Whatever you do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius and power and magic in it. ~ Goethe
Nothing of value has ever come from laziness, however, it isn’t just laziness that is evil as it slaps the faces of those who’ve sacrificed to give us whatever opportunities we have in life, it’s how we look at work that often hinders us from the greatness – and I don’t use the word lightly – that can be in our future. (Read This: Are We Wasting Their Sacrifice?)
Theodore Roosevelt has become an almost cartoonish character with his big, pearly white teeth and overtly masculine bravado. But the real TR was much more of an interesting character. Born into wealth, something that can be a hindrance rather than a blessing (which we’ll cover later), TR was a sickly young man. He was stricken with asthma and other debilitating illnesses that seemed to be getting worse with age. He was relegated to an inactive life especially for a young man who only wanted to live up to the strength and honorable and manly figure that was his father.
It’s his father, though, not the doctors or medics that would cure TR of his illnesses and propel him on to one of the most audacious lives we’ve ever seen, and he did it in a way that would befit a dad who wanted what was best for his son, save the opinions of those who wanted nothing more than to prescribe more medicine; he put Teddy through a strict workout routine.
TR’s father, Theodore Senior, was adamant that he wouldn’t have a sickly son. He wanted a son that would not only be able to experience life and all it’s wonder, but to impose his will on the world and do the good he knew young Theodore was capable of doing. Weight lifting, boxing, Jiu Jitsu, and Judo, these things were Teddy’s cures, not the elixirs or potions prescribed by the men who studied the human body for a living. It was physical pain that cured his physical pain.
Teddy was also a nerd. It’s this fact that’s important not to miss, but to highlight even further when using Teddy as an archetypical masculine figure because even those who love the company of books or the sciences can be good and great and effective masculine, manly men if manliness is taught to them and proposed to them not as something to shy away from or feel bad about, but to aspire toward and feel proud about. He loved insects and birds and animals. He’d dissect and study them. He’d bird watch and hunt and read and write. He was a book worm, but with his father as his example, he also grew up to be a great hunter, an author, a soldier, a president, and father and explorer and cowboy.
His curious mind led him into the Amazon in his sixties just as it led him into the mountains as a child. Without his father’s unwillingness to have a weak child, forcing him into a rigorous training regimen when doctors demanded he stay bed ridden, young Theodore wouldn’t have grown to be the President of the United States of a America, but more than that, the President who’d take lunch breaks to go down to the local boxing gym and spar a few rounds, or roll around on the judo mats even though he was the leader of what was quickly becoming the most powerful nation in the world.
What truly set TR apart, and it’s something that becomes evident and humbling to the reader when you devour the pages of one of his many biographies (start with The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt) is his love for work. Work, to TR, wasn’t something that you merely did and were done with at the end of the work day. No, he was a truly passionate man who saw work as life, the two inseparable from one another. He was always working toward something, on something, for something. He started a ranch out in Montana, wrote dozens of books on dozens of topics, was the police chief of New York City, the POTUS, an explorer, adventurer, and father of children of his own.
It wasn’t a job that took his time but the strenuous life that was his time. As men, we cannot distinguish between work and life because “work” isn’t just our jobs. Our work is our quest, it’s our hunt for improvement, and this hunt doesn’t take days off nor does it ever end. The Strenuous Life is the good life. There is no “end”, nor vacation from the steps forward that we take everyday. They are one in the same. And so we write 7 days a week, we read daily, study daily, train daily, improve daily. We acquire grit with every right choice we make or every recovery from the wrong choices we make.
Read This Next – Part II: The Virtuous Life
About The Author
Chad Howse: Chad’s mission is to get you in the arena, ‘marred by the dust and sweat and blood’, to help you set and achieve audacious goals in the face of fear, and not only build your ideal body, but the life you were meant to live.
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