There was two kind of men. Men who win and men who don't. Contrary to the popular belief, losing doesn't necessarily make you a part of the second group. Losing at whatever contest, challenge or trial is seen by the manly as just another step towards winning. A real man challenges himself because it's the only way he's going to get better. So winning or losing doesn't matter as long as you take the challenge with a complete abandon to the task, a pure and unbreakable will to win.
The lack of challenge is the undoing of a man. With no motivation, no task at hand that will require him to step out of his zone of comfort and explore the greater unknown, the man will collapse and become soft. The couch will get more and more comfortable and the Debbie Travis show will become oh so fascinating! Soon, your most eloquent retort will be: "Wow, they made a good job with this wallpaper. This kitchen looks like a million bucks".
Learn to love challenge. Physical, intellectual and even emotional. Challenge is water pouring on the soil from which you grow as a person. As we all remember, the golden rule for manhood is to be able to "handle the situation". In order to do that, you have to maintain a spartan attitude towards challenging yourself. You will want to read, learn , travel, keep your physical shape and cross your boundaries in every way you can. To give you a concrete image on how you should meditate on self-improvement, think about this: Philosopher Thomas Kuhn pictured the realm of human knowledge as a circle. Every fact out of the circle will require the circle to grow in order to be able to explain it.
Keep aiming for things outside your little circle, so that it's going to grow wider and wider and wider. You enjoy James Patterson? Hell, try reading Chandler, Doyle and Ellroy. You can bench 100 lbs? Aim for 200. Goals will keep you motivated and the constant work will inspire the others. That's why winning is not the most important part of the challenge. The work and the improvement are what counts. Leave your self-help book aside for a moment and try giving yourself a bit of a hard time. A well-calculated hard time that will bring something more to you, open the gates of a universe you didn't know before. A real man should always challenge himself and get better because he never knows when he's going to be needed to handle the situation.
