Competing Against Yourself

Competing with or against other men in activities like sports or business is one way of proving your skill and defining your manhood. Another way is competing against yourself. With this type of competition, you pit your grit and courage against some activity that challenges you to overcome fear. Some men engage in risky physical activity, such as cliff climbing, motorcycle racing or jumping out of an airplane with a parachute. Facing a dangerous undertaking tests their skill. Confronting their fear tests their courage. The adrenaline rush is addictive and nothing else makes them feel more alive. If they survive, they have proven themselves, and the world knows they are manly men.

I’ll never forget going to a bullfight in Portugal, where the goal of the fighters was to wrestle a full-grown, 2000 pound bull to the ground with their bare hands. A group of eight men, called Forcados, stand in line in front of an enraged bull, with no protection or weapons. The front man provokes the bull to charge and tries to secure his head while the others try to wrestle the animal into submission. What usually happens is the bull tosses the fighters into the air as if they were dummies and tries to gore and trample them before finally being subdued. Imagine being the first in line. He is surely courageous, or stupid, or both.

There are other, non-physical ways of facing danger and measuring your courage. One is to become a psychonaut, a person who dives deep within himself to confront the unknown that dwells inside his own mind. For a man to explore and wrestle with his fear, grief, despair, loneliness and shame is surely a challenge as full of danger as facing an enraged bull. He faces the possibility of opening painful wounds that he has held in his subconscious since childhood. He is a courageous man.

Celibacy, meditation, prayer, yoga, restricted diet, fasting, extended silent retreats, conforming to strict moral constraints and adherence to an austere monastic daily regimen are some of the challenges a serious explorer of the soul sets for himself. These spiritual activities require a degree of discipline few men can attain. The search for God and enlightenment is not for sissies, and a spiritual explorer is a man to be admired.

There are other ways a man can define his manhood through pitting himself against some difficult activity. He can, like Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr., overcome popular resistance and devote himself to a cause that benefits others. Or he can take on an ambitious project that requires diligence and discipline over a period of time in order to come to successful completion. Men such as Henry Ford and Steve Jobs come to mind. Gandhi, King, Ford and Jobs were giants, but the person who takes on fighting corporate greed in order to protect his neighborhood from environmental pollution, or the guy who works out of his garage in the hours after his day job in order to get his startup on track also fall in this category. They too are competing against themselves. They are willing to risk failure, encounter their self-doubt and the doubt and the derision of others, overcome laziness and power through their vision to completion.

A person who courts the danger of exploring the dark crevasses of his mind or scaling the steep mountains of his soul, or who devotes himself to some noble cause or to accomplishing a
difficult project, is courageous. He is as brave as anyone who challenges himself with physical tests and is fully entitled to be called a manly man.

Question: Are there ways you challenge yourself with a difficult activity?