From The Desk of Maverick Brenton.
Subject; A Letter to Those Who Feel Like Quitting.
I’m gonna open this piece by saying you should quit. Often and without remorse. But only those things which you know are not moving you forward to the kind of life you really want to live. I have quit before, and I have quit a lot. But I quit the things that didn’t matter. As for that which does matter? I would sooner die than give up. I will never give in, I will never give up, because I know I could never stomach dying without giving everything I’ve got into what is truly important to me. I could not live with myself because of who I am.
Me and you my friend, we have a fire in our heart that will burn until we take our last breath - it’s what and who we are. Forget the idea of ever putting it out, you can either fuel it with action or pretend it’s not there and suffer the horrible pain of knowing you are wasting your potential as a man.
When I say you must never give up, I don’t mean with everything. There are plenty of pursuits you will need to give up as a young man while you test the waters, find where you fit, and determine what will leverage your natural talents best. But what you must NEVER give up on is yourself, your dreams, the things you’ve always wanted to achieve since you were a young boy. This is what you can’t throw in the towel on, because if you do then you will lead a miserable life filled with a lot of regret and sadness. Each day it will gnaw at your soul, each night it will keep you awake.
You ever see the look in the eyes of older guys working some retail job, or behind the counter at a gas station, or mopping floors late at night - who just go through the motions and sigh their way through life? That look is the look of someone who has given up. Not because they didn’t want more, of course they do - we all do. But because they could not endure the frustration, the criticism, the loneliness, the hard work, the early mornings, the pain, the boring days of grinding towards something genuinely worthwhile.
It’s not always that simple either. Most men often fuck up their life through bad decisions; unwanted pregancies, wasted time, drugs, addictions, choosing the wrong career, terrible relationships. Suddenly they are 30, not 18, and they just lost their entire 20’s to a blaze of parties and bullshit and wasting time. Now they panic, have no idea what they are doing, and settle for whatever they can find that keeps them above water while the kids are on the way, the wife or girlfriend wants a better place to live, the car needs to be fixed, and the bills need to be paid.
What most Young Men do not understand is how easy it is to completely fucking wreck your life before you even start to really live it - modern society is filled with carefully hidden landmines designed for this purpose. Traps that will shackle you with unwanted obligations and destroy your masculine freedom. All of a sudden you are trapped in a life you never wanted, with a girl you never wanted, and a career that is really not what you wanted.
The common thread here is the phrase not what you really wanted.
It’s the reality of 9/10 men today - they were full of hopes and dreams, they did have things they wanted to do - but one day they woke up down a hole too deep to climb out of because they didn’t pay attention. Life isn’t an endless party on the beach, not everything works out perfectly. Life is ruthlessly selective and competitive and it only rewards those who really earn it.
This is why a lot of people just give up. It’s not fucking easy to win at life, it’s damn hard and it will take a lot of work. Especially for most young men of today who have NO older men to guide them, look up to, and go to for strength when times get hard. They are just wandering around in the dark, confused about life, and absolutely clueless to how the world really works. So we turn to worthless entertainment, shit food, delusional thinking and all kinds of copes to numb the fact that our reality is fucking trash and we are far less than we could be.
A sad fact of modern life is that most people go to their grave having never done what they truly wanted to do; paint, write, travel, build a business, climb a mountain, get rich, start a coffee shop. We all have things special to our heart, I know I certainly do. But these things are damn hard to get and they take WORK. There’s no 3 step system to manifesting everything you want, there is no easy way to do hard things - so you need to understand that life won’t be a walk in the park like you might expect it to be. In fact it’s probably going to tear holes in you, smack you around, beat you to your knees, and fuck with you for years while you learn to stay on your feet and fight back. The battles don’t get any easier, you just get smarter and you get harder…you get better.
The reason I say to never give up, is because the further you go and the harder you try - the more it all starts to make sense. You make more connections and your network expands. You become wiser, better able to judge situations, people, and make good decisions. You have more money and you know how to use it. You start to understand how reality works, and how you can leverage it to get what you want. You go from a victim to a creator of circumstance as life continually beats more and more experience into you through it’s endless inevitable trials and tribulations.
One day you wake up, and you are a million miles ahead of everyone else who refused to hold on and do the work. You have your freedom, your health, a bank account full of money, and high prospects. because you did the damn work. This is where I am as I type these words - but I went through holy hell to get here and I refused to ever settle for less than what I wanted. Years went by as a failed at a number of things and experienced legitimate misery. I wanted to quit and just have a tiny, comfortable life - but my heart would not let me because I knew, just like you do, that there was so much more.
