Integrity
Lead by example.
The Cultured Warrior #055 | Lead by example.
Monday's newsletter detailed my endeavor on the classic "300FY" workout. Â I left a message on our gym whiteboard for others to do the same. Â Below, you can see the wreckage left after 270lb black belt and gym owner, Kyle, stepped up to the plate.
You could equally quip that that workout doesn't scale with size or contrarily, shut up and crank more watts – see the last newsletter on FYF.
Truth be told, what was written on the whiteboard was:
FYF: BW in calories, for time, on Assault Bike. Â If you don't make it in 10 minutes, do it again.
Let's pause for a moment and recognize that a 270lb man stayed on an Echo Bike for 36 minutes. Â Now, let's consider that this same man doesn't have anything to prove; other than his own integrity. Â That is, he was a week late on attempting the above session.
In a world of ever more rhetorical politics where "leaders" either:
Talk louder and slower to get a point across (insulting their counterpart's intelligence), or...
Repeat the same catchphrase over and over, cutting off their counterpart (thus insulting their own intelligence)...
Be reminded to not outsource your effort, your integrity will follow suit.
Odds & Ends:
Prior to the most recent soft-reboot of this newsletter, I resolved to avoid political chatter – though as I've unfortunately had to argue, fitness, freedom, and food systems have become increasingly more political targets.
By now we've all heard about the tragedy in Uvalde. Â Let me throw some standard disclaimers (re-claimers?) out there:
My "day job" is in mental health,
I work with many police officers (defensive tactics) and adore working K9s,
I am a firearm owner, concealed carrier, and encourage others to do the same.
Now, let's acknowledge some very complicated ins-and-outs without devolving to the aforementioned style of political "debates."
You're likely to see more headlines like:
Now, Breaking Points is doing a great job of reporting on this from both / all sides, so I'll leave them to do their job. Â What I'd like people to consider is a deeper and more problematic question.
America has more people with firearms than any other country as well as more deaths by firearm than any other country. Â That is a correlation, from which we can never draw causation. Â
Articles like those above hint at issues such as access to firearms, which is a valid point. Â However, it still brushes under the rug the invalidating of and disregard for the sanctity of human life that has run amok in two generations now who have been raised in a global culture of war crimes, fear mongering, pandemics, the proliferation of "safety at any cost", government censorship and surveillance, and recession after recession.
Fitting then, that this post is titled integrity as we should all be reminded the various talking heads on television are only spewing rhetoric to soothe their own conscience – or what's left of it.  As we well know "actions speak louder than words", and "integrity" can also be interpreted as "doing what you say you'll do."
Or, as I've put it here; leading by example.
