A reader recently wrote in with a question I’ve gotten some version of dozens of times over the years. He’s a year into fatherhood, his wife is about to go back to work, and he’s struggling to fit in exercise, friends, hobbies, and reading while still being a decent husband and dad. What he wanted to know was basically: how do you balance all this stuff?

It’s a perennially tough question for dads. I remember when our kids were babies and toddlers and feeling harried and sleep-deprived changing diapers and doing early morning feedings and playing with them and tending to them when they got sick (little kids get sick a lot, which means you get sick a lot), all while continuing to work and trying to keep up an exercise routine and a glimmer of a social life.

Once the kids were potty trained, I thought time and bandwidth would free up. And it definitely did. The pressure on you becomes less relentless and immediate. But older kids take up your time in new and different ways. When they hit elementary and middle school, they’ve got places to be like basketball practice and church groups and what have you, and you’re the one driving them there and coordinating schedules with your wife. It’s great to watch your kids develop their talents and interests, but it takes a lot of time and mental energy.

Below is the advice I’d give any dad with kids in the house, regardless of what phase of fatherhood he’s in. It’s mostly what I’ve figured out through trial and error since our first kid, Gus, came along sixteen years ago.

1. Drop the Stuff That Doesn’t Matter

When fatherhood hits, it’s the time to reexamine and rearrange your priorities. Do an audit of your life. Are there any commitments — whether social, professional, civic, or religious — that used to make sense in your life and no longer do? Drop them.

Once I had kids, I stopped doing speaking engagements. Especially with those that required travel, they threw off my schedule too much and got me behind on work, and the time away from home simply wasn’t worth the tradeoff in missing out on time with my kids.

2. Scale Back the Stuff You Keep

The good news about fatherhood is that if you become more effective about managing your time and schedule, you should be able to keep all the things that are important to you and all the interests you had before kids. But, you should accept the fact that you might have to scale some of them back a little.

For example, I love to work out. Ideally, I get an hour of exercise in each day, and most of the time I do. But I’ve run into periods of my life as a dad where I can’t get a full 60-minute workout in. Instead of an hour session, I’ll do a 30-minute one. Heck, when all else has failed, I’ve done a 15-minute workout. Even now, when things get busier than usual, I aim to never have an all-or-nothing attitude about exercise; training for a half hour is better than not training at all.

If you’d like to keep working out on the regular, I highly recommend building a garage gym. Saves you so much time by eliminating the commute to a commercial gym. If you can’t afford or don’t have room for plates and a squat rack, a set of dumbbells and a bench will do.

You can do the same scaling back with your other interests. Take reading. Yes, it would be great to read 30 minutes, uninterrupted, every day. But maybe 15 minutes is all you can do right now. Do that. Or instead of reading a book, listen to an audiobook on your commute or while you’re driving kids to practice. I’ve got more tips for reading more, even when you have a busy schedule, here.

3. Get Organized

Maybe before you had kids, you’d manage to get by holding all the to-dos that needed tackling in your head. After you have kids, that’s not going to fly. You’ve got more on your plate, and you need a system for keeping a grip on it.

It doesn’t have to be an elaborate system. Just something to make sure stuff doesn’t slip through the cracks and you can keep moving forward personally and professionally.

For me, I devote a half hour every Sunday to planning my week. This weekly planning session helps me see what’s coming, figure out the most important things I need to do, and keep the big picture in view so the urgent stuff doesn’t crowd out the important stuff.

I first check to see what’s already on the schedule in terms of podcast interviews, meetings, article schedule, kids’ activities, doctors’ appointments, etc. Then I do a mind dump of everything I need to get done across the different domains of my life, from phone calls to chores, and input them into Todoist. (I highly recommend using this app. I’ve talked about Todoist plenty of times on the site — including a detailed breakdown of how I use it to organize my life and templates I employ for recurring tasks — but I don’t have any affiliation with the company; I’m just a very satisfied user.) Once I’ve finished my mind dump, I’ll assign due dates to the tasks that emerged from it.

This weekly planning session is one of the 8 habits that have had the most ROI in my life. Find a system that works for you.

4. Learn to Use Pockets of Time

Your time will become more fragmented as a parent. You won’t have many long, uninterrupted blocks of it anymore. But you will have plenty of pockets of time, and you can chip away at things in those interstices.

I do a lot of my reading while waiting for my kids to get done with practice. I just bring a book or pull one up on the Kindle app on my phone. I’ve also watched a lot of movies in 5- to 10-minute increments, waiting in the carline to pick up my kids from school. It’s not an ideal way to watch a movie, but it works. I also knock out chores in little pockets of time I find myself with at home. Small bits of time add up, so don’t neglect them; there are real possibilities in spare moments!

5. Decide Now How Many Activities Your Kids Will Do

If your kid is still in diapers, now’s a good time to have a conversation with your wife about how many activities and which ones you’re going to let your kids do as they get older. It’s easier to say no to a travel team or dance squad before your kid has ever heard of one than after all their friends are on it or you feel yourself getting caught up in the pressure to move them to an ever more competitive level.

From what I’ve seen of families with kids on travel teams, those teams will consume your life. They’re expensive in terms of both money and time. We didn’t pursue that path for our kids. They have and do play on rec or school teams. A sports psychologist I had on the podcast several years ago argued that all the special coaching and elite-team travel doesn’t do much to turn a kid into a superstar anyway, and it isn’t the only path to playing on the college and professional level. Unless you and your kids enjoy spending your weekends traveling 400 miles to play a game, why invest so much time and money in sports?

Kate and I also set a hard limit on extracurriculars: two at a time, max. This was often one sport + one musical instrument. More than that and things get bonkers and your family gets fragmented.

6. If You’ve Got the Money, Outsource Some Stuff

Pay somebody to do the stuff that doesn’t need to be done by you. Mowing the lawn, removing the leaves, cleaning the house, whatever. A lawn service gives you back hours of time every month, which is time you can spend with your kid (or doing something you want to do) instead of raking leaves that will all be replaced by the following day. Not everybody has the budget for this, I know. But if you do, it’s some of the best money you’ll spend.

7. Keep Up a Social Life, But Lower Your Expectations for It

Having a rich social life is important at every stage in life; it’s a huge contributor to our overall happiness. So it’s not something you should let disappear once you have kids; don’t turn into one of those people who never hangs out with other adults once their house is taken over by the diaper-wearing set.

But maintaining friendships when you have kids isn’t easy. Not only do you have less time, but the people you’d like to hang out with also have less time. Plus, your schedules probably don’t sync up anymore. There’s social discoordination.

So keep up some semblance of a social life, but lower expectations for what it’s going to look like. I aim to get at least one hangout a month with a friend. If I get that, I count it as a success.

If you want to make things a little more consistent, a standing thing (a monthly poker night, a discussion group) is a better approach than trying to schedule something fresh each month. The best and most fruitful social seasons of my life as a dad have been those when I had a set, regular time where I met up with a group.

8. Hold a Weekly Marriage and Family Meeting

Start a weekly marriage meeting with your wife if you haven’t already. Kate and I have done this for years and are big believers in the practice. Once a week, we sit down for 20 minutes and do the four components of a marriage meeting: sharing appreciation for each other, going over household to-dos, planning for good times, and discussing bigger issues. You can find the details of how a marriage meeting works here. The habit helps us stay connected as a couple and keeps our household running smoothly.

I also recommend holding a weekly family meeting that includes your kids (the older your kids are, the more they’ll be able to participate). It’s a chance to make sure everyone is on the same page regarding the calendar and upcoming events, while reinforcing your family’s culture and discussing how things are going with it.

Well, that’s about all the advice I’ve got. Some of it will fit your situation and some of it won’t, and you’ll figure out the rest through trial and error, same as every dad before you.

Popular culture would make it seem like fatherhood just adds a burden of stress and obligation, and that it’s sad that your former childless life has ended. But when you have kids, life doesn’t end, it just changes. You now have more than you and your wife to think about, but there’s a lot of joy in being part of a “little platoon.” As long as you make some adjustments and learn to move as a unit, you’ll find rich satisfaction in taking life on, together.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Few figures in history have had as powerful an impact on American masculinity as the cowboy. While the mythologization of the cowboy began all the way back in the late 1800s with dime novels and Wild West shows, it wasn’t until the advent of twentieth century cinema that the cowboy cemented his place as an icon of manliness. In the same way the myths of the Greeks and the legends of the Vikings espoused certain ideals and inspired men of the past, Western films contain lessons in heroism, epic adventure, and meditations on the line between good and evil. They form a fun, ponderous, sometimes contradictory, undeniably indelible, and thoroughly American canon on what it means to live with honor and be a tough, gritty, self-reliant man.

With that in mind, a few years ago we published a list of what we deemed to be the 17 best Western films. Of course readers chimed in that we had inevitably left out a few fan favorites. So a couple years later we did another list of more than a dozen films that readers recommended. Even then, there were a few more that just had to be added in. So for your reading convenience we combined those first two lists and included a handful more to give you the ultimate guide to the greatest Western films ever made. Enjoy!

High Noon

High Noon is film about being torn between duty and love and standing up for what you believe in, even when everyone else abandons you. Gary Cooper plays Will Kane, a town marshal from New Mexico, who settles down with his pacifist Quaker wife (played by Grace Kelly, one of your grandpa’s babes). Kane’s plans to retire to a peaceful life are interrupted after he gets word that a former gunslinger is coming in on the noon train to settle an old score with him. His wife pleads with him to leave town, but Kane knows he can’t. He has a duty to defend the town and his honor. Will finds himself alone in the battle as everyone in town, including his deputy sheriff, have turned away from him. The tension builds, leading up to the final gun battle — the quintessential mano-a-mano showdown that historians say rarely actually happened in the Old West, but has become an indelible part of popular culture.

