If you want to be anything: rich, successful in business, confident in love, outgoing in public, or even more creative, there are videos, books, courses, and coaches who can help you get there.  The best of them will immediately put you on the path of thinking like a person possessing the habits and qualities you are looking to build. They want you to lose your mind and gain the mindset of your chosen self-improvement goal. Becoming a Legacy Gentleman is no exception. We act differently.  To act differently, you must think differently.  Once you think differently, you become different. After you are reborn, you can go live that difference, and it will draw people to you, some admirers and some haters, but none will ignore you. But nothing starts until you lose your ungentlemanly mind.  

Five Steps to Legendary

Losing your ungentlemanly mind is no less than a five-step process. You must work inside out. Starting with your image to define how you will affect the world—moving on to the point where the most important thing you do is the last and most visible act, the culmination of the four preceding steps. So instead of starting at step five and counting down to step one, I will begin with step one being the end-state goal of all men.  Once you chart your path with steps five to two in consideration, you can genuinely say you have lost your ungentlemanly mind.

You Are the One

To be a man whose beliefs, lessons, and actions live on past your time on earth, a Legacy Gentleman makes himself his central point of focus. The Legacy Gentleman’s thoughts and actions should push him and the world toward his goals, his mental point of origin, so to speak, his every step should forward his effort to bend the world around his will. “You and the accomplishment of your purpose are number one non-negotiable every day. All men must live in this. Yes, we love our wives, absolutely we will die defending our family. However, Legacy Gentlemen, you must be first. If you do not put your purpose first, you will be no good to anyone else.  As I said, you must do the following four things first to be a value and not a drain on the world. But to indeed be on this journey, you must put and keep your world centered around you.

Definite Purpose

You must recognize that you are here for a purpose. We are men; we eat, have sex, and fight if we have time; we do other stuff like shower and sleep. However, after school, after a good job or starting a business; once we find a wife and 2.5 kids or settled into your life as a swinging bachelor, Legacy Gentlemen must seek and find that action which takes your life from a daily grind to one more brush stroke on your magnum opus.  Everyone’s life has a definite purpose.  This definite purpose might not be your job.  Your definite purpose might not make you any money; in fact, it could be expensive. Nevertheless, doing this action, championing this cause will be the most important thing in your life. You have it, find it, grab it, and squeeze everything out of it. We only have one life. Live it to the fullest.          

Grow Your Ends

When you lead people, there is a concept that you must understand before you can be a good leader.  People are not means they are ends in themselves. This concept should be transparent, but I will quickly review it. The original saying is that the ends justify the means, a phrase of Sergey Nechayev, the 19^th-century Russian revolutionary. It means that if a goal is important enough, any action you take to accomplish it is acceptable.  Generally, that statement does not remove the need to act morally. However, this concept is overlooked today.  The idea is that people are not means, tools to accomplish goals, but goals themselves. The previous realization requires that leaders consider how tasks they assign people will help shape them into the leaders of tomorrow. People are worth investing your time and effort in.  Your co-workers and subordinates are the organization leaders, future partners, and, yes, Legacy Gentlemen of tomorrow. So, you must know that others have value.            

Master of More Than One

Legacy Gentlemen must become self-sufficient men. Self-sufficient is a loaded term.  Should we be mountain men, living off the land, eating only what you kill?  Yes.  Should you be able to fix every gadget, machine, and engine around you in your modern urban home? Yes. What about being able to fight off a gang of ruffians to protect the purity of a carload of college co-eds whose car has broken down on their way back to State University after spring break?  Also, yes. The common theme is to be a manly man, a renaissance man, or like a Boy Scout of my childhood “Be Prepared.” Learn to master your everyday environment, urban, suburban, or rural. After you master your area, work on learning the other two areas.    

You Are Not the One

The last point I want to cover is last for a reason. It almost directly contradicts the first point if you give it a surface and non-rational look. But we are men, and we lean on logic, not feelings, so we can quickly harmonize You Are the One with You Are Not the One. You must recognize that there is a higher power than you. That power is God, Nature, or the spaghetti monster in the sky.  But you must be accountable to someone or thing more significant than you who will know what you do in private. If you know a higher power is real, how can you do anything but understand it and sever it above yourself?  You must bend the knee to something greater than you. This final judge will hold you accountable for how much you lie, cheat, steal, and murder even if no one knows.

Legendary Steps

Growing these five qualities will cause you to lose your ungentlemanly mind.  You cannot think like this and be like everyone else. Make you your mental point of origin, find your purpose, recognize that people have value, be self-sufficient, and know a higher power. Doing these things will make a life of fulfillment and success a matter of time, not chance. Lastly, you will become legendary.