/site, that’s why it seems like that, keyword, it seems.