Best line: “Don’t shove me Harv. I’m tired of being shoved.”

3:10 To Yuma (1957)

Small-time, down-on-his-luck rancher Dan Evans needs to do something to keep food on the table for his family. So when a stagecoach company offers $200 to transport the outlaw Ben Wade to Contention City in order to put him on the 3:10 train to court, Evans volunteers. But Wade’s gang has other plans, and their journey is fraught with danger at every turn. As often happens in Westerns, the demarcation between good and bad becomes a little blurred.

Originally based on a short story by great Western writer Elmore Leonard, 3:10 To Yuma was selected in 2012 to be part of the National Film Registry because of its cultural significance.

Best line: “What are you squeezin’ that watch for? Squeezin’ that watch ain’t gonna stop time.”

Stagecoach

This is the movie that made John Wayne a star and set the standard for all subsequent Westerns (some would say it set the standard for all 20th century cinema). Directed by the legendary John Ford and shot on scene in Monument Park, Stagecoach follows a group of nine strangers as they cross dangerous Apache territory in — you guessed it — a stagecoach. All of the characters have their own personal demons that they’re running from and the journey through the treacherous Apache territory in many ways serves as a symbolic road to redemption for each of them. The acting and screenplay is top notch. Despite being filmed in 1939, the movie is still fresh and engaging. Be on the lookout for the epic chase scene featuring one of the most famous movie stunts of all time performed by Yakima Canutt.

Best line: “Well, there are some things a man just can’t run away from.”

Open Range

Made in 2003, many commenters on our original list of movies noted this film as their favorite modern Western. Starring genre regulars Robert Duvall and Kevin Costner, the plot is fairly familiar: Boss (Duvall) embarks on a long cattle drive with his crew, which includes Charley White (Costner), a Civil War vet. They stop near the town of Harmonville to resupply, which is controlled by the ruthless land baron Denton Baxter. When one of the cowhands doesn’t return, Boss and Charley depart from the herd to go investigate, and run into some local trouble. Even though the plot is somewhat expected, the action and acting are no less spectacular, with the final gunfight being called one of the best of all time by Guns & Ammo magazine. That right there should be enough to convince you of Open Range’s inclusion on this list.

Best line: “We come for justice, not vengeance. Now them is two different things.”

Broken Arrow

Based on historical characters, but dramatized and fictionalized, of course, this film stars James Stewart as Tom Jeffords, an Army scout and Indian agent who was instrumental in making peace with Chief Cochise and the Apache people. After saving a young Indian boy, Jeffords learns the language and customs of the Apache, and then attempts negotiating for the safe passage of mail riders who are frequently ambushed. He makes a deal, but not everyone agrees with it. Both settlers and Indians are miffed, and it may cost Jeffords everything he holds dear. Broken Arrow was the first Western that took a sympathetic view towards American Indians.

Best line: “To talk of peace is not hard. To live it is very hard.”

The Searchers

In this film, also directed by John Ford, John Wayne gives the most intense acting performance of his career as the dark and vengeful Ethan Edwards, a man who vows to kill the Comanche raiders who murdered his beloved sister-in-law and brother, and took captive two of their daughters. Wayne does a fantastic job in embodying a conflicted, complex man whose racism and desire for revenge sets up a situation far more morally ambiguous than Cowboys vs. Indians.

Best line: “That’ll be the day.”

My Darling Clementine

Another John Ford film. This one stars Henry Fonda as Wyatt Earp in the period leading up to the gunfight at the OK Corral. Earp and two of his brothers ride into the town of Tombstone, leaving brother James behind to watch the cattle herd. Finding the town mired in lawlessness and without a marshal, Wyatt is the only man willing to handle a dangerous Indian in town. Upon returning to the herd, James is dead and the cattle are stolen. Wyatt vows revenge, and stays in Tombstone as the marshal until the perpetrators are found. You can’t be without a love interest, so along the way a gal named Clementine Carter (Linda Darnell) arrives in town and stays in the same hotel as Earp. As with most great Westerns, both sparks and bullets fly in this film.

Best line: “When ya pull a gun, kill a man.”

Lonesome Dove

Technically this isn’t a movie, but rather a TV mini-series, but I don’t care. Lonesome Dove is a Western every man should see. Even if you don’t like Westerns, you’ll love Lonesome Dove. Its themes of friendship, regret, and love will resonate with any man. The action scenes are just icing on the cake. Based on one of the best books of all-time, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove follows two retired Texas Rangers — Augustus McCrae (Robert Duvall) and Woodrow Call (Tommy Lee Jones) — as they lead a cattle drive from South Texas all the way to Montana. The production on Lonesome Dove is, bar none, the best in Western cinema. The costumes, the locations, even the way the characters speak make you feel like you’ve been plopped on a horse in 1876 America. But what really separates Lonesome Dove from the rest of the Westerns on this list (and I’d go as far as saying most movies ever made) are the characters. Thanks to top-notch writing and acting, Lonesome Dove is one of those rare movies that makes you feel like its fictional characters are real life people. Not only that, you feel like old friends with them by the end. You’ll cheer their triumphs and bawl your eyes out when tragedy strikes. Do yourself a favor and rent the complete series and watch it. You’ll be a better man for it.

Best line: “It ain’t dying I’m talking about, it’s living.”

McLintock!

George Washington McLintock, “GW” to friends and foes alike (played by John Wayne), is an aging and wealthy self-made rancher. He has eagerly awaited the return of his daughter Becky, who’s been away at school for the last couple years. To his surprise, though, his wife Katherine, who left GW after suspecting adultery, has also returned. And she’s intent on taking their daughter back to the state capital with her. That’s not the only drama, of course. There are shady bureaucrats, Indians on the verge of forced relocation, plenty of brawls and gunfire, and one of the last and most memorable scenes of cinematic wife spanking.

Best line: “You have to be a man first before you’re a gentleman.”

Unforgiven

Cinema often glorifies the Old West as a mythic time when good guys wore white and the bad ones wore black. In Unforgiven, director/actor/producer Clint Eastwood shines a light on the dark, violent, and morally ambiguous aspects of life in frontier America. Clint Eastwood plays William Munny, a once notorious and violent killer. Now, he’s just a quiet and tired farmer who is a devoted father still mourning his dead wife. But Will’s old life comes back to haunt him when he’s asked to do a hit on a cowboy who slashed the face of a prostitute. Will is transplanted from his farm in Kansas to a town in Wyoming where he meets Sheriff Little Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman), a mean son-of-a-bitch who is determined to not let the hit go down, no matter what it takes. Hold onto your hats, partners, this isn’t your grandpa’s Western.

Best line: “Hell of a thing, killing a man. You take away all he’s got and all he’s ever gonna have.”

No Country For Old Men

While not fitting neatly into the Western genre, this 2007 thriller definitely has the dusty, country grit that comes with the other films on the list. It won that year’s Academy Award for Best Picture, and features one of the scariest villains (Javier Bardem) of all-time.

Set in 1980, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) finds two million dollars, along with a slew of dead Mexicans, in a desert drug deal gone wrong. He takes the money, but is tracked by hitman Anton Chigurh (Bardem), so he sends his wife away to her mother’s house. On the run, Moss finds himself in trouble at every turn, and reluctantly accepts the help of both his wife and Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones). Gunfights, games of chance, aging lawmen — this film really does carry all the elements of a Western, but with the twist of the modern thriller. In staying with the genre, it may not have a neat and tidy ending, but it’s one that leaves you satisfied with the story. The book is great too.

Best line: “I always figured when I got older, God would sorta come inta my life somehow. And he didn’t. I don’t blame him. If I was him I would have the same opinion of me that he does.”

Shane

This is a great sheepdog movie. A quiet gunslinger who is trying to escape his past befriends a pioneer family that has settled out west. He attempts to settle down and become a hired hand to the family, but the ranchers who want to drive cattle through the homesteaders’ property are attempting to push them out. Shane tries to stay out of the disputes, but keeps being drawn in and is finally compelled to put his six shooter back on to protect his adoptive family. Perhaps the most touching part of the movie is the relationship Shane develops with the farmer’s son.

Best line: “A gun is a tool, Marian; no better or no worse than any other tool: an axe, a shovel, or anything. A gun is as good or as bad as the man using it. Remember that.”

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is the last in Sergio Leone’s trilogy of “spaghetti westerns.” Despite being the last, it has come to stand on its own. Even if you haven’t seen the film, you probably know something about it. Most likely you’ve heard the iconic theme song with its spooky “wha wha wha” shouts. And you’ve probably seen images and scenes of Clint Eastwood wearing a poncho and smoking a cigar. The film follows three cowboys during the Civil War who try to double cross each other in search of Confederate gold. There’s not much of a deep message in this film. It’s just a lot of fun to watch.

Best line: “When you have to shoot, shoot. Don’t talk.”

The Ox-Bow Incident

Based on the best-selling novel of the same name (which is marvelous in its own right), this 1943 Academy Award-nominated movie fell more into the Western noir side of the genre than your classic gunslinging action flick. Henry Fonda and Dana Andrews star as two drifters passing through a small town, in which a rancher has just been murdered and had his cattle stolen. The townspeople are outraged and form a posse (which includes our drifters) to go catch the murdering rustlers. The angry group catches up with three men who are in possession of the stolen cattle, claiming they were purchased on the up and up. About half the posse is willing to wait for a judge to make some sort of ruling, while the other half is ready to hang the supposed thieves then and there. Does groupthink win the day, or will reason have the last word? There’s not much action here, but the questions asked, and answered, remain remarkably relevant even 75 years later.

