How to Forge Masculinity Into Manliness

[00:00:00]Masculinity is what you and me were handed. Biologically, we're entitled to it. We have a right to it. But manliness is what you do with it. That force is never the problem. Don't let the American Psychological Association tell you. Don't let raging feminist tell you you are not the problem. Your behaviors could potentially be. I'll I'll give them that. But who you are, your biological makeup is not a problem. So, we need to call each other up and step up ourselves into what it means to be manly.

[00:00:40]Man, there's a lie that we have been sold by modern culture and we've been carrying around this lie for so long that we've internalized it, we believe it, we accept it as gospel and doctrine.

[00:00:53]And that lie is that the thing inside of you, it's the drive, it's the edge, uh the part of you and me that wants to compete and conquer and build and dominate. That that is the problem with society.

[00:01:08]That if you could just smooth out the edges a little bit, soften it, apologize for it enough that you finally be what society would deem a good man. And I'm here to tell you that's exactly backwards because that raw force inside of you is not the problem. It's the raw material. It's the building block of what makes a man a man. And a man who doesn't understand the difference between what he was given, God-given gifts and talents and abilities and skill sets and what he's actually supposed to do with it. That kind of guy spends his entire life either ashamed of his own driving force, his own engine, or potentially letting it run him into a wall. And we see both in modern times.

[00:02:03]We're in men's mental health month right now, and we see men killing themselves at staggering rates. And then we see other completely passive and weak and timid, cowardly young men who are becoming men because they've been told to sit down, to shut up, to color within the lines, and to reject everything that makes them who they are. So I want to draw the line very, very clearly today.

[00:02:26]And I want to put an end to this once and for all. The difference is masculinity versus manliness.

[00:02:34]what you are versus what you're responsible for becoming is the distinction. And then I'm going to give you five very strategic, very simple ways to take the one the building blocks of what makes you a man and forge it into becoming a man, manliness.

[00:02:55]And here's the distinction, and everything that I talk about hangs on this distinction. I think it's very, very important in society today.

[00:03:03]Masculinity is simply just it's raw.

[00:03:05]It's it's amoral. It's the force that you were born with. It's the aggression, the dominance, the stoicism, the ambition, the strength, uh the hunger to win, the drive, the capacity for dominance.

[00:03:20]And I want you to hear that word very clearly. It's amoral. It's not immoral.

[00:03:25]It's amoral. It carries no moral weight on its own. It's neither good nor bad.

[00:03:31]It just is. It's It's like horsepower.

[00:03:36]And And horsepower doesn't care whether it's driving an ambulance to a hospital or a getaway car from a bank robbery.

[00:03:45]Manliness is what happens when you take that raw force and you begin to hone it and refine it and make it what it's supposed to be. You discipline it. You aim it at something. You you govern it.

[00:03:58]You direct it. and you put in service of something worthwhile, something worth serving.

[00:04:06]Manliness is masculinity under control and aimed at something righteous and good. So again, masculinity is the fuel, but manliness is the engine. It's the steering wheel. It's the destination.

[00:04:19]It's everything else. And this is why you so often hear, you don't actually hear it much more anymore, but the the premise still permeates every fabric of society. this whole toxic masculinity idea.

[00:04:32]And this is why it's so catastrophically wrong and why it's hurt quite literally millions of men over the course of even just the past decade.

[00:04:42]Because if you tell a man the fuel itself is poison to him, if you let our young men believe in two options, that you can either suppress the fuel or you can just simply apologize for it. Then what you do is you neuter the very thing that gives that man or the young man or the boy the capacity to act favorably in the world.

[00:05:11]And you end up with exactly what we see.

[00:05:14]Men who are passive, they're resentful, they're anxious, they're ashamed of their own nature, and then they build nothing.

[00:05:23]They just wallow around in their own self-pity and they act like good little lap dogs to everybody else who comes along.

[00:05:31]But for the boys and the young men who understand that the moment that masculinity is is raw and amoral that it's not inherently wrong as the American Psychological Associ association would say then that question changes entirely. It's no longer how do I become less of a man? it becomes how do I refine myself and aim what I already have inside of me? And guys, that's that's the problem that you and I can actually solve for a legion of young men who need good, righteous, manly men in their lives.

