This morning I'm at Camp Foley in Pine River, Minnesota with a group of men over 50. Today we ruck, flip tires, throw axes, climb a wall, and take a wood-fired sauna before the evening workshop, and we'll probably jump in the lake a few times. It's October in Minnesota and you gotta do it.

Every man here trained for this weekend using the Argent Alpha process, and that process gets results. I look for ways to improve it anyway.

You might remember kaizen from a business course or from working in manufacturing: incremental, consistent changes that add up to a significant result over time. Tony Robbins brought the same idea to personal development and called it CANI, constant and never-ending improvement. I enjoy making things better, improving effectiveness and efficiency. Build a new process, sharpen an existing one, then hand it to somebody wired to run it every day.

This time I used Heidi Grant Halvorson's "Nine Things Successful People Do Differently," published in Harvard Business Review in 2011 and still in circulation fifteen years later. Her nine points came out of decades of achievement research, and she earned her PhD in social psychology at Columbia working with Carol Dweck.

Dweck's book Mindset drew the line between two ways of seeing yourself. A growth mindset says ability gets built. A fixed mindset says you got what you got at birth. A growth mindset is what led me to start Argent Alpha, and it's table stakes for the men who join. A fixed mindset is the thing a man overcomes before he grows.

When did you last run this kind of review on your own body and mind?

I took her nine and went through them one at a time against what we do every day. Most of her list is already in our process. A few things we handle our own way, and some of what we run never appears on her list at all.

You already run some version of this in your business, or if you're retired, you did at one point. The quarterly review you ran to spot opportunities. The competitive analysis somebody built for the offsite. The variance from plan report you read line by line to determine where you need to spend more time. Any competitive field demands it, because a company that stops improving gets left behind.

That discipline, that skill set, is already yours. You have been running it for years.

The ideas with the biggest impact usually arrive from outside your own industry. You don't get breakthrough ideas by copying a competitor. Analogous inspiration is the term for it: you study an unrelated field, take what works there, and apply it.

In 2007 the Oil Spill Recovery Institute put up $20,000 for a problem nobody had solved in almost twenty years. Crude recovered off the Alaskan coast after the Exxon Valdez froze into a slush inside the barges and could not be pumped out. John Davis won it, a chemist who had worked construction. Concrete crews use pneumatic vibrators to keep cement moving during a big pour, and Davis saw that frozen oil and seawater behaved the same way. The institute's research program manager put it plainly: if it was easily solved by people within the industry, it would have been solved by people within the industry.

So the process itself translates well to your health:

You have run this process on an organization for years. It runs the same on your health, your fitness and your mindset.

Advice comes at you from a multitude of sources. Websites, social media, television, books, friends, courses. None of it arrives with a way to grade it.

A list of nine behaviors tells you what good looks like, and that's valuable. It won't tell you where you stand against it. Finding that out is what a review does, and that opens the door to taking action. Knowing and not doing is not knowing.

Those nine are hers, in her words. What follows is what Argent Alpha runs in each area.

1. Get specific.

"Get in shape" gives you nothing to aim at. Her point is that a target you can't picture is a target you can't hit.

We start one step earlier than she does, with the man you intend to become written down, 90 days out and twelve months out. Then five standards you score a 1 or a 0 every day: mindset, sleep, nutrition, fitness, hydration. And one number every man can aim at, 15% body fat, with the tools to get there.

2. Seize the moment to act on your goals.

She means deciding in advance when and where you'll take each action, in that much detail. This one carries more evidence than anything else on her list. Across 94 studies, people who wrote down the day, the time and the place followed through far more often than people who only named the goal.

We call our version bookending, because the day gets decided at both ends. At night you run the Victory Lap: review your wins on paper, then write tomorrow's priorities. In the morning you run Pre-Game Planning: put your top three into the first half of the day and call your shot on all five standards. Calling your shot means naming what has to be true to hit them. Hydration means the jug gets filled before your first call. On Sunday we look back at the week, plan the week ahead, and share it.

