I got a message from a lad in my community the other day that stopped me in my tracks. Not because it was unusual. Because it could've been written by me 10 years ago.
34 years old. Software engineer. Good job, owns his own home, making decent money. Life looks great on paper. But something's missing and he can't put his finger on it. He's been telling himself for years he wants to create content, learn to fight, build something meaningful. Bought a camera. It's sitting in the closet collecting dust. Signed up for nothing. Started everything. Finished nothing.
And the bit that really got me. He said he already knows what to do. Wake up early. Meditate. Train. Do the deep work. He's known for five to ten years. And he's still not doing it.
I'd bet my life you're reading this nodding your head right now.
That "something's missing" sensation. It's not depression. It's not some chemical imbalance that needs medicating. It's your entire being telling you that you were built for more and you're wasting it.
And mate, I'm not just saying that. I lived it.
At university in England I was the definition of lost. Going out every weekend. Drinking too much. No direction. No purpose. Just chasing the next dopamine hit like everyone else around me. Women, parties, whatever was in front of me. I told myself that's what your twenties are supposed to look like. Everyone else was doing it so it felt normal.
I'd been in very negative environments for years and carried that energy with me without even realising it. Got into a toxic relationship that drained whatever was left. My body was a mess... IBS for years, stressed to the eyeballs, running on fumes and calling it living.
And the mad thing is, just like this lad in my community, I knew what I should've been doing. I'd been training since I was 16. I understood nutrition. I'd read the books. I had the information. What I didn't have was an identity that matched any of it.
That's the actual problem nobody talks about.
There's a recording from the 1950s by a man called Earl Nightingale. Called The Strangest Secret. Sold over a million copies. And the whole thing comes down to one line:
"You become what you think about most of the time."
That's it. That's the whole secret.
And I know what you're thinking. "Yeah yeah, mindset, I've heard this before." But have you though? Because if you actually understood it, you'd be living differently right now.
See, most men think the problem is information. They think if they just find the right programme, the right morning routine, the right course, the right mentor - eventually something will click and their life will change. So they consume. Endlessly. Another YouTube video. Another podcast. Another Discord server. Another subscription. And nothing changes.
It doesn't change because information was never the problem. Identity is.
You can tell yourself you're going to wake up at 5am, train hard, eat clean, build a business, become disciplined. That's your conscious mind talking. That's maybe 5% of your operating system putting on a brave face for thirty minutes in the morning while you journal and visualise.
But what's running for the other 23 and a half hours?
Your body tenses when the bills arrive. Your stomach drops when you see someone your age doing better than you on social media. You hold your breath when you check your bank account. You rehearse worst-case scenarios and call it "being realistic." You scroll for two hours and tell yourself you're "winding down." You chase distractions the moment anything gets uncomfortable.
That's the other 95%. That's your actual operating system. That's the signal you're actually broadcasting to the world - not the affirmations you said in the mirror this morning.
And the world responds to the 95%. Every time.
This is why men can read every self-improvement book on the planet and still be stuck in the same loop five years later. Because reading about a new identity and actually becoming a new identity are completely different things. One happens in your head. The other happens in your nervous system, your body, your daily actions when nobody's watching.
The lad who wrote me that message described it perfectly without even realising it. He said every day the wind blows one direction and he follows it. Next day it blows somewhere else and off he goes again. Stock trading one week. Content creation the next. Fight gym on the list. Camera in the closet.
That's what Napoleon Hill called drifting. A drifter is a man with no clear direction who wakes up, reacts to whatever's in front of him, gets pulled into everyone else's agenda, and then wonders why nothing changes. He's not lazy. He's not stupid. He's just never decided who he is.
And here's the uncomfortable truth about the modern world - it's specifically designed to keep you drifting. Every app on your phone. Every notification. Every algorithm feeding you the next thing. It's all engineered to make sure you never sit still long enough to hear your own thoughts. To never sit with yourself long enough to actually decide what you want and commit to it.
The thing you do to "relax" between tasks is actively making you worse at completing those tasks. Every scroll is a micro dose of damage to your ability to follow through on the things you said matter to you. And it compounds. Day after day, month after month, you're eroding the very machinery you need to build the life you want.
This lad told me he thinks his brain is "extremely fried" and "dopamine deprived." He's not wrong. But it's not permanent damage. It's a pattern. And patterns can be broken.
But here's where it gets interesting. And this is the bit most people get completely backwards.
Right before any real transformation, there is almost always resistance. The old version of you doesn't just quietly step aside. It fights back. It flares up. It gets louder.
Your oldest patterns come back with force. The relationship stuff you thought you'd dealt with. The self-doubt you thought you'd outgrown. The habits you thought you'd left behind. They all resurface, sometimes more intensely than before.
And most men interpret this as failure. They think "I'm getting worse, not better." So they quit. They abandon the process. They jump to the next technique, the next programme, the next shiny thing.
They give up right before the old pattern was about to collapse.
I see it constantly. A lad joins the community, starts making changes, feels great for two weeks, then hits a rough patch and disappears. He doesn't realise that the rough patch was the transformation. That was the old identity losing its grip. That was the moment to push through, not pull back.
The discomfort isn't evidence you're doing it wrong. It's evidence you're disrupting the loop that's been running your life on autopilot for years.
So here's what actually works. Not theory. Not affirmations. Not manifestation language dressed up in spiritual clothing. The actual mechanics of changing who you are.