[00:06:12]The the Stoics talk about this a lot.

[00:06:14]They actually had a phrase for this kind of unrefined, immature, maybe even potential. They talked about the difference between a man of raw temperament and a man of virtue. And virtue, which was called arite to the Greeks, literally meant excellence.

[00:06:34]A thing performing the function that it was built for to its its highest degree.

[00:06:39]And I've talked about this before.

[00:06:42]A knife's arite, I talked about this a week or two ago, is to cut well. A man's aratee isn't to have force. It's to wield it. Well, the force is already built into it. You're bigger. You're stronger. You have the capacity for violence and dominance and and and and aggression. It's already built into your DNA. But what you do with it, that's the whole test. And this is why this matters so much because it's not necessarily academic.

[00:07:14]The distinction does two things at once.

[00:07:17]and and sometimes it feels as if they're pulling in opposite directions, which which is exactly why I think it's so powerful.

[00:07:25]First, when you start to look at it this way, it takes the shame off of your nature. How many men do you know who, at least internally and potentially even subconsciously, feel shame or guilt for being the men that they are? They may not say it, but they act as if they're ashamed.

[00:07:47]They don't know how to step fully into their potential. They don't know how to step fully into their manliness.

[00:07:53]Guys, you don't have to feel guilty for being driven or competitive or hungry or strong. That's not a defect in who men are. It's the engine.

[00:08:03]But second, this is very, very important.

[00:08:06]It it puts the responsibility of making yourself into a man on you because that's where it belongs. Because if masculinity is the raw building blocks, the raw material, then you can't hide behind that, you can't take that aggression and that that hunger, that ambition, and and just use it to run over people around you. And this is what we see in the quote unquote manosphere. Like these guys who just are they're not tough.

[00:08:36]They act tough. They talk tough on social media. They sound tough, but they're just trying to bully and railroad people. And then they'll say things like, "Well, it's just how I'm wired."

[00:08:47]Wired has nothing to do with the efficacy of the wiring.

[00:08:53]It's it's just an excuse. It's just how I am. If people don't like it, then that's their problem. No, that's your problem. Because as a man, isn't it our job to be influential, to be credible, to have authority in the lives of the people that we're trying to serve? You can't just say, "My wiring is this way, and I have no obligation to refine it."

[00:09:13]and then at the same time complain that people aren't listening to you, that they aren't following you, uh that they aren't giving you promotions, that they aren't asking to be led by you.

[00:09:24]Manliness, on the other hand, is that obligation to do something honorable with what you were given by God.

[00:09:32]So that distinction, it holds you to a higher standard.

[00:09:37]It's it's like the adage uh Spider-Man's uncle says, "With great power comes great responsibility."

[00:09:46]The distinction between masculinity and manliness holds men to a higher standard. And it also it refuses the shame further your nature.

[00:09:58]It separates what you are, which you didn't choose that. You didn't get a choice in who you are.

[00:10:06]naturally, inherently, I should say, but it separates that from what you're responsible for becoming. And we often talk about becoming the man that you're meant to be. I say it every single week on this podcast for the past 11 years, which by the way, you absolutely do choose that you get to choose who you are becoming. And in modern times, being a man is no longer a requirement. It's a choice.

[00:10:33]You have to choose that every day because society will excuse it.

[00:10:38]Not only will they excuse it, they'll rebel against it. They'll tell you that you're wrong for being aggressive, that you're wrong for being competitive, that you're wrong for being stoic, that you're wrong for just existing as a man. Every single day you hear it. Every news outlet, every social media channel.

[00:10:58]In fact, I actually I've got a rebuttal I'm going to do with one uh just today on Instagram. So, if you're not following me over at Ryan Mikler, do because I'm going to redo a rebuttal on the kind of nonsense that we often hear from feminist and by misguided people who will on one hand complain about men.

[00:11:17]On the other hand, they'll get the ick when those men embrace and adopt the ideology that they profess.

