Can You Take Shit?

Part 1: The Trident

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This is a judgment to be made in the face of competing priorities. Not before you pick your path, and not something to be resolved before you start walking — the shit you'll take is a daily persistence test, with periodic shit storms resulting from nemeses and adversaries of all types and to all sorts of degrees.

Take the advice to fight with the Trident: What You Can Do, What Someone Will Pay You to Do (hopefully well), and What You Enjoy Doing. They say that engaging two of these edicts is more than most people accomplish. No matter the compensation, having all three is said to be tantamount to Bliss.

Allow me to simplify all that shit. If you're gonna take shit no matter what you choose — how do you really want to be?

Are you looking to sit on your porch and not see the neighbor? Do you want nightlife in the concrete jungle or nightlife on epic vacations? Do you want a simple life somewhere in between? More? Is your Bronx apartment your blissful place, or the shit you have to take to get your ass down to South Beach and live free at the end of that Trident? Is that Midwest town of your youth your origin story or your blissful resting place? Are you going to watch your great-grandchildren every day your heart holds out because you got the land, worked the land, taught your folk to carry on?

There are masters of this material whose shit is easy to read and can explain it in depth, but we all need a 2-4-8 Trident — also called a Be-Do-Have Plan.

In order: determine how you want to Be. Comfortable as a backcountry specialist in something like wells? Solar panels? Generators, maybe? Then map out what you have to Do to be able to Be that way. Finally, you'll be able to determine what you are going to need to Have — to Do the thing you need to Do, to Be the way you want to Be.

A good childhood friend decided he wanted his grandkids to have the kind of relationship with him that his grandfather had with him. To Be in the trades, or a vocational specialty, would allow him to afford a large family, always find good paying work, and build a solid retirement plan so he could enjoy his grandchildren. He chose Licensed Electrician as his Do, and the Have was easy from there: he needed tools and training.

Of course, there are all kinds of other little "things" and "relationships" in the Be bucket, but those are the little rocks you fit in around the big rocks. Check out the video of Steven Covey going over this. His Big Rocks, Little Rocks task management is the best, and could have been gloriously practiced by cave people for all we know.

Part 2: The Body

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No matter what your 2-4-8 Plan maps out to look like, you'll need to train to take shit while you're treading your Trident path. The first step to taking shit is to know that you can beat the shit out of anyone in most rooms.

You are not going to actually do so.

But you will be able to tolerate more of the shit you can't do a damn thing about, simply as a result of having that training and knowing you can do it. You don't want to play at chopping and hiyah'ing — you want to get beat to shit, over and over again, starting slow and smart, with progressively greater intensity.

There are three practices to this requirement, though you must do the first no matter how else you fail to fulfill all three.

First, you must take seventy-five Boxing or Kickboxing lessons and spar for a minimum of two thousand minutes. You'll understand why that metric is in minutes after your first time in the ring.

Second, you must take some form of rapid-effect street defense. This is going to come from Krav Maga, Laban, or Sambo.

Third, you'll need long-term health-maintenance and discipline-enforcing martial arts. It doesn't have to be boring. Judo, Aikido, Jujitsu (love Gracie BJJ, but not for this component), contact Tai Chi — these are all self-defense-grounded art forms with integrated health benefits.

As a long-time practitioner of all three of these implementations, I can convey with utmost confidence that I have never been concerned for the wellbeing of any of my children or family. To drive this home: my spouse is equally trained and far superior to me in execution. We went where we wanted, we did what we wanted, and if physical confidence and self-security could not keep a problem from erupting, we had the next component to employ before any bones needed to be thrown.

Part 3: The Mouth

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You'll need verbal tactical skills. These come in three forms: Small Talk, Smart Talk, and Smack Talk.

Small Talk comes in two modes — Friendly and Formal. Friendly Small Talk is about relationship building with coworkers, children's teachers, your niece or nephew visiting from college. Formal Small Talk is what you'd expect: getting along to get along, keeping the boss happy without accepting every piece of crap task they have to throw around, keeping the work wife happy while maintaining propriety.

Smart Talk has similar distinctions — Personal and Professional — but the learning and tactics are largely the same: to employ what we'll call ethically persuasive verbal jujitsu.

Smack Talk, also called Shit Talk sometimes, is the art of dominating a person in a very public and pugnacious manner. This is a skill of last resort because it is purely caustic, and caustic things are decidedly deleterious.

Let's put it to use.

You're in a dark-alley context. You see some not-suspiciously-profiled but actually-car-window-breaking, hootin'-and-hollerin', cat-callin', all-manner-of-having-no-manners group of young hooligans or miscreants. They're going to intercept you on this course. You casually divert to avoid convergence. Alarms still active, but imminent urgency de-escalated. They divert to intercept again.

We will work this out ahead of time so you can simply follow the rubric when the real thing happens.

You've attempted to use situational awareness and intuition to optimize your potentially deleterious encounter with forces of unknown intent. Their intent becomes somewhat known when they've displayed belligerent behavior and maintained course-intercept both before and after you took casually evasive maneuvers.