Best line: “Law is a lot more than words you put in a book, or judges or lawyers or sheriffs you hire to carry it out. It’s everything people ever have found out about justice and what’s right and wrong. It’s the very conscience of humanity. There can’t be any such thing as civilization unless people have a conscience, because if people touch God anywhere, where is it except through their conscience? And what is anybody’s conscience except a little piece of the conscience of all men that ever lived?” 

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

Based loosely on the real lives of Western outlaws Robert LeRoy Parker (aka Butch Cassidy) and Harry Longabaugh (aka the Sundance Kid), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is a classic movie about two buddies trying to make it in a changing world. What’s funny about this flick is that you forget that these guys were hardened criminals who robbed banks and trains for a living. The easygoing charm Robert Redford and Paul Newman bring to their roles makes you like the characters despite their choice of profession. Their clever hijinks and humor make the movie an enjoyable ride.

Best line: “Rules? In a knife fight? No rules!”

The Sons of Katie Elder

Another John Wayne classic, this one co-starring Dean Martin. Katie Elder had four adult sons: John (Wayne) — an (in)famous gunman, Tom (Martin) — a professional gambler, as well as Bud and Matt. The brothers meet up at their mother’s funeral, bemoaning the fact that they shouldn’t have neglected her like they did. They’d like to re-take the family ranch, which has been nefariously seized by one of the townspeople. As you can imagine, plenty of ruckus ensues, and the Elder brothers do all they can to make their dearly departed mother proud. The popular 2005 movie Four Brothers is loosely based on this story, with a more modern and urban take, and is also worth a watch.

Best line: “Texas is a woman, she used to say, a big, wild, beautiful woman. You raise a kid to where he’s got some size, and there’s Texas whispering in his ear and smiling, saying, ‘Come and have some fun.’ It’s hard enough to raise children, she’d say. But when you’ve got to fight Texas, a mother hasn’t a chance.”

The Magnificent Seven

Inspired by the classic Japanese film Seven Samurai, The Magnificent Seven follows a group of seven American gunfighters (including Steve McQueen) who band together to defend an oppressed Mexican village. This film has it all: great story, great cast, and one of the most iconic movie scores of all time.

Best line: “It’s only a matter of knowing how to shoot a gun. Nothing big about that.”

Red River

What happens to a man when he’s consumed by obsession? That’s the question that we see answered in 1948’s Red River. John Wayne plays Thomas Dunson, a determined and sometimes ruthless man who has the goal of forming the largest cattle ranch in America. With nothing but his trusty trail-hand (Walter Brennan) and a young boy who survived an Indian attack on his wagon train (Montgomery Clift), Dunson does just that. To make money, though, he’s got to get the cattle to market, so Dunson sets out to drive thousands of cattle from Texas to Missouri. Along the way, Dunson’s brutal and dictatorial leadership causes his young protege and adopted son to mutiny and take the cattle from Dunson. Dunson vows to find and kill his boy. Does he do it in the end? You’ll have to watch the movie to find out.

Best line: “Get a shovel and my Bible. I’ll read over him.”

True Grit (2010)

Hired by a young girl to track down the man that killed her father, Jeff Bridges takes on the role of Rooster Cogburn, the marshal with “grit” enough to bring the man to justice. The 2010 version is definitely better than the 1969 John Wayne version. Bridges simply did a superior job portraying Rooster Cogburn, and thanks to the Coen brothers, the movie just seemed more real and alive.

Best line: “Fill your hand you son-of-a-bitch!”

Silverado

This 1985 flick features quite the ensemble cast: Kevin Costner, Jeff Goldblum, Danny Glover, Brian Dennehy, Linda Hunt, and more. Set in 1880, four men find themselves brought together in the midst of gunfights and jail breakouts. (Check out our podcast about the gunfighting history of the Wild West.) They end up in the town of Silverado, and although they part ways, are quickly reunited by their desire to fight the town’s injustices. After fighting common foes, the men also avenge their personal demons, and although they end up going their separate ways, will always retain the kinship of fighting together for the justice of a small Western town.

Best line: “I always figure you might as well approach life like everybody’s your friend or nobody is; don’t make much difference.”

The Wild Bunch

The Wild Bunch is a tale about a group of outlaws who see the world they know quickly disappearing. Set in 1913, the West by then was no longer “wild.” The old rule of “might makes right” had been replaced by government-dispensed justice. Moreover, technology had made many of the skills and know-how needed to survive and thrive in the Wild West obsolete. Sensing that their time is up, a group of outlaws decide to go out in a blaze of glory and gore. The Wild Bunch was and is a controversial film. Its violence and nihilism paints a bleak picture of life at the end of the American West. In many ways, The Wild Bunch symbolized the end of the classic American Western. Just as the outlaws in the film were out of step with a changing society, so too were Westerns out of step with 1969 America. It’s interesting to note that very few new major Westerns were produced after The Wild Bunch was released in 1969.

Best line: “Let’s go.”

Pale Rider

Another movie that Eastwood produced, directed, and starred in. As with many of his other roles, he plays a lone ranger figure just called the “Preacher.” He rides into a gold mining settlement in which a group of thugs led by Coy LaHood (Richard Dysart) are pushing the panners to give up their territory. Preacher attempts to first negotiate with LaHood, but he sets out unreasonable terms that the gold panners refuse to agree to. And so a rough and corrupt Marshal is sent in by LaHood to clear everyone out. That’s where Preacher’s mysterious background — he has six unexplained bullet wounds in his back — comes in handy and he joins the settlers to fight off the bad dudes. Being one of the only Hollywood Westerns made in the 1980s, it received excellent reviews, and was nominated by the American Film Institute as a Top 10 film in the genre (although it ultimately wasn’t included in that prestigious list).

Best line: “There’s plain few problems can’t be solved with a little sweat and hard work.”

Rio Bravo

A small-town sheriff (John Wayne) in the American West enlists the help of a cripple (Walter Brennan), a drunk (Dean Martin, of course), and a young gunfighter (Ricky Nelson, still dreamy even as a cowboy) in his efforts to keep the brother of the local bad guy in jail. Director Howard Hawks made this film in reaction to High Noon. Both he and John Wayne despised what they saw as the wimpy and unmanly lack of resolve in Gary Cooper’s character. I’m not sure I agree with Wayne and Hawks about that, but that’s a debate for another day. Overall, Rio Bravo has everything you should expect in a good 1950s Western: action, adventure, and heroics. We even get to hear old Dean-O sing a tune. 

Best line: “Hey, Dude! How do ya like them apples?”

Major Dundee

Union cavalry officer Major Amos Dundee (Charlton Heston) has been assigned to a POW camp in New Mexico after making a tactical error in the Battle of Gettysburg. After an Apache war chief named Sierra Charriba, along with his band of comrades, massacres a family of ranchers and a group of cavalrymen, Dundee takes it upon himself to get revenge. So he recruits a private army of Union soldiers, Confederate prisoners, Indian scouts, and even mercenaries. They venture into Mexico to fight the Apache, with whom they engage in several bloody battles. Dundee is able to show off his tactical prowess, and we see how even enemies can come together in the face of a common foe. While this film wasn’t held in terribly high regard when it came out, in the last decade or so that tide has been turning; one modern reviewer describes it as “likely the most gritty and realistic Western ever made.”

Best line: “I have only three commands. When I signal you to come, you come. When I signal you to charge, you charge. And when I signal you to run, you follow me and run like hell!”

Tombstone

After years of chasing outlaws, legendary lawman Wyatt Earp retires and takes up residence in the town of Tombstone, Arizona. His plans to live out his days as a respectable businessman are interrupted when a gang of hell-raisers called “the Cowboys” starts causing trouble in the area. Not able to stand the lawlessness, Earp joins his brothers in getting rid of the Cowboys. Tensions between the Earps and the Cowboys heats up and eventually leads to the infamous showdown at the O.K. Corral. Action-packed and fast-moving, Tombstone is definitely a Western that suits modern moviegoers’ tastes. Not to mention, it has some of the best mustachery in the history of cinema.

Best line: “I’m your Huckleberry.”

Once Upon a Time in the West

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was supposed to be Sergio Leone’s last Western. But then Paramount Pictures offered him access to Henry Fonda (who plays the villain), and he couldn’t say no. Although Clint Eastwood turned down the role of protagonist, Charles Bronson did not, and over time the film has come to be known as one of the best Westerns of all-time (famous directors like Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, and George Lucas credit this film with influencing them), even though it didn’t gain critical or box office success when it first came out.

The story revolves around Jill McBain, who has just moved from New Orleans to the Utah frontier, only to find her new husband and his children brutally murdered. She’s joined in the hunt for the killer by outlaw Cheyenne and the mysterious fellow named Harmonica (Bronson), who knows a few tunes on both his classic cowboy instrument and his gun.

Best line: “How can you trust a man that wears both a belt and suspenders? Man can’t even trust his own pants.”