[00:11:26]So, let's talk about five ways to do this uh to do this forging.

[00:11:31]Okay. Number one, attach your masculinity to a mission. I've often said that a boy becomes a man when he learns to produce more than he consumes.

[00:11:43]Guys, we are all consumers of goods and products and services and resources.

[00:11:48]There's nothing inherently wrong with that. But we need to outproduce our consumption.

[00:11:55]raw force with no target, it it actually just turns into destructive behavior. You know, I I remember when I was a kid, I would dig holes and I would break toys. I would do all sorts of crazy stuff because I didn't know how to channel and harness that masculinity into productivity, just consumption. So, I'd break things or alternatively, it just rots in place with nowhere to go.

[00:12:24]for example, aggression with nowhere to go becomes silly bar fights and and comment section wars. And I I'm not telling you I'm above above that. I'm not cuz I'm I'm guilty of my fair share of not necessarily bar fights, but comment section wars.

[00:12:43]But the ambition that you have with no object becomes a low constant relentlessness, a feeling that that a lot of you know where you you've got all this drive and just nowhere to put it.

[00:12:59]So it just wells up and fers and builds inside of you. It's anxiety.

[00:13:05]You know, you often hear the phrase action is the antidote to anxiety. True, but I would say righteous action because I can go be destructive, but that's not going to help my anxiety.

[00:13:17]It has to be constructive.

[00:13:20]So, the first element of refinement is just aiming it towards something.

[00:13:26]If you're physical and aggressive, go to the gym. Go join jiu-jitsu.

[00:13:31]If you've got ambition and drive and motivation, go to business conferences, start a business, solve a problem.

[00:13:41]You have to point the energy that you have at something worthwhile. It's again build a business, lead the family, uh master a craft, pick up a new project.

[00:13:51]The instant that that force that you are inherently capable of has a target, it stops running you and then it starts working for you and other people. By the way, and this isn't just like soft motivation rah cheerleading type stuff I'm trying to give you. There's actually hard data underneath this. Um there there's a uh 14-year study. Um and I think it's by what's the guy's name? Um Hill Patrick Hill and Nicholas something. I can't remember his name right off hand. I'll have to put it in the show notes. But they found that those men with a stronger sense of purpose in life had a measurably lower risk of dying across that 14-year period. And and we know this inherently. We don't even need a study to know that. We know that because what is the life expectancy for men who retire and ride off into the sunset or go sip my ties, you know, on the beach or or play golf for the rest of their life? And and by the way, that happens regardless of your age. There's a separate study that I was looking at of older American adults found that those with the highest sense of purpose had a significantly lower mortality risk than those with the lowest sense of purpose.

[00:15:09]Do we need studies to tell us that or do we inherently know that purpose isn't a poster on the wall? You remember those? It must have been in the '9s where it was, you know, a picture of a canyon or a mountain range and it said motivation and then it gave you the the quote. It's not a poster on the wall.

[00:15:29]It's it's literally well in this case it's life and death.

[00:15:34]A lot of you guys are familiar with Victor Frankle. Um he watched men quite literally live and die in concentration camps. And I think he put it as plainly as he can as you can say it. He said that when a man knows the why, he can bear almost any how.

[00:15:54]A man with a mission is a man with a reason to refine himself.

[00:16:00]But a guy who doesn't have a mission has no reason to really bother with refining himself, improving himself, developing himself. and therefore he's just unbridled, immature, and unreasonable.

[00:16:15]All right. Number two, you have to submit your masculinity to discipline.

[00:16:19]Now, I know that when I say submit, it has this negative connotation, but masculinity is just impulsive. It's that there's no better definition of masculinity than just a raw set of characteristics that determine our behavior based on our biological makeup.

[00:16:36]That's it. That's the definition.

[00:16:38]Anybody who else who tells you there's a different definition is lying or they're just wrong. They're lying or they're ignorant.

[00:16:44]Okay? It it wants the thing that it wants and it wants it now.

