Genuine manhood, manly manhood, true manhood – is sacrifice. To do manly things, tend your field, make manly men, and to live to the glory to God – in other words, to fulfill all the Manly Maxims – you have to sacrifice. Sacrifice what? Everything. Anything. Not your integrity or morality or commitments to God, but certainly your comforts, your rights, your time, your money, your attention, and your energy. You have to sacrifice the priority of yourself.
– Stephen Mansfield
We live in an age that defines people largely by appearance. The body is the man. The look is the woman. There is almost no separating the outer from the inner, the true man from the physical vessel he occupies in his life. This overemphasis on what is seen has had tragic consequences for some men. Some of us just don’t look “manly” in the traditional sense. We are thin or un-muscular or high-voiced or perhaps even effeminate in the way we move.
These features tempt us to believe that we are condemned to some form of un-manly, un-masculine life. Meanwhile, our more hairy, more muscular friends are considered manly merely for their appearance. Hear me: I don’t care about your appearance. Manliness, in my view, is about doing.
– Stephen Mansfield
The small man gossips. The average man lets him. The great man stays silent and allows what is said of him to make him greater still.
– Stephen Mansfield
Devotion to self-education is unquestionably one of the marks of an exceptional man. Passive men wait for knowledge to come to them. Weak men assume what they need to know will seek them out. Men of great character and drive search out the knowledge they need.
– Stephen Mansfield
Manly men know themselves, work to understand their God-ordained uniqueness and their unique brand of damage, and accept they will always be a work in progress, always be a one-man construction project that is never quite finished in this life. They don’t despair. They don’t settle.
– Stephen Mansfield
A man cannot fulfill his purpose if he is living for applause, approval, and affirmation in this world.
– Stephen Mansfield
Action is character. Manhood is action. Some people are going to be uncomfortable with this conclusion. They’ll want to say that true manhood comes from something else. A man becomes a true man by recovering his natural wilderness. Or a man becomes a true man after he finds healing for his masculine soul. Or a man becomes a true man when he starts to resist
being overdomesticated. Or a man becomes a true man by being like Jesus. Or Gandhi. Or Bono. There is some truth in all of this. Afterward, though – after the man starts following Jesus, or is liberated, or is healed, or is unleashed – how do we know he is a true man? We know only if he acts like one.
– Stephen Mansfield
Manfield’s Manly Maxim #2: Manly men tend their fields… It is the job of a man to know the definition of the field assigned to him. Who “belongs” to him? What is he responsible for? What boundaries is he guarding? What forces – physical, moral, emotional, spiritual, intellectual – must he guard against? What needs to be done?
– Stephen Mansfield
I learned a long time ago in my consulting work that friends are the best reflection of a man’s happiness, priorities, and health.
– Stephen Mansfield
Forgiving is more about doing than feeling. Forgiving is primarily a decision to treat a wrong in the same way we cancel the debt of someone who owes us money. We no longer hold the debtor in a debtor’s prison. We forgive the debt by deciding we are no longer owed anything: an apology, an opportunity to beat the offender to death, the right to talk nasty about him or her. Instead, we decide – not feel – the record is wiped clean.
– Stephen Mansfield
Men are in a crisis. We know this. There are books about it, retreats about it, academic conferences about it, and every kind of gathering where men sit around and talk about it. As these words are being written, men lag behind women in nearly every measurable field of achievement. If the statistics are true, and if television commercials are any reflection, men today are unhappy, self-loathing, pleasure-addicted, juvenile, and less productive than ever.
– Stephen Mansfield
For a man to become a great man, he will have to defeat the force of bitterness in his life. No one escapes it.
– Stephen Mansfield
In the wild, turkeys are amazing. When domesticated, turkeys are so stupid they have to be kept from accidentally killing themselves a dozen different ways. Gentlemen, let’s admit it: most of us are tragically over domesticated. We have hardly any connection to the wild or our wilder selves. Words like adventure, exploit, and quest no longer apply to us. It is why we are soft, whiny, and bored.
– Stephen Mansfield
All it takes for a contagious manly culture to form is for one genuine man to live out genuine manhood. It creates a model, something for other men to feed upon and pattern themselves after. It also gives other genuine men a vital connection that sustains and extends who they are.
– Stephen Mansfield
I believe something fairly radical: true manhood comes from doing manly deeds. It is the mastery of a body of behaviors. By words like manly and manhood, I don’t mean the kind of behavior we see in the fake masculinity that surrounds us today. There’s nothing manly about a guy downing booze until he throws up in the street. There’s nothing manly about cruising
for women like some predatory beast and then devouring them for pleasure before casting them aside. There’s nothing manly about making a child but then running like a coward before that child is born. There’s nothing manly about dominating a woman or treating her like a servant or leaving her with burdens that aren’t rightly hers.
– Stephen Mansfield
We know our flaws – at least most of them. We constantly face our weakness and our damage. It can cause us to doubt we will ever live an exceptional life. It isn’t true. If history is any guide, struggling manfully against our deformities is the beginning of greatness.
– Stephen Mansfield
If we asked men today to list the duties or disciplines that comprise true manhood, most would not include learning or the acquisition of knowledge. This signals a tragic failure to understand the traits that make a great man. The truth is most great men in history have become great because they aggressively pursued knowledge.
– Stephen Mansfield
The question we all face is not whether or not we have defects. We do. Everyone of us. The question is whether we are capable of envisioning a life defined by forces greater than the weight of our flaws. The moment we can – the moment we can envision a life beyond mere compromise with our deformities – that is the moment we take the first steps toward weighty
lives.
– Stephen Mansfield
Much of what a man needs to know can land in his iPad while he is sleeping, but he has to know enough to value this power in the first place. How many men have lost jobs because they did not see massive trends on the horizon? How many men have failed to stay intellectually sharp and so gave up ground in their professions to others with more active minds? How many have lost money through uninformed investments or have not taken opportunities in expanding fields or have missed promotions because they had not bothered
to learn about new technologies or what changes social media, for example, would bring to their jobs?
– Stephen Mansfield
I believe most men make peace with their defects. They accept their flaws as simply the way they are, and so they never declare war on those parts of themselves that keep them from exceptional lives. Mediocrity becomes their lot in life; merely getting by their only hope.
– Stephen Mansfield