Strength Obligates
Today is Memorial Day. Enjoy it, but take a moment to remember those who sacrificed everything to preserve the freedoms we enjoy.
Noblesse oblige is an old French phrase that means “nobility obligates.”
It meant that if you were of high birth, wealth, power, or privilege, you had a responsibility to act with honor. You were expected to protect the weak and carry yourself like someone worthy of your position.
That idea is still important, but since you (hopefully) don’t wear a powdered wig, and are not a soft-handed aristocrat, we need a harder version.
Strength obligates.
If you are physically strong, mentally tough, disciplined, durable, and hard to kill, you don’t get to use that strength only for yourself.
You have a responsibility.
Not to coddle the weak or make excuses for them. Not to pat them on their soft, simple heads.
Your job is to shepherd them. To stand between them and the wolves when necessary. To carry more than your share. To set the standard and refuse to let those around you give in to comfort, weakness, and self-pity.
The strong should not exist to dominate the weak, but to protect, guide, harden, and raise them up.
That is the difference between a bully and a leader.
A bully uses strength to make others smaller. A leader uses strength to make others stronger.
There is a moral obligation that comes with physical and mental toughness. If you can take more pain, more pressure, more hardship, and more responsibility than those around you, then you are obligated to do so.
That does not mean carrying everyone's load or enabling their laziness. Nor does it mean rescuing people from the consequences of their bad decisions.
Sometimes shepherding the weak means helping them up. Sometimes it means telling them to get the fuck up. Sometimes it means pointing at the hill and telling them to ‘ruck the fuck up.’
Our world often confuses kindness with weakness. They aren’t the same.
Kindness is demanding enough of someone to believe they can become harder, stronger, more capable, and more useful.
Kindness does not lower the standard; it helps people reach it.
If you are someone who still trains hard, holds standards, keeps promises, and chooses the hard road when the soft one is available, you’re different, and you bear the obligation of strength.
Your strength is a tool for protecting your family, raising your kids, leading your team, and building a tribe.
Use it to drag the people you care about out of weakness.
Our world needs hard men and women willing to carry the standard, defend the perimeter, and train others.
Strength obligates.
Be hard.
Protect the weak.
Train the willing.
Challenge the lazy.
Shepherd your people and teach them to RTFU.
Until next week,
John
Life is Hard. Be Harder.
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Love it…Protect the weak and train the willing!!!!
Very powerful message. Often obscured in this modern world by saying to the people who are failing, well it’s not your fault. It’s someone else’s fault. Well maybe that’s so but the consequences still accrue to the individual. You can help them rise up, or you can give them excuses. Excuses help no one. I remember my father telling me, there are no excuses, hard perhaps, but true words.