[00:16:49]I've often referred to it as the natural man. And the natural man is lazy and he's immediate gratification and he's gluttonous and he's slothful and he's idol. He's just a piece of crap. If I'm being honest, there's a guy in our Iron Council group, uh, Jay Li, and he often says in his past he was acting like a roach. That's right. We've all acted like roaches. That That's masculinity.

[00:17:14]It's just again, it's not inherently roachelike, but it has the potential to be unless it's harnessed.

[00:17:25]So guys, we've got to figure out a way to submit to this idea of discipline, to run that masculinity through routine, through training, through standards that you hold. Even I would say especially when no one is watching. Discipline is the forge of masculinity. It takes heat and it makes it useful instead of just hot and destructive.

[00:17:50]Like if if you take a fire, I can burn down the Amazon.

[00:17:55]But I can also craft knives and melt steel to build buildings. It's not the fire that's the problem, it's how we utilize it, if we utilize it at all.

[00:18:09]There's a there's a famous marshmallow test. You guys have probably heard this where kids were offered either one treat now or two treats later if they could wait. And in the original studies, it suggested that kids who could delay gratification did better on all sorts of metrics and outcomes down the road. And and I'll be really straight with you on this because I want you to have the real picture.

[00:18:36]Um later bigger studies found that a lot of that effect was tangled up with also a kid's home environment and circumstances. So it wasn't just the delayed gratification. It's not just the clean magic trick that it gets sold as.

[00:18:53]But here's what did survive that later scrutiny.

[00:18:59]uh the the man who actually designed that test, he insisted that delaying gratification is not some fixed gift that you're born with, it's it's an acquirable cognitive skill. You can actually train it. That's the entire point. It's not that just some people are more disciplined. Discipline isn't a personality type. It's reps.

[00:19:23]It's being around other people who are disciplined. And and the reps, unfortunately, they're mostly invisible.

[00:19:30]It's it's the alarm that you didn't wake up to on the first goound. It's it's the workout that nobody saw, nobody claps for. It's it's that drink that you didn't order.

[00:19:43]It's the honest sentence or a hard conversation. Nobody sees any of that.

[00:19:49]That's what makes it a forging process instead of just a performance where you're entertaining for likes and validation.

[00:20:01]All right. Number three, you have to govern masculinity with some sort of principled approach.

[00:20:08]The same strength that protects people can also exploit people.

[00:20:14]The same power that that shields the weak and the vulnerable is the same power that can prey on the weak and the vulnerable. We see it. We know it. We know there's people being taken advantage of and being exploited.

[00:20:31]There's no version of force that is automatically good. The only thing standing between the two is what I would say is a code.

[00:20:41]A man governs his masculinity with principle.

[00:20:45]What is your principle? You have to decide in advance, by the way, in in in the dark, at night, in the morning when nobody's listening, when you're journaling, what you will and will not do when the pressure comes.

[00:21:01]When you have to hold that line, when it will cost you time and money and energy and resources or satisfaction or comfort, when no one else will know if you folded. That's what separates a man from a a a child, a boy who happens to be on his just best behavior. The child, the boy is good when it's easy, but the man has a code that binds him when it's hard. Masculinity is forged in difficulty or at a minimum, it's revealed in difficulty.

[00:21:35]It doesn't res reveal itself in easy times. It's easy to be good when everything's going well. That doesn't make you a man. What makes you a man is what you can do when times are hard. Or there's another quote, absolute power corrupts absolutely.

[00:21:53]So, and I'll probably butcher this one.

[00:21:55]What's the quote about uh you know give give a man power and you can see who he really is.

[00:22:02]Give a man hardship and you can see who he really is.

[00:22:08]Okay. And I think that was I think it was Lincoln who said that if you want to test a man's character then give him power. That's the whole game. Power doesn't build character. It just reveals more of it. As in a previous life, I was a financial adviser and people would say,"Well, you know, if I had money, then I'd be good. Then I'd be charitable. Then I'd do this, then I'd do that." No, you wouldn't. You'd be the exact same person you are right now on steroids.

[00:22:38]That's it.

[00:22:40]The power that you have doesn't make you better. It just gives you leverage to utilize who you already are, good, bad, or indifferent.