As I am sure some of you do, I would look at older guys who seemed to have it all together, wondering why I couldn’t do that too. Maybe something was wrong with me? I just could not figure out life, and nothing would work. The real issue was not that I couldn’t figure out life though, it was that due to all my reading and networking and study - I knew what was possible, and I just didn’t know how to get it. I’d subsconciously raised my standards and they would never come back down which cursed me to eternal trial and error until I finally found a place in life that met at the crossroads of my being.
Most of the people I thought had it together actually did not, and they were in fact living lives they had simply settled for. What made them look like they had everything on point was the house they didn’t own, the car they didn’t own, the fake confidence that a lot of guys put on to mask their insecurity. It was all surface level shit. Maybe some were happy with this, but most are not - most men settle for far less than what they want out of life. They give up.
We ALL at some level want to be rich, have high status, freedom, multiple women, lots of options and obtain the material things we’ve always wanted. Few of us want to live in some shitbox apartment or stupid house we don’t like, with kids we didn’t want, and a wife who doesn’t give a shit - but this is the life everyone settles for, it is the life pushed by the Matrix, and it is what is expected of you as a modern man; to live shackled with debt, unwanted obligations and too much body fat.
I know all too well what it is like to be stuck working some job that makes you feel depressed, trapped, and unfufilled. Where you just go through the motions each day, where you envy other guys who are further ahead, where you have to put up with your coworkers bitching and complaining and gossiping, where the work is pointless, where you have an asshole boss who treats you poorly, and where you KNOW you are doing far less than you are capable of…but you are there because you don’t know what else to do, and you don’t know where to go.
Listen friend, all you need to do is not give up. It might suck right now, you might feel like there is no way out. But it’s right in front of you. The reason you cannot see it is because you lack the knowledge and you are not ready to see it. So you must endure, work your job, save your money, spend your evenings thinking and planning. Read, lift weights, network, start exposing your mind to new opportunities and before you know it you will be in a totally new world where your work is more enjoyable and lucrative, where girls want you, and where you have control over your life.
The first step in getting ANYTHING is admitting you fucking want it. Remember this. Until you can write down on a loose sheet of paper precisely what you want, with conviction and determination, do not expect to get anything more than what you currently have. Knowing what you want and optimising your mind is half the battle. Actually getting it is the easy part because once your head is right, then everything works better.
If you look around what you will notice is that the majority of people gave up on some level - on their body, on their mind, on their life. It was too hard to persist in the pursuit of what they truly wanted, or maybe they didn’t even try. The reality of becoming successful at unconventional endeavours like starting businesses, pursuing art, or other creative pursuits not pushed by the mainstream - is that it is fucking tough, and I mean really tough. It takes a lot of balls to say no to what is expected of you, and to lock yourself away in your own mind to build the future YOU want. It takes courage, determination, extreme commitment.
Few can do this, and that’s why few become enviable in the world. Not many people can tolerate the criticism, the judgement, the self-doubt, the fear, the unknown and the uncertainty of banging your head into a wall trying to make something work while having no money, bills to pay, people mocking you, and your own mind gnawing at your fucking soul daily that you can’t do it and that you should just settle for what everyone else is doing.
Why do you think successful men and established entrepreneurs have true Character?
It’s because of what it took to become who they are and get what they want, and if you want to do the same then literally all you need to do is refuse to give up on yourself. You have got to fight that voice in your head that tells you negative shit. You have got to ignore people who don’t support your decision to pursue excellence. You have to become deaf to anything that doesn’t advance your purpose and vision.
What you may not realise as a young man, is that most of these people are both afraid and resentful of you. Afraid of seeing you succeed, and resentful because you have the courage to try - they wish they could be like you. So don’t be so hard on yourself when you get judged or others criticise you. People love to make assumptions based on surface level data, they have zero fucking idea what it takes to be successful in this world. It’s hard, it’s dirty, and it takes endurance of pain.
Years ago while driving out of Sydney with my mentor Colin Peek - one of Australia’s biggest egg farmers and a ruthlessly feared businessman - we sat in his Mercedes while he smoked and I remember asking him questions about life.
One of those questions was….
“Colin - why do you think most people never get what they want mate? Not many get to live like you do, but everyone would like to. I want to know what you think about this?”
Colin smiled as he always used to. His face was hardened by a life of pain. His eyes sharper than a razor. He took a puff of his cigarette and blew the smoke out the window.
“Maverick - it’s very important in life that you don’t give up on yourself. Most people can’t handle the stress of doing something big, they can’t cope, they can’t rise to the occasion. So they give up well before they even truly tried. People don’t get what they want out of life not because they can’t have it, it’s because they give up on it. Simple as that.
There’s been many times when I wanted to throw in the towel. I had no clue how I would get out of a situation I was in. But I fucking did, now I am here.
…s_o just Don’t. Give. Up.”_
Filed under · Motivation
