This Is How To Be A Man

Here is the poem If by Rudyard Kipling, an English writer who won the Nobel Prize in literature.

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream – and not make dreams your master;
If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build ‘em up with wornout tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings – nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run –
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man my son!

This part leapt out at me:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;

To buffer ourselves against the future, we aim to save large sums of money. If you’re a little older, you’re probably familiar with hitting a certain savings goal and then immediately feeling that it’s not enough. Then you construct a new goal in a neverending treadmill towards safety, comfort, and stability. But as long as our present needs are met, how important is accumulation and protection of wealth? Would it really be that bad if we had to start from scratch after some large misfortune? If comfort protects you from difficulty, and therefore prevents you from risk and the growth that the risk entails, maybe betting it all on a  “pitch-and-toss” is not a bad idea.

Read Next: How To Live A Balanced Life

39 thoughts on “This Is How To Be A Man”

  1. “If you can make one heap of all your winnings
    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
    And lose, and start again at your beginnings
    And never breathe a word about your loss;”
    Heh…Grandpa Simpson said that in the episode where he was betting his inheritance in a casino.

  2. By the way this is my favorite part of the poem:
    “If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
    Or walk with kings – nor lose the common touch”
    That is some Gmanifesto wisdom right there

  3. Would it really be that bad if we had to start from scratch after some large misfortune?
    If you are an alpha, no. Whining about misfortune is what women and betas do. Alphas look at it as a reset to start conquering again.

  4. The virtue you admire is taking risks and being a man about the outcome–win or lose.
    You’re no better a man if you win and no worse a man if you lose. You just have to put your chips on the table and place your bets. That’s what real men do. Notice how poetry, music and art laud winners and losers, but take no notice of those absent from the game?
    I’m well into my middle age years and have pitched-and tossed and “bet the farm” several times over. Depending on how you measure success, I’ve won and I’ve lost. However, I see this as my biggest accomplishment: whether I encounter success or failure, I’M STILL IN THE GAME, even to this day. Whether it’s money, women, intellectual pursuits, or self development, I’m still betting to win, and not whining when I lose.
    There is no such thing as a purely safe haven. You can leave the game and take your chips and put them in your safe at home, only to have a thief rob you of everything.
    Realizing that Triumph (success) and Disaster (failure) are imposters (arbitrary perceptions of outcomes) and irrelevant to a fulfilling life give you the confidence to keep betting the farm on the next great hand.

  5. This and Theodore Roosevelt’s “In the Arena” Quote are my two favorite:
    “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

    1. THIS is better than the bullshit poem Roosh posted. Who the fuck reads poems? Anyway, risking it all on one “pitch and toss” has nothing to do with being a man; it is about being a fool. Roosevelt’s “In The Arena” has the merit of masculine concepts.

      1. Badmouthing Kipling makes you an uncultured boor. Kipling was a hundred times the man you’ll ever be, kid.
        One of the biggest evils of feminism and progressivism is that they’ve convinced masculinity that the finer things of life aren’t masculine.

  6. Great poem. My fav part is this..
    If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
    To serve your turn long after they are gone,
    And so hold on when there is nothing in you
    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
    “Force your heart and nerve”!!!
    “It’s not the critic…” by Roosevelt is also beautiful.
    Roosh’s response is also really interesting.

  7. To those few of you who put down reading poetry, you are imbeciles. Read Kipling, Walter Scott, Tennyson – these guys hit the nail on the head. That being said, there are a lot of runny-nosed, milquetoast, less-than-betas who have written poetry, so I see why you’ve generalized. But being lost in ignorance is beta-behavior… Who do you think some chick would rather shag, someone who makes no effort to understand the world, or someone who is sure enough of his alphaness to figure out for himself as much as he can about as much as possible?

    1. I don’t like reading poems. That does not reflect a failure to attempt to understand my world. That’s a literary preference.
      And I’m not about speculating what traits women would and wouldn’t shag, or categorizing what is “beta” and what is “alpha”. Do what works for you.

  8. Great poem. Walt Whitman’s book of poems “Song of Myself” is excellent as well, especially for the traveler. Strong and content, I travel the open road..

  9. Kipling’s done another couple of great ones. This one Roissy’s referred to a few times. “The Gods of the Marketplace” as he calls them are what’s popular:
    http://www.kipling.org.uk/poems_copybook.htm
    Also, “The Female of the Species” is great. A good part:
    45 So it cames that Man, the coward, when he gathers to confer
    46 With his fellow-braves in council, dare not leave a place for her
    47 Where, at war with Life and Conscience, he uplifts his erring hands
    48 To some God of Abstract Justice — which no woman understands.
    49 And Man knows it! Knows, moreover, that the Woman that God gave him
    50 Must command but may not govern — shall enthral but not enslave him.
    51 And She knows, because She warns him, and Her instincts never fail,
    52 That the Female of Her Species is more deadly than the Male.
    http://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/hum100/female.html
    Not PC at all, but a great poet.