How the West Was Won

This 1963 film has perhaps the most star-studded cast ever assembled: John Wayne, Gregory Peck, James Stewart, Carroll Baker, Henry Fonda, Debbie Reynolds, and more. It’s an epic, so rather than focusing on a single story or time period, it follows four generations of one family over 50 years in the mid-1800s as they move westward. You get a little bit of everything: river fordings, Indian raids, plains crossings, Civil War battles, gold rushes, railroad construction, and skirmishes with outlaws. Over the course of almost three hours you span nearly every subject covered by the genre. And it’s not like today’s celebrity-stuffed films that are poorly made and clearly just vying for more eyeballs; How the West Was Won has a perfect 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It’s a dang good film, and one that stands out not just among Westerns, but among all genres.

Best line: “The west that was won by its pioneers, settlers, adventurers is long gone now. Yet it is theirs forever, for they left tracks in history that will never be eroded by wind or rain — never plowed under by tractors, never buried in compost of events. Out of the hard simplicity of their lives, out of their vitality of their hopes and sorrows grew legends of courage and pride to inspire their children and their children’s children.”

The Outlaw Josey Wales

Directing and starring Clint Eastwood, the film’s about a man named Josey Wales who lost home and family during the Civil War to a band of pro-Union Jayhawkers. Driven by revenge, he joins a posse of pro-Confederate soldiers so he can find the men who destroyed the things he loved. The Civil War ends and the band of Confederate fighters surrender. But not Josey. Revenge, sorrow, forgiveness, betrayal, love, family, and honor take center stage in this Eastwood classic.

Best line: “Dyin’ ain’t much of a living, boy.”

Comanche Station

Some Westerns are big-budgeted affairs loaded with stars and running for up to a few hours. While those are great, sometimes you want to see what the smaller-budget guys can do with just a couple good actors and a solid story. That’s where Comanche Station comes in, having recently been noted by some as one of the great underrated Westerns. With a running time of just 74 minutes, there’s no fluff. When loner Jefferson Cody trades with a band of Comanches to release a white woman, he assumes that getting Mrs. Lowe back to her husband will be a piece of cake. But with a handsome reward on the line for her return and a couple of nasty outlaws, the going ain’t so easy.

Best line: “Not talkin’ about right. Talkin’ about stayin’ alive.”

The Big Country

East coast sea captain James McKay (Gregory Peck) heads West with his fiancee Patricia (Carroll Baker — who also co-starred in How the West Was Won) to live on her father’s ranch. McKay doesn’t realize he’s walking into an old water rights feud between his soon-to-be father-in-law and the neighbor, Rufus Hannassey (Burl Ives — who won an Academy Award and Golden Globe for his supporting role).

Terrill (the father-in-law) and Hannassey trade barbs and trouble-making stunts, but after declining to duel, ride unbroken horses, or otherwise prove his manhood, everyone, including his fiancee, starts to consider McKay a bit of a coward. Unbeknownst to the family, however, he’s been settling things and trying to make peace behind the scenes. Turns out the seaman knows a thing or two to be able survive in the West after all. This film has it all: literally dueling neighbors, vivid landscapes and wild horses, and even a love triangle. President Dwight Eisenhower was a big fan of this film, and in fact once screened it on four consecutive evenings in the White House.

Best line: “There’s some things a man has to prove to himself alone, not to anyone else.”

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

This 2007 film directed by Andrew Dominik is the film version of the 1983 novel of the same name. Brad Pitt stars as Jesse James with Casey Affleck taking on the role of his killer, Robert Ford. When James’ gang plans a train robbery in Missouri, Ford makes multiple attempts to join the gang. Ultimately, Ford gets rejected by James, and so sets out to get revenge. The film is star-studded, but surprisingly had lackluster results at the box office despite excellent reviews, with one critic even saying that it is “one of the most wrongly neglected masterpieces of its era.”

Best line: “It seems to me if you have something to confess, you outta be right and you spit it out now.”

Dances With Wolves

Kevin Costner both starred in and directed this 1990 Best Picture winner (one of only three Westerns to win the prestigious Academy Award). During the Civil War, Lt. John Dunbar becomes a Union hero for an act of bravery he did not intend to commit. Wanting to get away to the Western frontier, he requests a posting at a remote fort. Finding it abandoned, he mans the outpost alone, and quickly befriends not only the local Indians, but a wolf too, which he names Two Socks. He also finds a white woman who’s been raised by the tribe, and comes to earn the trust and respect of the native people. This doesn’t exactly sit well with the military, though, and Dunbar soon has to choose where his loyalty really lies.

Best line: “It seems every day ends with a miracle here. And whatever God may be, I thank God for this day.”

The Shootist

Nobody wants to die alone. Especially gunslingers. In a haunting portrayal that foreshadowed his own fate, John Wayne plays J.B. Books, an aging gunfighter dying of cancer who resigns himself to live out his days in private. But skeletons from his past prevent him from fading away, so he decides to go down the only way he knows how – with his six-shooter blazing.

Best line: “I won’t be wronged. I won’t be insulted. I won’t be laid a-hand on. I don’t do these things to other people, and I require the same from them.”

Vera Cruz

Starring Gary Cooper and Burt Lancaster, 1954’s Vera Cruz was one of the first big Westerns to feature morally ambiguous characters who were nonchalant towards violence. It paved the way for those themes to be realized in big Hollywood fashion in the late 50s and 60s.

Set during the Franco-Mexican War of 1861, Cooper plays ex-Confederate soldier Ben Trane. He’s gone down to Mexico looking for work as a mercenary and teams up with gunslinger Joe Erin (Lancaster). They are hired by Emperor Maximillian I to escort the Countess Duvarre (Denise Darcel) to the port city of Vera Cruz. Trane and Erin discover that the locomotive they’re traveling aboard has a stash of $3 million. As you can imagine, a lot of people want that gold, and I don’t need to tell you the rest of the story.

Best line: “Don’t take any chances you don’t have to. Don’t trust nobody you don’t have to trust, and don’t do no favors you don’t have to do.”

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

US Senator James Stoddard (James Stewart) has rolled into a small Western town to attend the funeral of Tom Doniphon (John Wayne). Why would a big-time politician come all the way out West for that? We flashback 25 years to when Stoddard was a young attorney whose stagecoach was robbed by the ruthless Liberty Valance. The lawyer was whipped and left for dead, but saved by Doniphon and brought to the town of Shinbone, where the community as a whole tended to his injuries. Stoddard opens a law practice, but Valance is still a terrorizing presence. Doniphon — who only knows the ways of brute force — debates with him the best way to bring justice to Valance. Is it through the grim violence of the West, or the more civilized path of the law and courts?

This movie was shot in black and white, even though color was available. Many speculate that director John Ford was moving to a grittier, more realistic view of the West over the more colorful, romantic, and optimistic pictures he had previously done. Ford and Wayne worked on ten(!) Westerns together, but many single out The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance as the most impactful. Roger Ebert said it was “the most pensive and thoughtful,” and Sergio Leone called it his favorite film by the famed director.

Best line: “I know those law books mean a lot to you, but not out here. Out here a man settles his own problems.”

With our archives now 4,000+ articles deep, we’ve decided to republish a classic piece each week to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in October 2017.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

The Wind Beneath the Stone by David Keohan. For millennia, stone lifting was an important part of cultures around the world. It was not only a feat of strength, but part of weddings and funerals, used as a job interview to assess someone’s fitness as a farmhand, and included in rites of passage and tests of all-around manhood. I really enjoyed having David Keohan on the podcast back in 2023 to talk about his quest to discover the lost lifting stones in his home country of Ireland, and he’s got a new book out about his passion. Keohan is a world champion kettlebell lifter who, after hearing the old tales of stone lifting in Ireland, set off to find the stones himself, working from a 1930s archive of local folklore. He tracked them down to churchyards and pastures where they’d been sitting untouched for generations and found people who still remembered the legends attached to them. He then lifted the stones himself. The heaviest weighs over 450 pounds. As word got out, other lifters started showing up to pick them up alongside him. The book will make you want to find a heavy stone in the middle of a field and hoist it.

Trader Joe’s Fall Harvest Salsa. Last week my family made the trip down I-44 to see my folks in OKC. One of the small pleasures of these visits is to check out my mom’s snack stash. She’s always discovering new things, and this latest visit didn’t disappoint, as she introduced me to this tasty salsa. Along with tomatoes, it’s made with fire-roasted tomatillos, honey-roasted pumpkin, diced butternut squash, and chopped sweet apples, plus jalapeños for heat. Tastes like fall. In addition to pairing it with classic tortilla chips, Trader Joe’s suggests spooning it over ricotta on a cracker or adding some vegetable broth, heating it up, and turning it into a soup. I’ve gone through a jar of it in a few days putting it on my morning eggs.

Pressure. This film came out this year, and it’s about time someone made a movie about one of the most difficult and agonizing decisions in world history: when to launch the D-Day invasion into France. Supreme Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower had to decide whether to go ahead with the original target date or delay the invasion due to the threat of potential storms; moving ahead held the danger of capsizing the landing forces, delaying might reveal the plan to the Germans. It’s not often that a film makes a weather forecast the fulcrum of the plot, nor places a meteorologist as its protagonist. But it manages to turn these elements into compelling narrative grist, as a Scottish and an American meteorologist battle it out as to who knows what’s coming. It’s a good film, prevented from being a great one by the miscasting of Brendan Fraser as Eisenhower; he’s not buyable as Ike in either appearance or demeanor. 