[00:22:53]But principle, code, righteousness, virtue decides ahead of time that there's this thing that can survive I contact with power. I guess you could say like when you have power, it's principle that actually keeps you in line that makes you a man.

[00:23:18]All right. Number four is that you have to aim this outward in service of others. Okay? Undefined masculinity points inward.

[00:23:30]That's what it does. It just points inward.

[00:23:36]It's my wants. It's my status. It's my appetite. It's my desires. It's my comfort. It's just this closed loop. And a man stuck in that loop, he's going to be miserable even when he's winning because he's just feeding the monster that's never full.

[00:23:56]But manliness takes that exact same force and it turns it outward towards protecting, towards providing, towards presiding, towards leading people who actually depend on you, your wife, your kids, your colleagues, your co-workers, your family members. And notice that the energy doesn't shrink, right? We're not asking you men to become smaller.

[00:24:20]We're actually I would ask and argue and and assert that we want men to be more powerful, but we want to give that power to something righteous.

[00:24:32]And I really want you to picture this in your mind as vividly as you can.

[00:24:37]Let's say you've got two guys, same ambition, same fire. One pours it entirely into his own reflection.

[00:24:51]It's it's the numbers. It's the image.

[00:24:53]It's the performance. And the other pours it into a wife who feels safe by him. kids who feel led and seen a team that's better for having that man in the room. Again, same raw material, but two completely different men. One is just consumptive. Consume, consume, consume. Eat everything. It's like the hamburger with hamburglar or whatever his name with McDonald's. Just consume all the burgers. Consume everything.

[00:25:23]And the other is building something worthwhile.

[00:25:27]Serving other people, leaning into other people, building an empire, offering value, offering products and services, offering refuge.

[00:25:37]That's the difference between a man who I was going to say take up space, but it's worse than that. Just takes up consumes resources, how I would say it.

[00:25:48]and a man who holds space for other people.

[00:25:52]All right. And the last way that we turn masculinity to manliness is this.

[00:25:59]None of the first four happen if you're sitting on the couch.

[00:26:04]You You can't refine raw force by reading about it, by talking about it, by listening to it on this podcast. You refine it by putting it to the test against real resistance. Just like steel gets tempered by heat and pressure by being worked. I've got my everyday carry knife right here. Shameless plug for my friends over at Montana knife. This is their brand new folding knife. But this metal, this steel, I've actually gone through and do done their tour at their brand new facility outside of Missoula. This knife doesn't become useful just because Josh and his team decided to shape it into something.

[00:26:44]No, it goes through a process of heat and pressure and being grinded against and then it becomes a useful tool.

[00:26:53]And the same is true for you.

[00:26:56]You can be a useful tool or you can be a useful idiot. And unfortunately, there's way too many useful idiots.

[00:27:08]It's voluntary difficulty. It's choosing hard things.

[00:27:13]It's it's the failure that you internalize and then you answer instead of just avoid it.

[00:27:20]Every single rep of your life against real resistance makes you and the steel that you're operating from a little more, a little better, a little sharper, a little harder, a little stronger.

[00:27:33]A man who has never been tested by anything or is not willing to be uncomfortable is a man who just has potential. and he does.

[00:27:43]But what is potential mean other than stored energy that is meant to be deployed.

[00:27:50]But a man who's been through the fire, he has proof for himself and for the people who are watching him. Your wife is watching you guys. Your kids are watching you. Are you proving that you're capable of leading them to a place they could not have imagined going on their own?

[00:28:09]And more importantly, that kind of guy who's gone through the refiner's fire knows what he's made of.

[00:28:15]Which means that the fear that might lesser men loses its power over the man who's proven that he's capable of handling it.

[00:28:29]This is why I will never ever tell you to seek the comfortable path.

[00:28:35]It doesn't forge anything. It's the resistance that does that work.

[00:28:41]You should be a little suspicious of a life that never asks anything of you. I mean, how many of you have wished at some point in your life that life was easier? I've certainly done that, but I think it was Bruce Lee, I think is where the quote is attributed to. Do not pray for an easier life. Pray for the strength to endure a more difficult one.

