Become Your Most Masculine Selfಮಾದರಿ

If you are a hunter, you may already know why some of our founding fathers wanted the national symbol to be the turkey rather than the eagle. As beautiful as they are, eagles are scavengers. The founding fathers were men still taming a wilderness, and they knew this. They weren’t easily impressed, but they were impressed with the turkey. If you have ever hunted turkeys, you were probably impressed too.

They are unbelievably fast creatures, capable of running twenty-five miles per hour and flying at speeds up to fifty-five miles per hour. They are also smart and constantly on the alert. Hunters like to say a deer thinks every hunter is a tree stump but a turkey thinks every tree stump is a hunter. They can be hard to find, harder to kill, and then, just to be ornery, turkeys make themselves hard to clean after they’re dead. There are as many as fifty-five hundred feathers on an adult turkey.

This is the wild turkey, though. The domesticated turkey is another story. They are idiots, perhaps the dumbest animals alive. Domesticated turkeys will eat themselves to death unless someone stops them. If thunder frightens them, they will often bunch up in one corner of their pen and suffocate each other.

Interesting, isn’t it? In the wild, turkeys are amazing. When domesticated, turkeys are so stupid they have to be kept from accidentally killing themselves a dozen different ways.

Gentlemen, let’s admit it: most of us are tragically over-domesticated. We have hardly any connection to the wild or our wilder selves. Words like adventure, exploit, and quest no longer apply to us. It is why we are soft, whiney, and bored...

Men need to bark at the moon. Men need to blow something up. Men need to push themselves into a zone they don’t control—that in fact isn’t actually a zone.

Men need to go in pursuit. They need a quest.

Challenge: Remember the last time your heart raced, you sweated like a pig, you thought you might die, you conquered something, and you bored your band of brothers to death by describing it over and over again? Go do something like it again. Just don’t get arrested.