You Are No Longer Invited to Dinner. If you feel like fewer people host dinners and parties than did in your parents’ and grandparents’ day, it’s definitely not in your head. Over the last fifty years, the share of Americans who say they host friends and family in their home at least monthly has declined by 70%. In this interesting article, Derek Thompson unpacks the phenomenon and what may be behind it: the rise of busy dual-earner households, an increase in the amount of time parents devote to their kids, and a decline in people having the most fundamental thing you need to host a party: friends to invite! Being alone in your house has also simply gotten more comfortable and at least superficially sating; hosting events requires time, money, and overcoming significant issues of social coordination; it’s a lot easier to just lie on the couch and watch short-form videos on your phone. It’s led to a situation where “Everybody’s home. No one’s coming over.” But as Derek points out, while we may think that’s what we want, it’s not really what we want. Parties add true pizzazz to life. Don’t wait for someone else to host something; take the initiative and do it yourself! 

On our Dying Breed newsletter, we published Sunday Firesides: Attention Is a Gift and Dying Breed Dialogues: Gretchen Rubin’s Dark Secrets of Adulthood.

Quote of the Week

Ability involves responsibility; power, to its last particle, is duty.

—Alexander MacLaren

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

The glove box is basically your car’s junk drawer, accumulating this and that odd document or condiment packet over the course of months and even years. That’s not necessarily a problem . . . until the day comes when you actually need something from inside. Keeping it tidy and organized with a few simple, useful items can help you handle everything from being pulled over to a minor emergency without having to dig through the rest of your car.

In this guide you’ll find what we recommend keeping close at hand — those documents and everyday items that are easy to overlook but can come in handy when you need them.

Of course, this isn’t everything you should keep in your car. For a more comprehensive list of roadside and emergency gear, check out our complete guide to what every man should keep in his car.

Illustrated by Ted Slampyak 

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

So why do we often feel busier, more stressed, and more, well, inconvenienced than ever?

My guest today argues that many supposed advancements don’t actually save us time, money, or energy — and that even when they do, they can eliminate forms of friction that made life richer, more enjoyable, and more human.

His name is Gabe Bullard, and he’s the author of Against Convenience. Today on the show, Gabe and I discuss how self-checkout, mobile ordering, digital communication, streaming services, food delivery, and even smartphone cameras can paradoxically make life more annoying and less satisfying. Gabe also shares questions to ask yourself to decide which conveniences are worth keeping, and why deliberately adding a little friction back into your life can sometimes make it better.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

If you’ve got a philosophical bent and you like to lift weights, you’ve probably heard of Yukio Mishima.

Mishima was one of history’s most interesting cats. He was a Japanese novelist and playwright, a martial artist and bodybuilder…and an insurrectionist who attempted to overthrow his country’s government.

His life started out one-sided. Then he found a way to artfully combine dual energies. Then he came apart.

Mishima was born Kimitake Hiraoka in Tokyo in 1925. When he was a baby, his grandmother Natsuko, a sickly aristocrat from a samurai family, took him away from his parents and raised him in her sickroom. She wouldn’t let him go out in the sun or play with other boys. He grew up surrounded by female cousins and classical literature. There was no outdoor, rough-and-tumble play. To compensate for the lack of physical stimulus, a scrawny and sickly Mishima crafted a rich imaginary world.

When World War II came, Mishima fully expected to be drafted and die for the emperor. That’s what he wanted to happen. He came from a samurai family, and it was his destiny to sacrifice all for the glory of Japan. But an army doctor misdiagnosed him with tuberculosis and sent him home to work in an aircraft factory while his classmates went off to die in the Pacific. He never forgave himself for that. “I lacked…the muscles suitable for a dramatic death,” he wrote years later.

After the war, he published his first novel, Confessions of a Mask, at 24 and became instantly famous. He wrote novels and plays at an astonishing clip and became one of the best modern fiction writers in Japan. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times.

But despite the literary success, Mishima was discontent. He built his entire identity out of words and abstractions. He didn’t feel fully alive. He described his younger self as a creature of the night, holed up in a “dusky room,” burning the midnight oil, with a body he not only ignored, but despised.

But a trip to Greece in his late 20s, where he stood in front of the classical statues and saw what the human body could look like, kickstarted Mishima’s journey in the visceral world of physical culture. Seeing those white statues gave him what he called a “will to health in the Nietzschean sense.” In 1955, Mishima walked into a gym and started lifting weights. He kept at it three times a week, without a break, for the next (and last) 15 years of his life, and added boxing and kendo along the way. He took great satisfaction in his bodybuilding, treating it like a spiritual or religious practice.

For a while, it seemed like Mishima would be like a Japanese Ernest Hemingway or Jack London, relishing a life of both physicality and letters.

But Mishima became more and more politically radicalized. He felt that the soul of Japanese society, and particularly its samurai culture, had been eviscerated after WWII and wanted to resurrect it and restore the Emperor to the center of political and spiritual life. So he embraced an extreme form of nationalism and started his own private army, which he suited up in sharp military uniforms. Then, on November 25, 1970, he attempted to lead a coup to overturn Japan’s postwar political order. The coup had no chance of succeeding, and Mishima had already planned what he would do when it failed. After the soldiers who had assembled below the balcony at the Self-Defense Forces’ Ichigaya headquarters jeered him, he walked back into the commandant’s office and committed ritual seppuku.

He committed suicide by disemboweling himself with a dagger and then having one of his followers (in the end it took two of them) decapitate him with a samurai sword.

Dang.

Mishima was a complicated guy who left a mixed legacy, and you don’t need to look to his politics or radicalism for inspiration. But there is something you can glean from his philosophy.

Particularly the philosophy he forwarded in his book Sun and Steel.

The Sun, The Steel

Two years before he killed himself, Mishima published Sun and Steel to explain what he learned from his religious (in both senses of the word) pursuit of weightlifting. The title is his shorthand for the two things that pulled him out of the sheltered mindset he had developed in his childhood.

The sun is objective reality. It’s “the world beyond your head,” as Matthew Crawford put it. When you’re out in the sun, you’re like the guys that escape Plato’s cave of shadows, and you finally see things the way they really are. The sun doesn’t care about your theories of how you think the world is supposed to work. It’s fitting that Mishima made the sun his symbol for hard reality. This was a guy who spent his childhood hidden from the sun in his grandmother’s sickroom and, consequently, from real life.

The steel is the barbell and plates. The steel was the tool he used to train his body and mind so that he could meet the reality of the sun on its own terms.

The sun, the steel: together these elements provide a counterbalance to a life lived too much in the abstract.

I first read Sun and Steel a long time ago, and much of it really resonated with me. What I appreciate about Mishima is that he was a brainy, cerebral guy who understood there’s a danger in living inside your head too much. It can make you morbidly self-conscious. And the remedy to that is to train your body. Hard.

I know I’ve learned that lesson. I make my living sitting in a chair typing words or talking to people via the internet in my closet for the podcast. I spend most of my time in the world of ideas, and I’ve seen how that can lead to a downward spiral of rumination. But I’ve also seriously trained with the iron for over a decade, and have found it’s taught me things I couldn’t have learned any other way.

Mishima does an illuminating job articulating what those lessons have been, and below I offer seven of the insights from Sun and Steel that have stuck with me:

1. Living Entirely Inside Your Head Is Existentially Stunting

Most people make friends with their body before they enter the abstract world of ideas. A child runs and climbs and scrapes his knee and gets back up without thinking much of it. Mishima experienced it backward: “My memory of words reaches back far farther than my memory of the flesh.” A person who only lives in the world of words, he says, becomes a man who can write a tragedy but “cannot participate in it.” In other words, when you exist in the world of the abstract, you live only half a life.

Living entirely inside your head can also breed anxiety and despair as thought loops back endlessly on itself. Mishima found an antidote in shifting his attention outward and pushing against something that wasn’t him: the barbell. Science has since confirmed the broader point that physical activity is one of the best ways to get out of your head and improve your mood.

2. Your Body Speaks a Language

My favorite idea from Sun and Steel is that there is a “language of the flesh.” Mishima said he learned it “much as one might learn a foreign language.”

What does it mean that your body has a language? Nietzsche, whom Mishima read closely, gets at it in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “You say ‘I,’ and you are proud of this word. But greater than this, although you would not believe it, is your body and its intelligence, which does not say ‘I’ but performs ‘I.'” There’s an embodied kind of intelligence you can’t acquire simply by thinking about something. You have to actually move your body. You have to “perform.”

Here’s an example of that. Right now, I’m teaching my son Gus how to drive stick shift. He read the article we wrote about it several years ago and watched a YouTube tutorial, approaching the new skill as an abstract theory you can download into your brain. But when he gets in the car and starts actually trying to apply that theory into practice, it only sort of works. It doesn’t translate completely. So he asks for advice on when to shift or how to take his foot off the clutch, and I give him some, and it works…a little. But in the end, I simply tell him, “You just got to feel it. I can’t tell you exactly what to do. There’s no three-step process. Your body just sort of learns what to do and when to do it.” The physicality of driving stick requires him to learn the language of the flesh.

The same goes for any physical activity, be it throwing a football, climbing a rock face, or deadlifting a heavy barbell from the floor. The language of the flesh is a language of physical action, not abstraction. If you want to fully express yourself and communicate with the world, you have to learn it.

3. The Iron Doesn’t Lie

As a novelist, Mishima made his living manipulating words. He could do whatever he wanted with them. The barbell was different. He couldn’t manipulate it. He had to conform himself to the steel:

The steel gave me an utterly new kind of knowledge, a knowledge that neither books nor worldly experience can impart…For me, muscles had one of the most desirable qualities of all. Their function was precisely opposite of that of words.