  10. The Stoics have a better idea: practice poverty. Seneca advocated taking some time to strip away all of your creature comforts for a day or two to get some of the benefits of living on the margins (necessity is the mother of creation and other similar statements) without actually incurring the downside of actually doing so. I designate one weekend every month where I make myself sleep outside on my parent’s land with nothing but a small tarp, a knife, a flint, old clothes, and a small, raggedy but warm blanket with no food and little water. It’s not so bad during the summer but it truly sucks this time of year.
    Anxiety and doubts lose their power pretty quick when you expose them to reality rather than letting them fester as mental abstractions. It’s how I learned to deal with approach anxiety too.

    1. I SERIOUSLY doubt Seneca ever did that, though. He was basically the Donald Trump of his time. Nietzsche calls him “the toreador of virtue” (being Spanish), and a renowned Roman historian at Yale tells his huge lecture classes not to read him, since he was such a disgusting hypocrite.

  11. “If comfort protects you from difficulty, and therefore prevents you from risk and the growth that the risk entails, maybe betting it all on a ”pitch-and-toss” is not a bad idea.”
    call me beta all you want, but statement like this will most probably come from someone who hasn’t been there and experienced it first hand. ask any refugee from kurdistan/irak/afganistan/africa or anywhere where people had good opportunities to “grow” thanks to the lack of comfort if they would trade the comfort for growth and experience etc. and see what they say.
    winter is a romantic/idilc thing when you look through the window form a nice warm room with a fireplace.

  12. I’ve always thought his poem; “The Female of the Species” was a profoundly insightful warning, about the dangers of giving women the vote. His Nobel Prize for Literature was well deserved.
    By the way, another insightful English man, (and N.P. L. winner) Winston Churchill, wrote on the same subject; “The women’s suffrage movement is the thin end of the wedge, if we allow women to vote it will mean the loss of social structure and the rise of every liberal cause under the sun”.

  13. Kipling talked about te white man’s burden as well. I guess this poem is only for white men then. But since the white men and white manhood is dead, a non-white is extolling the virtues of Kipling on a PUA site (and we all know that PUA movement is brimming with whites hating the minorities who sleep with “their” women). It’s funny according to census bureau the largest interracial coupling is White male – Asian female (in the US). funny no “race-realist” talks about that. A very good VK article from a few months back comes to mind.

  14. anon; “Kipling talked about the white man’s burden as well. I guess this poem is only for white men then”.
    I fail to see how you’ve extrapolated your latter statement from the former.
    If you stop guessing and actually read some of his work, you’ll discover that many of the heroes of his stories, were black or of mixed race.
    He actually used the phrase “white man’s burden” to express his belief, that the developed nations, (at the time predominately white) had a moral duty and obligation to help the undeveloped nations better themselves, whether they want the help or not.
    anon; “white men and white manhood is dead”
    If you’re not careful, people may start to think that you have a few racist issues of your own but that’s for another site “I guess”.
    Respect to Roosh for the original post.

  15. A classic. I’ve always thought I should have it framed for my nephews.
    The idea that all poetry is beta is very high school.
    Most of the heroic epics are written in verse.
    Poetry probably comes from men using verse (and sometimes rhyme) to memorize stories of adventure and heroism to tell around the campfire. It’s a natural male storytelling form.
    Writing “roses are red…” for some girl is beta.
    The Iliad? Not so much.

  16. “With no desire for success, no anxiety about failure, indifferent to results, he burns up his actions in the fire of wisdom. Surrendering all thoughts of outcome, unperturbed, self-reliant, he does nothing at all, even when fully engaged in actions.
    There is nothing that he expects, nothing that he fears. Serene, free from possessions, untainted, acting with the body alone, content with whatever happens, unattached to pleasure or pain, success or failure, he acts and is never bound by his action.”
    Bhagavad Gita 4.19-26

  17. You should always have savings, just in case. This example “”pitch-and-toss” is for worst case, that you’re able to start over without much mourning.

  18. This is a great message, and embodies the best of the mystic tradition. Read the works of the great mystics! The mystics say that you only really “own” the clothes on your back and what is in your skull. And you should live your life as if you could start over, if you had to, after losing everything. And once you make this realization, you become invincible.

  19. Tennyson’s Ulysses is as Alpha as they come. “to follow knowledge like a sinking star” and “i will drink life to the lees” and “life piled upon life” “tho much is taken much abides” “to strive and not to yield.”
    I”m in the process of memorizing it.
    a man amongst eunechs.

  20. As they song says: every form of refuge has its price. I actually did much worse than that. I deliberately put myself into a lot of debt, just so I could force myself to succeed all over again from scratch.

  21. The last part probably stands out because it was used in a “The Simpsons” episode.

  22. This brought me to tears. It was the poem my brother read at my father’s funeral, last year. This was him.

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