[00:29:07]That's the kind of men that we want to become. Not that there's nothing wrong.

[00:29:10]And by the way, this is the distinction also between happiness and fulfillment.

[00:29:15]This is how I define it anyways. And words are important. So, we give them meaning. And the meaning for me between happiness and fulfillment. Happiness is just could be ignorant bliss.

[00:29:25]And how many people do you know that are just happy because everything's going well, so I'm happy. Well, I'd be happy, too. But what happens when it gets hard?

[00:29:34]Does that happiness go away? Yeah, typically. And then people who have never been tested end up wallowing in their own self-pity because things got a little hard.

[00:29:43]Fulfillment, on the other hand, to me is not the absence of hardship.

[00:29:51]It's the strength to endure meaningful hardship. We don't need to make life hard just to make it hard to prove to anybody else that we're men.

[00:30:02]That's that's not that's performative. Again, that's not that's faux masculinity or faux manliness, I should say. It's not it's not real manliness.

[00:30:13]So guys, I'll leave you with this.

[00:30:16]Masculinity is what you and me were handed biologically. We're entitled to it. We have a right to it because it's a simply a set of characteristics, behaviors that are biologically constructed based on our biological makeup.

[00:30:31]But manliness is what you do with it.

[00:30:34]That force is never the problem. And don't let the American Psychological Association tell you, don't let raging feminists tell you, don't let cryard liberals tell you that you as a man are the problem.

[00:30:50]You are not the problem. Your behaviors could potentially be. I'll I'll give them that. Your behavior could potentially be, but who you are, your biological makeup is not a problem. So, we need to call each other up and step up ourselves into what it means to be manly. A man with no force has nothing to refine, nothing to offer. This is like Jordan Peterson when he talks about uh a harmless man is not a good man. He's not he's not he's not good because he's incapable of doing anything meaningful. He's good because he has the ability to do something meaningful and instead of destroying everything in its path, he does something righteous with it.

[00:31:34]It's not the absence of capability or strength or power or dominance or aggression. It's the ability to harness that into productive outcomes for yourself and for other people.

[00:31:47]If you don't have a mission, if you don't have discipline, if you don't have a code, if you don't have anybody to serve, nothing to serve, you don't have any fire to temper it, you're going to be a problem. And you're going to feel the effects of that. I guarantee you, cuz I have in my life. And then we end up fighting or we end up freezing or we end up fleeing.

[00:32:10]Fleeing might look like suicide or just avoidance of everything. isolation, maybe fighting might be unbridled aggression, might be violence towards other people who don't deserve it.

[00:32:23]Freezing is just indifference. Nice guys freeze. They don't talk, they don't assert, they don't share, and they just get stepped all over because they're frozen because they don't know what to do with it. A lot of it has to do with the fact that nobody showed them and society acts actively fights against it.

[00:32:40]And we know why good men are harder to subjugate.

[00:32:46]Okay. All of us have the same simple building blocks underneath.

[00:32:52]But a man taking control of that raw material instead of being controlled by it is somebody who's going to be valuable to society. And that's the work.

[00:33:01]Not becoming less of a man, becoming a man who's fully in command of everything that you already are. You were given that fire.

[00:33:10]You don't need to apologize for it or feel bad about it. You were given it to make it something. So go make something.

[00:33:18]So that's it for this one, guys. I hope that helped. And I hope it hit it hits home for you. And if it does, I want you to do this work with other men who are serious about it. And that's why we talk so much about these things inside of our exclusive brotherhood, the Iron Council.

[00:33:31]These are conversations that we're having. We're diving deep into what makes us men and how we utilize our God-given talents, gifts, and abilities, and characteristics for productive outcomes. We want to live fulfilled lives, fulfilled lives, excuse me. So check it out. Go to orderofman.com/ironccounsel.

[00:33:48]We are open for enrollment right now and bandwidth the thousand plus men who are doing the work of harnessing masculinity and turning it into manliness. All right guys, we will be back next week. Until then, go out there, take action, and become the man you are meant to be.