In short, unlike words that can be arranged to tell yourself the story you want to hear, the steel won’t let you do that.

Henry Rollins made the same point in his famous Details essay “Iron and the Soul”:

The Iron never lies to you. You can walk outside and listen to all kinds of talk, get told that you’re a god or a total bastard. The Iron will always kick you the real deal. The Iron is the great reference point, the all-knowing perspective giver…two hundred pounds is always two hundred pounds.

I make my living with words, so I’m as good as anyone at telling myself a story. I can’t do that with the barbell. I either lift the weight or I don’t. I can’t spin the results. The iron teaches you not to lie because it doesn’t lie.

4. Pain Is Information

“Pain, I came to feel, might well prove to be the sole proof of the persistence of consciousness within the flesh.” As Mishima observed, pain is often the medium for the language of the body. Physical pain can tell you things about yourself that you didn’t know, even your values.

Kate wrote a great Sunday Fireside called “You Are Your Relation to Pain” about this idea. The pain of a hard workout can feel like an unwelcome stressor…or evidence that you’re becoming more fully alive. How you interpret pain reveals something about what you value. As Ernst Jünger put it: “Tell me your relation to pain, and I will tell you who you are.”

5. The Body Brings You Up to the Surface

The whole modern approach to self-knowledge, from therapy to journaling, is about digging. If you want to learn about yourself, you go deep inside your psyche. Self-reflection can be useful, but like any good thing, taken too far, it becomes a hindrance. Think about those nights when you lie in bed caught up in a whirlwind of thought about how your life isn’t going the way you wanted, rewinding every mistake you’ve made and conjuring up increasingly dire futures. That’s what happens when you live entirely in your head.

Mishima poses a contrarian question. What if, instead of only going down into your psyche, you went up into the world?

Why must thought, like a plumb line, concern itself exclusively with vertical descent? Why was it not feasible for thought to change direction and climb vertically up, ever up, towards the surface?

By surface, Mishima means your skin: the boundary where you meet the world, the part of you that’s visible in the sun. His claim is that there’s as much truth up there as in your psychological basement. Once he started training, the anxieties and neurotic fantasies he’d lived with since childhood receded. He learned that things weren’t as bad as he thought. The sun puts things in perspective.

I’ve experienced this. Whenever I’m in a rut or a foul mood, my natural bent is to ruminate. I think that thinking about the problem over and over will solve it, but it rarely does. It usually just makes me feel worse. So I go down to the garage and train, and I usually feel better afterward. The iron gets me out of my head, because my only focus is getting the next rep. When I’m doing a heavy set of squats, the only thought in my head is “Don’t die.” That’s it. There’s no room under a 420-pound barbell for thoughts about why my recent article didn’t get as much traffic as I wanted. The weight doesn’t care. Most of life doesn’t care about most of your problems either.

6. Shared Suffering Brings People Together

At one point in the book, Mishima describes carrying a portable shrine through the streets during a festival with a crowd of other young men, all of them staggering under the weight of it. They were all miserable. But he noticed that misery made him feel closer to those other guys: “The pounding of the heart communicated itself to the group; we shared the same swift pulse…only bodies, placed under the same circumstances, can experience a common suffering.”

I’ve never carried a shrine, but I know what Mishima’s talking about. Back when I played high school football, I absolutely hated pre-season two-a-days. So did my teammates. Just awful. The morning practice started when it was a “cool” (and very humid) 85 degrees. Then you’d get a few hours off and head back to the field when it was pushing 100 and even more humid. But that shared suffering brought the team together. During practice, we’d encourage each other when one of us was flagging; between practices we’d trade gallows humor. Shared pain made us one. I loved those guys.

If you want to bond a group of people, have them do something physically demanding together.

7. Be a Man of the Pen and the Sword

The samurai had an ideal called bunbu ryodo, the dual way of the pen and the sword. A samurai was supposed to be a gentleman and a fighter, and a man who was only one or the other was either a brute or a coward. Mishima lived the ideal of the refined warrior. He’d train hard in the gym and then come home to write or listen to flute music. He combined both brains and brawn, and saw parallels between the gym and the classroom. Adding weight to the bar little by little, he wrote, “was remarkably similar to the process of education, which remodels the brain intellectually by feeding it with progressively more difficult matter.” Progressive overload, baby. It works for your muscles and your mind.

Books and barbells. That’s mostly my life, and the combination has lent it richness. I think it’s important for guys to think, to be philosophically inclined, but to always stay grounded in the objective reality of the sun by way of the steel. Read Kierkegaard. Then go deadlift.

If you like to spend time in the gym, and you like to think about why you like to spend time in the gym, go read Sun and Steel. It’s about 100 pages. You can knock it out in an afternoon. It will give you a new appreciation of how the steel can help you listen to the language of the flesh and, as Mishima put it, experience “the eloquence of life.”

For more on the philosophy of physicality, including a discussion of Yukio Mishima, listen to this episode of the AoM podcast:

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Smells can conjure up powerful memories. The smell of pine needles can take you back to childhood Christmases or the smell of a laundry detergent can remind you of home.

For me, there are certain smells that I’ve come to associate with manliness. Whenever I smell them I think of my dad or grandpa or some aspect of my boyhood and my initiation into the rites of manhood. 

It was back in 2009 when we first came up with the idea for creating a list of manly smells. We asked you, our readers, for your input, and we gathered together 15 especially virile scents. The list was a hit, and we of course received hundreds of comments relaying further manly smells to feature. So four years later in 2013, we did another crowdsourced list, that time of 18 aromas. We’re at it again, but this time we’ve combined those two original lists with a handful more to boot. Thus, below we present the ultimate collection of manly smells! Interspersed in this list you’ll find not only our descriptions of manly smells, but also memories from our readers themselves. 

Hardware Store

The hardware store is a smorgasbord of manly smells: paint, wood, fertilizer, metal. It’s all there. As a boy, there was a local hardware store that my dad would go to. He’d lug my brother and I along. We’d open up all the drawers for the hinges and nails and play hide-in-seek in the door displays. Like many local hardware stores, it went out of business years ago when the big box stores moved in. The building was torn down and replaced with an upscale shopping center. But whenever I drive by the corner where it once stood, I can still smell the manliness that once emanated from that place.

Black Coffee

“My favorite scent, not just manly scent, but scent period: the smell of coffee percolating in one of those enamel coffee pots on a campfire on a cool autumn morning, right next to the river. Inhale the good, exhale the bad. Heal.” —PiperJon

“Cowboy coffee! Not that BS latte smell of hot milk, but the deep, powerful smell of cowboy coffee made by dumping grounds right into the pot, in deer camp, at 5 am, over a campfire.” —Wilson

Shoe Polish

The smell of shoe polish is a distinctively manly smell. For many men it conjures up images of soldiers shining their boots to a mirror polish. For me, whenever I crack open a can of Kiwi black shoe polish to shine my shoes, I’m instantly transported to my childhood den. About once a month, my dad would pull out his wooden shoe polish kit and take all his boots to the den to polish them. He usually watched a classic detective show like In the Heat of the Night or Magnum P.I. while he did it. The warm smell of shoe polish and leather filled the entire room, and it would usually linger there after he finished.

Gasoline, Motor Oil, Grease, and Garage

“Every time I’m at a gas station, I can smell my father with his hands covered in engine oil and gasoline from splashing the red canister contents onto the funnel. Those red rags smell more like a man than most men do.” —James

“I drive an old Triumph Bonneville motorbike and I have to ‘tickle’ the carbs before starting it until a little gas comes out. The smell of it on my finger or leather gloves always makes me nostalgic for my dad’s bike on the carport.” —Matt

“My dad would smell like that after working on the family cars, my older brothers would smell like that after working on their cars, and my husband smells like that every day, as he is a mechanic. Too much is too much, but just the right amount of grease on his tan forearms, smelling manly…WOW. That is one hell of a manly smell.” —Alison

Cut Grass

For many men, mowing the lawn is the bane of their existence. But even if you hate the actual chore of mowing the yard, you can’t deny that the smell of fresh cut grass is pretty darn manly. Combine that grass-y smell with a little body odor from the exertion, and a bit of gasoline (if you’re not using a reel mower), and you’ve got a scent you may find yourself in no rush to wash off after giving your lawn a haircut.

Old Tackle Box

“The smell of the metal on old, worn-out pocket knives mixed with the remains of earthworms on fish hooks just brings me right back to fishing with my grandpa as a young buck.” —Mark

Sawdust

I haven’t worked with wood as much as I would like to. But whenever I do, I always try to savor the smell of sawdust. I can remember when I first gained an appreciation for this scent. It was at that old hardware store I mentioned earlier. Out back, they had a lumber yard, and I remember getting big whiffs of sawdust as I watched the workers saw wood down to size for my dad. The smell of sawdust also brings back the memory of my dad showing me how to sand my first pinewood derby car. Good times.

Airplane Cockpit

“I worked B-52s, and the smell of 40 years of sweat, burnt food, tension, and hard work just can’t be beat. I’m sure it’s one of those acquired smells, but once you get it, you got it.” —Josh

Scotch

There’s nothing like the warm, rich, smoky smell of an aged Scotch whisky. To the first timer, the smell of Scotch can be off putting. But once you get past its initial pungency, you’ll discover a symphony of smell. Each Scotch has its own distinct smell, but they all share some general characteristics. You’ll definitely smell the smoky peat used during the malting process. But if you get in closer, you might catch the subtle fruity smell of apples or cherries. There’s also a hint of licorice, reminiscent of kind old men. Taken together, you’re left with a scent that will put hair on your chest.