At intercept, you employ Small Talk. You use the art of getting along — rapport building — to attempt a Monopoly Earthquake. Remember the board game? When you were going to lose horribly, you'd claim an earthquake shook the board and ruined the game. You broke the rules to overcome the system. This is an important point in the encounter: until someone becomes agitated or aggressive, this can still come up heads, if you use your trick coins. Focus all your sincerity and wit into a compelling introduction. Carry yourself as if you have no expectation that anyone should think anything is out of order — but that maybe you've had a drink and you're always that smiley, friendly, fast-rapport-building guy or gal with a repartee that even those looking to start trouble might find endearing. Maybe you get a laugh and a high five and you're back on your plans without unpleasantness.

When Small Talk fails, you shift to Smart Talk. If you've acquired, workshopped, and practiced the craft of persuasive speech, then you will be fine. If you have not — if you haven't mastered the basics of Cialdini's Reciprocities, used the 48 Laws of Power to then go research all the historical references in the margins, if you have not read The Art of Small Talk — then you will fail at Smart Talking your way out of that avoidable, possibly survivable (if you've been doing your Boxing–Krav–Tai Chi work), eminently violent encounter.

Do you see how these paragraphs are getting shorter?

It is not causation-independent correlation. Entropy, once begun, accelerates and increases velocity — like an intergalactic snowball of black holes. That got dark. Entropy is fast and then faster. When the first falls, the second falls fast, and the third falls at once.

Smack Talk rarely de-escalates.

Then, you must fight. You could not walk your way out of the encounter, you could not run your way out, and ultimately, you could not talk your way out. You are justified and obligated to fight for survival. We can get into stacking tactics in depth later, but for now: a large group would require a run to divide the slower from the faster, then conquer the fastest in the most expeditious and gruesome manner allowable. Followed by another run to divide and conquer — and so on until evasion is successful or all aggressors are vanquished.

Part 4: The Mind

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There are other skill sets to discuss.

Health sounds like either a lot of sweating or a lot of untasty and hard-to-chew food. It can be that. It can be the best you can do, as you can do it. It can be a root vegetable juice in the morning to fight the inflammation of life's toxins, both chemical and psychological. It can be as simple as a Jamba three times a week — the healthy one that tastes good and isn't basically a dessert smoothie.

Whatever little things, or major things, you do in terms of Self Health Care, do these things, or more: drink your cold-pressed veggies instead of getting them fried — get a cold-press juicer, add beets, ginger, turmeric, carrot, and a touch of apple or pear to sweeten. Get your heart rate over 122 for 22 minutes a day (assuming you have no comorbidities). And grow as much of your own vegetables and fruit as you can, whether you're in a double-wide or a downtown high-rise.

If it's a chore, then it's a chore, but you best master that chore. Only got time to grow one tomato plant and then one squash plant and then one pumpkin? Do that, then. The point is this: similar to the humble confidence that comes from feeling safe because you train to survive a fight — knowing that you know how to grow your food, even if you never have to actually live off of it, gives you a sense of wellbeing that empowers you psychologically and metaphysically. As in, your feelings of destiny, free will, universal good. Become kind of a geek about it. Get your soil analyzed. Make your own worm tea. Email experts about strange spots on your Japanese eggplant.

Before you practice that Judgment we were talking about earlier, there's one more thing. Let go of the "body-mind-spirit" trap.

We are body and mind. We are mind and spirit — or soul, or essence, or what-have-you. When you tend to the health of the body, the brain (the hardware) included, you are tending to the health of the mind by tending to the health of the brain. You must also tend to the mind so that the spirit and the soul can be healthy.

Healthy Body = Healthy Brain. Healthy Mind = Healthy Soul.

A mind filled with the Great Ideas, tended with good advice, thrilling mysteries, and the occasional self-help book that just somehow makes sense and helps you deal with grief or nihilism or something much lighter — the mind becomes a fertile place for the soul to grow and to glow.

Where is all that preamble leading?

To the ever-so-simplistic advice: Read.

Read for fun, sure. I love Dune, and The Hobbit, and The Screwtape Letters (that book is so not what C.S. Lewis thought it was, or it is exactly what he wanted it to be — it's just great). But also read The Great Conversation and books for your path.

The Great Conversation will be covered, also at length, later and throughout. But it's those other books — the books for your path — we'll discuss here.

Are you a county clerk? Read a book a year about everything from the history of county clerks in the U.S. to the bylaws of your county. Just something related to your context. Maybe there's not a book a year for that content, but you can extend it to your church, your union chapter, something. I know of an engineer who was always studying old ways of building things and came across an idea to integrate earthworks with permaculture guilds. He attributed his breakthrough to something he'd read in a very old text. We may not all change an industry, but we can change our lives.

Read a book a week when you can. At least a book a month. Don't get locked into a genre. Read autobiographies for sure, and posthumous biographies. Living biographies are usually filled with lies and deceptions.