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The Art Of The Scholarly Warrior (Society Of Stoics)

This is a guest post by Victor Amerigo who runs the great website Society of Stoics where he covers masculinity, Stoicism, and how to get the most out of life. Highly recommend you check his site out. You can also follow him on Twitter for updates as well as general wisdom. In this article Victor tells us how to become both a scholar and a warrior. Enjoy!

Idleness kills. Over preparation can quickly become counterproductive. You can read copious amounts of information but if you never enact the philosophies you learn you only set yourself in the same situation if not further back. On the other end of the spectrum, acting without thoroughly thinking about the consequences could do the same damage. It is not enough of to be a man of wisdom in today’s society; you must be a man of action. In order to be a leader, you need to have the archetype of a scholar and a warrior.

The Separation

Let’s look at some applicable modern examples. Think about the men of wisdom in the 20th and 21st centuries. Nikola Tesla, a genius inventor, died in a destitute state. Elon Musk, a entrepreneurial genius who puts in 100 hours per week, is more or less sitting on top of the world with wealth from Zip2, PayPal, and Tesla Motors. We can estimate from royalties that Robert Greene, author of The 48 Laws of Power, has a net worth of around $4 million. 50 Cent on the other hand, a man who lives the 48 Laws of Power is sitting at a net worth of about $15 million. What differentiates these men?

The Scholar

Being a scholar will allow you to communicate well with others, thus establishing good friendships and having a decent quality of life. Expanding your knowledge allows you to break the mold of specialization and be sufficient in many fields. This also allows your brain to acquire new talents with minimal effort.

Being a man of supreme intellect may definitely take you far, but if you never take action then your ideas and dreams will most likely die with you. The Scholar has read enough to be able to know not only from their own experience, but others’ as well. Although this may sound like a good thing, many times this makes them risk-averse and even a cynic.

The Warrior

A true warrior is bold and confident enough to give his ideas to the people without troubling himself with the idea that it will not be well received. He knows that he will not achieve perfection so he puts out what he has now. The warrior is risk-seeking which results in his life being more fulfilling.

In some instances, the Warrior may be too brash, resulting in monumental consequences. The impulsivity of the Warrior can sometimes cause great harm to those around them. The self-confidence of the warrior can be overbearing to those he meets and may lead to minimal interaction with others.

Uniting the Scholar and Warrior

You can be a good man if you embody only one of these archetypes, however, the greatest men of history have personified both. The greatest leaders educated themselves on communication, politics, philosophy and history while not getting trapped in the void of continual education. The scholarly warriors did not keep their knowledge to themselves; they utilized it in every aspect of their living.

Reading some history, our founding fathers may have doubted the efforts of a revolution but with the warrior archetypes inside them they acted on their impulses. Their impulsive act of declaring independence started the Revolution. Nathanael Green and George Washington’s use of guerrilla warfare is greatly attributed to the victory of the Continental Army, a tactic that is popular in Sun Tzu’s “Art of War.” They had to have been familiar with the East’s philosophies of war in some way. The point I’m getting at here is to not pigeon hole yourself into one genre of literature. If you only read one genre of books, then that is a hobby; if your library is diverse then you are attaining fulfillment.

If up to this point you have been nothing but a hermit reading, you are in dire need of strenuous activity now in order to develop your inner warrior. Do not use your weak body as an excuse to never start for even the most brute giants have all started as weak, defenseless infants. Look to Theodore Roosevelt for inspiration; the man who could speed read three books a day but was asthmatic, weak, and often picked on as a child. He realized his downfalls so he picked up boxing and many other martial arts until he became known as a “locomotive in human pants.” In many lists he is in the top five of all presidents and this is attributed to his “go get ’em” attitude and uncanny intelligence.

Conclusion

By now hopefully you understand the importance of the integration of the scholar with the warrior. Many of us in the Manosphere have the scholar quite mastered but some of us never act. We are on the verge of achieving greatness and all we have to do is tweak our inner warrior a bit. There is no reading you can do to achieve this. Be active, get a workout split/routine and stick with it. You can be intellectual and have great ideas but people tend to be persuaded by someone of a healthy, large stature more than a weak and frail one. In order to become a great leader, you have to find the healthy balance between your inner scholar and warrior.

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Charles Sledge

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