Baseball Glove

“I remember when I played in Little League there was no smell like putting your glove on your face: leather, dirt, grass, sweat. Baseball is full of great manly smells.” —Sam

Barbershop

I love walking into a barbershop. You know why? Because they all smell so damn manly. A barbershop smell is a mixture of Barbicide, shaving cream, musky smelling hair, and cheap (and free) coffee. If you’re going to an old barber shop, it may also smell ever so faintly of tobacco from the days when men would smoke a cigarette and put out their butts in the ashtray on the barber chair armrests.

Gunpowder

I think every man’s affinity for the smell of gunpowder began at some fireworks stand out in the country. That’s where mine did at least. Every Fourth of July, without fail, the parents would take my brother and I to a fireworks stand on an old country road. I can remember being overwhelmed by the smell of gunpowder as we ran up to the stand. After we filled up our paper bags, I would often stick my nose in it and take a nice big whiff. It smelled of danger.

The smell of spent gunpowder is just as appealing, like shotgun shells or the way it smells all around after you fire off a round from a pistol.

The Interior of an Old Car

“Nothing beats getting into an old car (that hasn’t been completely restored from the ground up) and taking a big ol’ whiff and just smelling the years.” —Josh

Original Old Spice Cologne

Go to any men’s section in a department store, and you’ll see a stand selling $60 bottles of cologne with foo-fooey scents. Walk into any local drugstore and you can find manliness in a bottle for less than $12. Before they made deodorant, Old Spice was known for its cologne. They still make the cologne, but it doesn’t get much play these days, which is a shame. Based purely on anecdotal evidence, women seem to love a man who wears Old Spice. It reminds them of their grandfathers. They’re not hot for their grandpas, obviously, they’re just keen on the smell of old fashioned manliness. When they get a whiff of you sporting Old Spice they’ll instantly associate you with a time when men were men. Quit dousing yourself in Calvin Klein or gassing yourself in a cloud of Axe body spray and get some Old Spice.

Horses

“Anything to do with horses . . . dried manure, saddle leather, wet saddle blankets, even the smell of hay and sweet feed.” —Kerry

Campfire

It’s sunset. The last rays of light are slowly fading into the horizon. You go over to the fire pit and begin to strategically place dry leaves and small twigs into a tepee shape. You light a match, and watch the leaves smolder. And then it reaches you: the first bit of smoke from a campfire you created with your own two hands. You suddenly feel more manly. But the smells don’t stop there. Throw in some maple, pine, or pinion logs and you up the manly smell quotient a few marks.

And the campfire smell stays with you when you go home. It gets in your clothes and in your hair, though you don’t really notice it until you walk into a clean house. The contrast between your smoky smelling self and your antiseptic home gives you one last chance to revel in the manly scent of a campfire, before it gets washed down the shower drain.

Locker Room

“The smell of a change room after a game . . . Sweat, grass, blood, and deep heat, and after the showers, various types of stinkpretty. Just the smell of a change room almost has the power to impregnate any females passing by.” —Ben

Freshly Churned Dirt

“For me, it’s the smell of freshly turned dirt — that earthy, loamy smell reminds me of the large garden we had in the backyard when I was a youngster. We emigrated from Hong Kong when I was a kid, and my father dreamed of having a farm or acreage in Canada. We never did get that farm, but the privilege of working on his own land meant spring and fall, my kid brother and I were outside mucking around in the garden with him as he toiled away. To this day, when I turn the dirt in my own garden, the smell of turned soil reminds me of ‘real’ work and what life is all about, not the antiseptic feel of my office, pushing electrons and paper around in an endless circle.” —Ozone

Pipe Smoke

Not many men smoke pipes these days, so that the sweet smell of pipe tobacco has largely evaporated from our world. Cigarette and cigar smoke can be acrid and obnoxious, but pipe smoke is, well, just pleasant. A whiff of a nice clove or cherry wood blend summons images of kindly older men in tweed jackets sitting in a chair next to a warm cozy fire with an old dog nearby.

Construction Site

“The smell of a rough framed house, before the exterior doors, windows, and roofing are installed.” —Kerry

“Cutting steel with a torch. Creosote timber. That deep-down earth smell when excavating. Wet concrete.” —Jim

Navy Ships

“Having spent a lot of time at sea when I was in the US Navy, when I visit a warship museum, such as the USS Midway, the first thing I notice is the smell. Kind of a paint, hydraulic fluid, boiler exhaust, salt air mix.” —Perry

“I’m an old Navy guy and after 35 years I can still remember that smell. Red lead paint, bunker oil, steam, food from the galley, and gunpowder. Add several hundred — or several thousand — tired and often scared people. Put it all in a steel box and seal it up from the sunlight and fresh air. I visited the USS Texas about 15 years ago. She’d been cold iron since the late 1940s but when I went below decks I could still smell the ghost of that smell in the air.” —Dave

Your Grandpa’s Chair

Me as a boy with my Grandpa Hurst.

It seems like every old man has a chair that’s just for him. After years of sitting in it, the seat conformed specifically to the contours of his body and his scent has been permanently stamped into the upholstery. At least that’s how my grandpa’s chair was. That’s him sitting in his chair with me on the left and my little brother, Larry, on the right. One of my fondest memories was going to my grandpa’s house in Bosque Farms, New Mexico for Thanksgiving. We’d sit on his lap and he’d hold us in his big strong hands. His chair smelled like the pinion wood he’d burn in his cast iron stove, the barn that he kept his horses in, and the sweat of a man who worked hard even in retirement. In a word, it smelled like pure manliness.

I miss my grandpa. And I miss that chair.

Gun Cleaning Solvent

Another ritual my father had when I was growing up was cleaning his government-issued gun for his job as a Federal Game Warden. It was usually done on weeknights after dinner. He’d bring his gun cleaning kit to the kitchen table and place a white cloth in front of him on which he’d place his revolver. I was always fascinated by all the different size brushes in his kit. He’d then slowly open up the bottle of Hoppe’s No. 9 gun cleaning solvent. It filled the entire room with a rich, warm smell.

The first time you smell gun solvent it’s pretty jarring, but then you get used to it, and then you start to like it. That smell alone may even inspire you to make cleaning your gun a regular weekly chore.

Splitting Firewood

“Hand splitting of firewood. You can’t use an electric or gas-powered log splitter and get the same effect. From the metallic smell you get stuck in your nose as you use the double action file to restore the edge on your decades-old axe, to the one-of-a-kind aroma released by a length of red oak as it is cleaved in two, right on down to the combined smell of dank bark chips stuck to your sweaty flannel shirt. Much like the lawn mowing smell, I like to pause to enjoy it.” —Dave

Charcoal

I love tearing open a bag of Kingsford and letting that waft of charcoal goodness hit me right in the nose. It’s a smell that tells my mind and body that summer is officially here. But the smell only gets better when you throw a match on it and watch it turn from black lumps of coal to glowing red stones, ready to cook any meat you throw on it.

Bowling Alley

In their heyday in the 1950s, bowling alleys replaced the fraternal lodge as a place for men to gather and bond. Perhaps that’s why I associate the smell of a bowling alley with manliness. The combination of lane wax, piles of bowling shoes that have been worn by thousands of people, and cigarette smoke mix together to form that distinct bowling alley smell that permeates alleys across the country.

Zippo Lighter

Not just any lighter carries the scent of a Zippo, which is one that will bring you back to your youthful days of Grandpa letting you play with fire while Mom and Dad weren’t looking. Zippo lighter fluid isn’t anything special on its own, but when it’s soaked up into the cotton padding, travels up the wick, and is ignited by the flint wheel to create an enduring, windproof flame, a unique and manly smell is created.

Leather

Nothing beats the smell of well-worn leather. Some of the manliest pieces of clothing and accessories are made from leather — jackets, boots, briefcases, saddlebags. The smell of leather reminds me of riding horses with my grandpa. I loved walking into the barn where he stored all his tack and taking a deep breath. I remember thinking, “This is manly.” 

Newsprint

“My dad would sit on the couch after work (whence by the way, he would come home smelling of machine grease) and read the paper, back in the days when the paper would really leave some color on your hands. I would sit next to him and that newsprint aroma would waft out when he spread the pages wide open. In the winter, he’d light an old kerosene heater just before he settled down to the paper. Talk about being engulfed in manliness.” —Hawkins

Aqua Velva

Pete Rose and the Lone Ranger are some of the manly icons who’ve worn Aqua Velva — one of the best forgotten drugstore colognes and aftershaves. Aqua Velva’s biggest selling point has always been the cooling menthol that soothes away razor burn, while bracing your face with a potent, minty smell. After the wintery menthol punches you in the mug, the scent fades to a pleasant aroma of oak and moss. You’ll find yourself walking around with a little swagger in your step and calling people “tiger” and “ace” after you start wearing it.

Bacon

One of the best parts of spending Thanksgiving at my grandpa’s ranch were the breakfasts. Every morning I’d wake up to the smell of pan-fried bacon, pancakes, and black coffee. That’s what heaven smells like.

Bay Rum

The history of bay rum is as manly as it smells. Several centuries ago, sailors in the Caribbean had the idea to mix bay leaves and rum together to create a cologne that helped cover their stench on long voyages. Islanders took this basic recipe and began adding their own olfactory flourishes by mixing in cloves, citrus rind, and cinnamon. Thus was born an incredibly unique and wonderful fragrance that spread to the rest of the world and became popular among men as an aftershave scent and as a staple at classic barbershops. You can even make your own.