3. Know exactly how far you have left to go.

Monitor your progress, weekly or daily. Then she adds a clause that lets a man off the hook: "if not by others, then by you yourself."

Research published since then says that clause is the weak option. Across 138 studies, tracking progress worked far better under two conditions: somebody else saw the numbers, and you wrote them down by hand.

So we track daily, report weekly, and test monthly. Write a standard down and you're at about 42%. Share it with one person and you're at about 65%. Report it regularly and you're at about 95%. We call those three rungs the 95% Success Formula.

We measure the gains first, the distance from where you started. As you close in on your objective you start measuring the gap. Measuring only the gap crushes a man early, when the gap is at its widest.

4. Be a realistic optimist.

Believe you'll get there, and plan for what the work is going to cost.

We use Kelley and Conner's cycle of change, which maps what happens to a man's motivation over months instead of what he hopes will happen. The plateaus and the valleys are on the map before he hits them. When one arrives he recognizes it as part of the process instead of as evidence he's failing.

5. Focus on getting better, rather than being good.

This is Dweck's growth mindset, the work Halvorson trained under. A man trying to look capable avoids anything he might be bad at. A man trying to get better starts anyway.

Start ugly is our phrase for it. The only way you get better at something is by starting.

6. Have grit.

Duckworth made grit famous, and researchers went back and tested it across 66,807 people. A grit score mostly tells you how reliable a man already is. It doesn't predict much about what he'll accomplish. The one piece that held up on its own was plain perseverance, continuing after it stops being fun.

So we skip the questionnaire. Grit gets built and tested in the same place: the monthly challenge, the two live events, and a misogi for the man who wants one. Misogi is Michael Easter's term from The Comfort Crisis for one genuinely difficult physical undertaking a year, big enough that you don't know going in whether you'll finish. Every one of those tells you what you've got and adds to it at the same time.

7. Build your willpower muscle.

In 2011 the consensus was that self-control works like a muscle. Use it and it gets stronger, spend it in the morning and you have less at night. Halvorson reported the science of her day accurately.

It didn't hold up. In 2016, twenty-three labs ran the same willpower experiment at the same time to find out whether it was real. Whatever they measured was too small to tell apart from nothing.

Willpower doesn't get stronger, we simply get better. Your C standard is the version you can hit on the day everything falls apart, so it asks less of you than the ambitious one, and you've run it enough times to know you can. We give you the process, the tools, and men who have already done it. You design your standards and live them.

8. Don't tempt fate.

Set the situation up to work for you, take on one challenge at a time, and stay out of the places where temptation is everywhere.

Angela Duckworth's team laid out a man's options for self-control in the order they come at him. First is choosing where you are, so the temptation isn't in the building. Second is changing the place you're already in, so the ice cream leaves the freezer. Last is standing at the open refrigerator door at nine at night, arguing with yourself. That one is the weakest, because an impulse gets stronger the longer you sit with it, and Duckworth's team found men undervalue the first two because shaping things in advance never feels like self-control.

You create an environment that supports your objectives instead of sabotaging them. Your kitchen, your calendar and your training schedule get built so the standard is the easy option.

9. Focus on what you will do, not what you won't do.

"Stop snacking at night" gives your head nothing to do. "Forty grams of protein at breakfast" gives it a job.

You already have standards in all five areas, and every one of them arrived by default. The work is replacing the ones you drifted into with ones you design. Cleaning up how you talk about yourself, raising your floor, setting intentions every morning, and naming the limiting beliefs you carry all feed this one.

Every one of her nine assumes you already have the goal. None of them says where the goal came from, or what you run when there's no goal on the table. All three of our additions live in that gap.

First, you design who you're becoming. We start with the man you intend to be 90 days from now and the man you intend to be twelve months from now, both written down. Leave that undesigned and you've left it to fate, and you end up running tactics in search of a purpose.

