Why get up early, do the work, put in the effort, struggle when you could take it easy, focus when you could get distracted?

We know that most choose what they want now while sacrificing what they want most, and that those who sacrifice what they want now for what they want most live not only more successful lives, but lives with more meaning as well.

Forget about happiness…

It’s a feeling, an emotion, and it’s something we don’t fully have control over. 

Happiness can come in unexplained waves and leave with the same illogical pattern.

Meaning is something that’s far more powerful than happiness, and it’s something we have much more control over.

If you have a reason to keep going, you will. If you think that you don’t, you won’t.

Men have found meaning in the horror of the Concentration Camps of the Second World War, as well as in the atrocities of POW Camps in Vietnam (read: Man’s Search for Meaning, and Thoughts of a Philosophical Fighter Pilot).

Researchers have also observed that depression is higher in wealthier nations.

Depression is also non-existent in modern hunter-gatherer societies where they have no electricity, central heating, or plumbing – some of the things we completely depend on for ‘happiness’ in more developed countries – let alone internet, cell phones, and social media.

This leads me to think about humanity, and not the meaning of us all, but how we’re designed and evolved to live.

That is, where we find meaning.

It seems that we find meaning in struggling, not when we have no struggle, nothing to struggle toward, or no one to struggle for.

Many of us struggle for an end.

As ambitious men, an end will always be a marker that’s just out of our reach.

I don’t think I’ll ever rest, that I’ll stop pursuing, and that’s good or bad, but it is me.

However, that cannot be the only reason to struggle.

Men must struggle for the sake of struggling and because struggling is a part of our nature, it’s in our DNA, it feeds the soul in ways that rest cannot.

We all have our reasons to struggle.

If you have a family, there is no better reason to ensure that they’re provided for, but also that you’re at your best (something obtained through struggle).

If you don’t, you may one day, so struggle for that family in your future.

Struggle, also, because of this idea of potential. This idea that one day you’ll meet who you could have potentially been.

You’ll see what could have been achieved, and you’ll wish you did more.

You’ll look back at the time off, the near-decades of TV you watched in your lifetime, the inefficient, half-assed work you did when efficient work could have easily been done, and wish you did more, wish you did better.

Struggle because struggle gives you a reason for being here. It gives you this ever-elusive meaning that the masses long for, never understanding that their meaning isn’t found, but created. It isn’t thought, but acted. It’s not something can can be given…

…It must be earned.

Struggle because you’re a man, on his way to being the man, on his way to building a legacy.

Be Legendary,
Chad Howse

P.S. I’m writing this at the end of a 14 hour work day. A scoop of Man Greens got my mind right, got me focused and alert and on my game. Get a bottle because it’s your ally in your struggle.