Canvas Tents

Whether associated with camping or life in the Army, the distinct smell of canvas tents — a mixture of the scent of the fabric and a mildewy musk — is indelible for many men. Personally, this smell reminds me of Boy Scout camp in Colorado.

Wood Finish

While cutting, assembling, and sanding/planing wood provides a variety of manly scents, finishing your work provides another unique aroma. On its own, wood finish is often slightly noxious. Not in a bad way, necessarily, but it’s not terribly pleasant. When applied to wood, though, and the smells are allowed to intermingle, you have a whole new scent. Mix the natural, fresh smell of lumber with the artificial, man-made stain or polyurethane, and you get the bonafide smell of man creating something new and beautiful with the gifts nature has given him.

Lava Soap

Since 1893, Lava Soap has been the go-to soap of painters, grease monkeys, and other men who get their hands dirty for a living. Why is it called “Lava”? The soap contains ground-up pumice (a volcanic rock) that helps scour tough-to-remove gunk from your hands. Despite its volcanic inspiration and composition, rather than smelling sulfuric, it actually has a pleasantly fresh scent — one that’s associated with rolling up your sleeves and putting in a hard day’s work.

Burning Leaves

Perhaps it’s strange to be nostalgic for something I never experienced myself, but I’ve always found the idea of burning leaves in the fall quite evocative. Most cities in the US had banned the practice by the time I was born, but my parents have told me about these autumnal leaf burnings; for about a month, all you could smell in most North American neighborhoods was the scent of smoldering piles of detritus. I imagine it would have smelled like a campfire, magnified by ten. If you want to experience this smell today, just throw some leaves on your campfire the next time you build one.

With our archives now 4,000+ articles deep, we’ve decided to republish a classic piece each Sunday to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in September 2017.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Salesman. My latest Criterion watch was this 1969 documentary, which follows four door-to-door salesmen from the Mid-American Bible Company as they work Catholic parishes around Boston and then down in Florida, trying to move a $49.95 (that’s $500 in 2026 dollars — expensive!) illustrated Bible to working-class families. It’s a peek into a world that no longer exists, and an interesting look at the intersection of religion and business in America. My favorite scenes are the sales meetings, where the men get pumped up by their manager and the company’s “theological consultant” (that was his real job title) about how they’re on “the Father’s business” before heading back out to knock on doors. The desperation of Paul Brennan, the old-timer who can’t get sales anymore, reminded me of Jack Lemmon’s character in Glengarry Glen Ross. I actually enjoyed this flick more than that one. Definitely less f-bombs.

Ode to a master mechanic by Matthew Crawford. I really enjoy the writing of former AoM podcast guest Matthew Crawford on craftsmanship and the importance of encountering the material world to get outside our heads. His latest essay on Substack is about Ken Jansen, a machinist in Belmont, CA, who builds engines for Volkswagen drag racers. This ode to Jansen is really about the idea that for stuff to work, you need people around who know things. And by knowing, Crawford means people who’ve got a lifetime of embodied knowledge. They know things in their bones. It’s the kind of tacit knowledge you can’t fully explain nor learn from a Google search or from AI.  This kind of practical knowledge only gets passed down in person, from one guy to the next, in shops with no storefront. Ken learned from a German mechanic who trained at the VW factory after the war, and Crawford has been learning from Ken. Crawford’s worry is that as these guys retire and die off, nobody’s stepping in to replace them, which means a future world where fewer things work. 

The Pastures of Heaven by John Steinbeck. I picked up this 1932 Steinbeck book after reading that Brandon Flowers said the concept for The Killers’ album Pressure Machine (a set of songs about Nephi, his small hometown in Utah) was partly inspired by it. The Pastures of Heaven contains a series of self-contained yet interconnected stories all set in the same California valley. My favorite is about a farmer named Shark Wicks who’s poor but convinces the whole town he’s wealthy by talking up an imaginary stock portfolio, which he tracks in a ledger like it’s real. The illusion eventually comes crashing down in humiliating fashion. Steinbeck’s writing here is simple and plain, yet very evocative. Really enjoyed this one. 

New Balance 574. I needed a new pair of everyday sneakers and went back to the NB 574. Can’t beat it. It’s the classic ’90s dad shoe (New Balance designed it as a trail runner in 1988), and the gray colorway goes with about everything I own. What’s funny is that the 574 has also become my 15-year-old son’s standard shoe, so there are now two identical pairs strewn around the house. The way I tell which pair is his and which is mine is that his are bigger. The kid has gotten taller than me.

On our Dying Breed newsletter, we published Sunday Firesides: A Place for Everything, and EVERYTHING In Its Place and Why Nothing Succeeds Like Success.

Quote of the Week

Monotony is the awful reward of the careful.

—A.G. Buckham

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

You’re surely familiar with the idea that humans spend a lot more time sitting than they used to. If you haven’t heard the statistics — the average American sits for 9-10 hours a day — you’ve experienced it in your life, finding yourself spending long stretches of your work and leisure time sedentary in office chairs and on couches.

You’re probably also familiar with the ill effects all this sitting can have on both our bodies and minds: higher blood pressure, higher blood sugar, impaired metabolic health, anxiety, and depression.

As Manoush Zomorodi, author of Body Electric, shared on the AoM podcast, one of the big effects of spending a lot of time sitting is, ironically enough, feeling unaccountably tired. This, despite the fact that you haven’t done anything physical. Sitting saps your energy and makes you feel strangely fatigued.   

You might hope that the 3-mile run you do in the morning or the lifting session you get in after work will counteract the effects of excessive sitting. But while it does help, working out for one hour doesn’t erase the consequences of spending ten hours sedentary. Even among people who exercise, long bouts of uninterrupted sitting are still associated with worse metabolic and cardiovascular outcomes. And being too sedentary — even if punctuated by sessions at the gym — is still a drag on our mood.

Fortunately, the solution doesn’t require upping your exercise time 10X. Instead, you can combat the ill effects of sitting by peppering your day with surprisingly small movement “snacks.”

The Outsized Power of 5-Minute Movement Breaks

In seeking to improve her health and reenergize her routine, Zomorodi came across research from Keith Diaz, a physiologist at Columbia University Medical Center, that investigated how much movement the human body needs to mitigate the effects of prolonged sitting. 

In one study, five minutes of walking every half hour helped offset increases in blood glucose and blood pressure, while reducing fatigue and improving mood. The walking wasn’t even strenuous; the treadmill was set to about two miles per hour.

Zomorodi then tried the protocol herself. On one day, she spent eight hours sitting and working with only normal breaks every few hours. On another, she walked for five minutes every half hour. The results of this routine change were striking: her blood sugar was nearly cut in half, her blood pressure dropped by five points, and she reported substantially better concentration, energy, and mood. 

Researchers later tested a similar approach by enrolling nearly 20,000 people in a global study. On average, participants reported a 25% decrease in fatigue. 

This is heartening news: You can improve your mental and physical health with very short bouts of activity that don’t have to be intense to be effective. As Zomorodi said, “The point is to get the blood flowing and raise your heart rate just a little bit, but you don’t have to go crazy.”

Every 30 minutes, just get up and walk. Go outside or simply walk around your house. Jump on a treadmill if you have one. The movement needs to be continuous; just standing at a desk doesn’t carry the same benefits. 

Don’t want to walk? Move in place. Jumping jacks, push-ups, bodyweight squats, or any other simple movement can also work. And don’t obsess over hitting that exact 30-minute interval every time — while the greatest benefits accrue to those who move every half hour, there are significant benefits even for moving every 1-2 hours. The broader goal is to break up long stretches of sitting with a short bout of physical activity.

You Also Need to Move Around After Work 

It’s easy to think of sitting as a workday problem; you sit at your desk all day, so you need to get up occasionally. But what happens when work ends? For many people, you go home and sit on the couch for three or four hours.

You don’t have to give up your favorite show or turn leisure time into exercise. Between episodes or during commercial breaks, get up to walk around the house, take the dog outside, or do a few jumping jacks. The goal is to avoid turning an extended period of relaxation into a long chunk of uninterrupted sitting. 

Make It Automatic

Now, the hardest part isn’t necessarily the five-minute break — it’s remembering to take it. When you’re absorbed in work, it’s surprisingly easy to go from “I’ll get up in a minute” to realizing that two hours have passed. That’s why one of the most common strategies participants used in the study was setting a timer.

Set one for 30 or 60 minutes. When it goes off, drop what you’re doing, get up, and move for five minutes. You don’t have to interrupt a genuine flow state, but you do want to create a regular pattern of breaking up long periods of sitting.

You don’t have to be moving all day long to live with greater vim and vigor. Just five minutes here and there will have you feeling more vital. 

For even more info and actionable advice from Manoush Zomorodi, be sure to listen to the podcast: 

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

My guest calls this collection of abandoned or deferred desires your “invisible list” and is the author of a book of the same name.

Today on the show, Ravi Gupta presents a plan for tackling the things on your invisible list by picking one hobby-like activity each year and working your way to an intermediate level in it. He explains the different categories these pursuits can fall into, from the liftoff project to the mental marathon to the skillbatical, and how to pick the right one for your season of life. We also discuss how camps for grownups can make skill acquisition more enjoyable, why you should consider taking up an adult-appropriate sport like tennis, why Ravi decided to take the MCAT even though he doesn’t plan to become a doctor, and how working on your invisible list can give your life chapters and, over the course of a decade, turn you into a Renaissance-man badass.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.