THE CODE

Situational Awareness is key. When things don’t go your way, stop looking at the ground, pick your head up and look to where you want to go. Don’t wallow in where you have been. Opportunities may be staring you in the face.

The formation conditions behind your genesis is critical, because that context sets up how you can coordinate and scale moving forward. Remembering this fact, gets you back to your ground level truth. This is your north star, and will always lead you back home.

Holding on to sunk costs is equivalent to wearing layers of wet clothes and trying to run a marathon, just because you paid a lot of money to look good while you run. Not only will you move toward your goal much slower, you will be giving up other opportunities that cross your path because you're tied down or doing something that doesn’t 100% resonate with your truth.

Always have a backup. Put another way, always build redundancy into your life. Hard drives fail. Friends will over commit and bail. Time runs out. When you have backups, you don’t lose time but have the ability to move forward. Bonus points if one item can fulfill two or more tasks, thus creating a backup if something else fails. Duck tape, multitools, think of tools that make other tools. Redundant capability but applied with diversity. Ie can you battery pack charge your phone, LED light, and ham radio?

Be strategic when you decide to put pressure on people and situations. If you do something that is interpreted as an act of war, you can’t back down from that. Make sure that when you do so, you make it count, and use that opportunity judiciously.

If every person you meet and interact with is better off for having known you, that person will be in a better mood to go and lift others up. Also, few people these days are genuinely kind and give without expectation of receiving. This is a true art that is only cultivated through continuous practice. The opposite is manipulation and coercion, which is effectively a weaponization of influence.

Your intuition is your personal internal guidance system. When you get a gut feeling for better or worse, trust it. Your soul is speaking to you through subconscious awareness.

Just because someone looks or sounds like they know what they’re doing - doesn’t mean they do. People who yell or try to exert dominance on purpose are usually hiding something under the surface (their own insecurity). See #7.

How you do anything is how you do everything. By cultivating a practice of being intentional with everything you do - nothing is wasted. Acting with intention means constantly walking and acting in resonance with your own truth.

Leave no trace is like #6, but for the environments you traverse. Leave no trace is a core tenant for outdoor ethics promoting conservation. Not only is this efficient and beneficial for everyone, it’s also great for OPSEC (operational security). The more information we unintentionally or carelessly put out in the world, the bigger the attack surface we create for ourselves to be leveraged by nefarious parties.

Bruce Lee once famously once said “be water my friend”. Instead of trying to force your way through an obstacle, flow around it. Maybe there are many other ways around towards your goal that you haven’t yet considered. Water is amorphous, meaning its shape adapts and reacts to the situation or environment. Water is also the element symbolizing emotions in astrology, and prosperity and abundance in feng shui. Be water, and allow it to flow!

The first relationship you have is always with yourself. If you don’t take care of yourself or prioritize your needs, no one else will. That is the path to codependency on others, and contempt for oneself.

Not just a practice, but a persistent mindset. The US Coast Guard motto, semper paratus, is a translation from latin meaning always ready. The more prepared you are, the more complexity and uncertainty you can handle. With more adaptability, the more calculated risks you can take, while also increasing the odds of success.

If we lie to ourselves, there is no way to improve or exist with intention. Without observing the truth, we have no frame of reference to history, and we therefore repeat the same mistakes. At the end of the day, all we have is our truth and our choices. Without truth, we have nothing. You don’t know who you really are. If you don’t know who you are, or uphold beliefs that are not resonant with your own intrinsic value system, you are probably being manipulated by some other force.