Your body comes first. Always.
Your nervous system is the foundation everything else is built on. If it's in fight-or-flight mode - running on cortisol, bracing for the next threat, contracted and tense , no amount of positive thinking is going to override that. Your body will win every time because your body IS your subconscious mind. It's not a metaphor. Your tissues, your cells, your autonomic nervous system, they're running programmes you installed years ago. Maybe decades ago. Maybe in childhood.
So before you try to change your thoughts, change your state. Breathe properly. Move your body. Get outside. Let sunlight hit your eyes before a screen does. Train. Walk. Cold exposure. Sauna. Regulate your nervous system first, then build from that foundation.
When I stripped everything back and got serious about my body - proper training, proper nutrition, proper recovery everything else followed. Not because having a good physique makes you successful. Because the discipline you build in the gym translates to every other area of your life. And because a regulated nervous system broadcasts a completely different signal to the world than a stressed, contracted, reactive one.
The man who can push through a set when his body is screaming at him to stop is the same man who can sit down and do deep work when his phone is begging for attention. The man who feeds himself properly is the man who respects himself enough to demand more from life. It all starts with the body.
Ruthlessly remove the brain rot.
I don't mean reduce your screen time by 30m. I mean audit everything you consume and cut anything that isn't actively making you better. Unfollow accounts that make you feel anxious, envious, or behind. Leave the Discord servers that are just noise. Stop watching reviews of things you're never going to buy.
No phone for the first hour of the day. I don't touch mine until midday most days and I can tell you that life got dramatically better the moment I stopped letting an algorithm decide my first thought of the morning.
Your brain needs silence. It needs space. It needs moments where it's not being fed stimulation so it can actually produce original thought. Every piece of content I create, every idea I have, every breakthrough I've ever had it came in silence. Not while scrolling. Not while consuming. In the quiet spaces between inputs.
Become the identity, not the outcome.
Stop asking "how do I get the body, the girl, the business, the money." That question keeps you in the frequency of not having it. Of needing it. Of lacking it.
Instead ask, who is the version of me that already has this? How does he carry himself? How does he respond when things go wrong? What does he do first thing in the morning? What does he refuse to tolerate?
You can't think your way into a new identity. Your body has to learn it. And your body learns through action, not intention. Not journaling about who you want to be. Actually moving like him, deciding like him, carrying yourself like him. Every single day until it stops feeling like a performance and starts feeling like you.
When I was at my lowest... out of shape, toxic relationship, no direction - the shift didn't happen because I found a better programme or read the right book. It happened because I decided to stop being the man I'd become and start being the man I knew I could be. I changed the identity first. The results followed.
Five genuine seconds of actually embodying who you want to become -standing like him, breathing like him, carrying yourself like him is more powerful than five hours of thinking about it. Your body needs to learn the new pattern, not just your mind.
Find something bigger than yourself.
This is the one nobody wants to hear. But I'll say it anyway because it changed my life more than any training programme or morning routine ever did.
Have faith. Find God. Find something. I don't care what you call it. But you need to believe that there's a direction to this and that your job is to show up and do the work, not to have it all figured out before you start.
Irrational optimism in a modern world that tells you everything is falling apart. That's the cheat code. Because when you genuinely believe things are working out, not because you've got evidence, but because you've decided to trust the process you stop gripping so tight. You stop needing to control every outcome. And ironically, that's when things actually start moving.
I spent years not trusting anything. Not trusting God, not trusting the process, not trusting myself. All that got me was anxiety, toxic relationships, and a bloke in the mirror I didn't recognise.
The moment I let go and just committed to becoming the best version of myself - physically, mentally, spiritually without needing to know exactly where it was going, that's when the doors started opening. The coaching business. The community. The content. None of it was planned. All of it came from being in the right state.
Build every single day and serve others.
The feeling of "something's missing" disappears the moment you start creating instead of consuming. It really is that simple. Write something. Film something. Build something. Help someone. Every single day.
That restless energy you feel? That's not a problem. That's fuel. You just need to point it somewhere instead of letting it leak out through a screen.
The men I coach who transform the fastest are never the ones with the most information. They're the ones who start doing. Imperfectly. Consistently. Without waiting for permission or perfect conditions. They pick one thing and they commit to it with everything they've got.
I know what some of you are thinking. "Easy for you to say, you've already made it." I haven't made anything. I'm still building. Every single day. The difference is I stopped waiting and started moving.
I'm not going to sit here and tell you life is going to feel amazing every single day. It won't. We all have low moments. That's the human experience. You're not going to operate at a hundred percent every waking second and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you something.
But you can raise your baseline. You can spend more time in the higher states... clarity, purpose, energy, gratitude and less time in the lower ones. You can strive for higher on the map of consciousness even if you never reach the top. The striving itself changes you.
And it starts with the most boring, unsexy truth in the world:
Stop consuming. Start doing. Regulate your body. Decide who you are. Trust the process. Repeat.
The lad who wrote me that message ended it by saying "sorry for the long post." Brother, don't ever apologise for being honest about where you're at. That's the first step. Most men won't even admit it to themselves, let alone write it down for others to see.
You're already ahead. Now do something with it.
— Achilles
If this resonated, I built Sons of Achilles for exactly this. A brotherhood of men who refuse to stay the same. Training. Nutrition. Consciousness. No motivational quotes on sunsets. Just the work.