Second, you design your standards, including your floor. A designed standard beats a default one, and that holds for your worst day as much as your best. A is the ambitious version. B is your baseline. C is the conservative version that still scores you a 1 on the day everything falls apart. Three ways to win, one way to drift, and drift is a choice.

Third, your standards are part of who you are. A goal is short term and finite, with an end date built into it. Your standards come from the man you're becoming, they run independent of any goal, and they flex when a goal calls for it.

Running without those three has a cost, and it comes due. It shows up the day something you used to do without thinking about it is out of reach. A flight of stairs with a bag in each hand. A ladder you used to go up without a second thought. The last half mile of a walk somebody else set the pace for. Nothing warns you it's leaving. Knowing and not doing is not knowing.

Start with the thing you want to do, and look three to four months out. Rucking, hiking, biking, walking, a race, an obstacle course. Solo or with other men. You decide, because a challenge you didn't choose won't survive the first cold morning.

Then you lock the date. If somebody else runs the event, the date is already set, so check that it leaves you enough weeks to train. If you're creating your own, you pick the Saturday.

If you want one that already exists, our men have competed in these:

Once the date is real, three steps:

You committed to something, you set a date, and you told people about it. Every one of those decisions is still yours, and stacking them raises the odds you follow through.

Don't overthink the event: find something that appeals to you, commit to it, then use the date as the forcing function to do what you need to do to be ready.

Every man at Camp Foley this weekend picked the date, put it on his calendar, and had two months to get ready. We run a training program into each live event: one workout a week from the first of August to the day before we left, squad assignments, texts from squad captains, and pre-work to prime the pump for the workshops. That part is specific to a live event, and we run two a year, spring and fall.

Argent Alpha is a forcing function, and that's the design rather than a side effect. Future Self gives you the destination. Five standards get scored every day. Then the reporting and the testing come due on a schedule you don't control: your numbers to the men on Monday, your body composition and your fitness on the calendar every month. That's the Alpha Triad, and it works the way a start line works. Something is due, other men are expecting it, and the date doesn't move.

We put on the five-mile ruck in that list above. The Everest climb, the 202-mile ride, the Foot March and the marathon were not ours. Each of those men found his own event and put the date down. The ideas got sparked in here, because a man posts what he signed up for and three others go look it up. Whether they'd have found it alone is unknowable, and you can't run that trial. What's visible is that the daily standards and the weekly report carried them through the training.

Underneath all of it runs the same cadence: track daily, report weekly, test monthly. We call those our Recurring Accountability Drivers, or R.A.D. for short.

Men from 50 to 78 are in there with body fat coming down, skeletal muscle going up, A1C dropping, prescriptions no longer needed, first pullups turning into double-digit pullups, and rucking miles under 20-plus pounds.

Argent Alpha has helped over 300 men become harder to kill via our two communities, and thousands of others based on my Amazon bestselling book and over 200 newsletters.

Halvorson's list was already running here every day before I opened her article, and fifteen years of newer research stands behind it.

Read — Heidi Grant Halvorson, Nine Things Successful People Do Differently, Forbes, July 2011. The article behind this issue, worth your time on its own.

Listen — Author Angela Duckworth says how we're 'Situated,' not our willpower, can impact our lives most, Here & Now, WBUR, August 2026. Just under ten minutes with the researcher behind two of the nine above.

Watch — Matt Cutts, Try something new for 30 days, TED, 2011. Three minutes on what a short, bounded commitment does to a man, which is what this week's Challenge asks of you.

Harder to Kill is for the man over 50 who wants the fat gone, the meds gone, and his strength back.

What you get:

Over 300 men have become harder to kill through our two communities, and thousands more from my Amazon bestselling book and over 200 issues of this newsletter.

$47, one time, and it's yours for life. That price holds until we reach 500 members.

Pick your event, put the date on your calendar, then start your comeback with us. Below is the link to join.

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