At 25, I believed it was all downhill from there.
That this was as good as life was going to get. The news had fed me problems I was in no position to solve, every day, for years. I’d mistaken that for an accurate picture of the world.
With no hope, there was no reason to invest in anything: not my body, not my money, not my time.
So I ate whatever concoction of sugar, fat and salt best calmed my nerves, within a quick sprint of my home.
It took me years to understand something simple. The despair came first, and the weight came second. No diet survives a man who has already written off the future.
If you feel that way right now, consider the possibility that you’re looking at what someone chose to show you.
Here’s what you rarely hear in the mainstream: we’ve come so far that we’ve lost something on the way.
The natural connection to our environment. The way of life that forced us to become strong and capable just to survive and procreate. Adam Sinicki compares the average modern human to an overfed poodle standing next to a wolf.
This is why I lift. This is why I run. This is why I mind what I eat.
Your body is the first thing to fail you
Studies tracking men since the 1980s show testosterone falling decade by decade, independent of age.
Nothing changed in our biology. Everything changed in our environment. We’ll reach for the stars soon and call it progress, while the body we ride in grows softer every year.
And nowhere is our new weakness more obvious than in the place we go to fix it.
Isolated together: 50 men in one room, headphones in, eyes on their phones, each paying $50 a month to feel alone in public.
That’s the modern gym. I tried to become a “gym person” for decades, across different cities, countries and continents. Here’s what I learned when I finally quit.
The gym sells community and delivers strangers. At most, you get a nod.
The math is brutal too.
$40 to $70 a month comes to $5,000 to $8,000 over a decade, plus hundreds of hours commuting. A couple of kettlebells, a pull-up bar and rings cost a few hundred dollars. Once.
Equipment was never the bottleneck.
A handful of movements combine into hundreds of sequences.
Pull-ups, chin-ups and kettlebell flows cover most of what you need. Wooden rings multiply the options again.
You’ll run out of years before you run out of progressions.
Burpees became my daily anchor.
Squat, plank, push-up, jump, zero equipment. I started with 30 a day. Now it’s 50.
Here’s what I know now: self-sufficiency is freedom.
My burpees come with me everywhere.
The doorframe pull-up bar and the rings both fit in a bag, so they can come along when I travel. The kettlebells have to stay home. But I’ll survive a trip without them.
A man who has never done anything genuinely hard doesn’t trust himself to do hard things.
That distrust shows up everywhere: the conversations he avoids, the risks he doesn’t take, the life he watches instead of living. The fix is reps.
Do enough hard things, and the distrust starts to fade.
Your money is the second
If you lost your job tomorrow, how long could you last without asking anyone for help?
Nearly 4 in 10 Americans can’t cover an unexpected $400 bill without borrowing or selling something. That’s true across all income levels. It’s a right-now problem.
I ignored it for a long time myself.
My dad told me to start saving when I was 22.
To me it sounded like throwing money into a black hole, so I ignored him for 17 years. What changed my mind was my older brother, who stopped working and has now lived off his investments for several years, with no plans to go back. He isn’t rich in the Hollywood sense; he just started earlier and stayed consistent.
That’s when saving stopped looking like obedience and started looking like freedom.
The fix is boring on purpose.
Build six months of expenses in savings first. Then auto-invest 10% or more of your salary the day after payday into a broad index fund. Learn a skill someone outside your company will pay for, and start selling it on nights and weekends.
And train until your body makes you unafraid.
The man who can walk away
If you’re over 40 and your entire skill set is built around one company, read this twice.
Your seniority is not insurance. Your loyalty is not insurance. Your competence is not insurance.
The day your line item costs more than it produces, you’re gone.
Rebuilding a body and a financial floor from zero at 52 is possible.
It’s just a marathon you start at mile zero while everyone else is already running. So start building iron and gold now, while you still have the paycheck to fund it.
A man who can walk away is a man they can’t control.
That’s the whole point.
The muscle and the money are tools. The point is that you stop being someone who has to take whatever is offered, who has to stay in the room he’d rather leave, who writes off the future because it doesn’t feel like his. You can’t be controlled when you aren’t afraid to be left with nothing.
And you stop being afraid of that the day you’ve built a body that has done hard things and a floor that catches you when you fall.
“Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
— Dylan Thomas, “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night”
It’s time we overfed poodles reacquainted ourselves with our inner wolves.
Do the reps and eat like it matters. Automate the investing. Build a skill that earns money on nights and weekends.
I don’t think of it as saving for retirement anymore.
I think of it as building enough strength and financial density that nobody gets to decide what I do next. So I can walk away whenever I want, or stay in the game on my own terms.
P.S. The exact setup behind all of this is in the Iron & Gold Starter Kit: the daily burpee floor, the kettlebell basics, how I eat without counting anything, and how to automate your money so it grows without your attention.
Free when you subscribe at IronAndGoldStarterKit.com
