Most men chase the ceiling. They cling to highlight reels—the monster drive, the 10-bagger stock, the personal best from years ago. Peaks feel good, but they don’t define you. What does define you is your floor—how you show up on the days that look ordinary.

The truth? The strategy that delivers the sexiest results looks boring and unsexy in the moment. It’s not hacks, shortcuts, or highlight reels. It’s the basics, done daily, without fanfare.

This week we’re talking about Raising the Floor—why your baseline matters more than your breakthroughs, why your worst day tells me more than your best, and how doing the unsexy work produces the results most men only dream about.

Most men define themselves by their peaks—the longest drive they ever hit on the golf course, the 10-bagger stock they still brag about, or the personal best in the gym they haven’t touched in years (guys love to talk about how they used to bench 225 for reps as one example). Peaks are easy to brag about, but they don’t define you. They’re outliers, whether they happened last week or decades ago.

What defines you is your floor. The baseline you refuse to dip below. The work you do every day when nobody’s watching. That’s why “never be the former anything” matters—you’re not living off old ceilings. You’re raising your floor today. Reinvention is about the present, not the past.

Here’s where most men go wrong: they avoid the floor because it feels boring. They chase hacks, highlights, and shortcuts instead of executing the fundamentals. But hacks never last. They short-circuit success every damn time. If shortcuts worked, you’d already be living as your Future Self.

Hard life now, easy life later. Easy life now, hard life later. That’s the deal. You either pay in advance with discipline, or you pay later with regret. Which price are you willing to pay?

That’s why raising your floor matters. It’s not about kissing the ceiling once in a while. It’s about making sure even your “average” days keep you moving forward. When you raise your floor, you minimize drift. You guarantee that your worst day is still better than most men’s best day.

The compound effect is real. Yesterday’s ceiling becomes today’s floor. What once felt like a rare win—50g of protein in a meal, a 12,000-step day, a 10pm lights-out—becomes normal. And as your floor rises, your ceiling follows.

And it goes deeper than habits. When you raise your floor, you’re not just stacking behaviors—you’re stacking proof. Proof rewires belief. Belief creates identity. And identity makes consistency stick. You’re no longer the man trying to “do” the thing; you become the man who always does it. Hacks can’t do that. Hacks crumble when motivation fades. Floors hold because they’re built on boring, repeatable proof.

Don’t get me wrong—“kissing” your ceiling will happen, and it will feel good. But the ceiling is always moving. The floor is where momentum lives. In Newsletter #156 we talked about the Gap and the Gain—the trap of measuring yourself against the ideal. The ceiling is just the ideal made visible. Chase it, and you’ll stay stuck in frustration. Raise the floor, and you shrink the gap. Your average days start to look a lot like your best days. That’s how reinvention happens—incrementally, consistently, without fanfare.

The man obsessed with his ceiling is fragile—defined by outliers and old stories. The man raising his floor is resilient—defined by his ability to show up, do the boring work, and stack proof. Peaks may inspire, but your floor proves who you are becoming. And over time, it’s the floor—not the ceiling—that transforms you.

Most men think transformation comes from peaks—new programs, hacks, or highlight-reel days. But the truth is, raising your floor happens in the boring work. It’s not flashy, it’s not complicated, and it doesn’t need to be entertaining. It’s the basics, repeated until they become your standard.

This week, your exercise is simple: write down your previous floor and your ceiling in each Alpha 5 category. Then raise your floor.

Be honest about your ceiling. A perfect ceiling done once or twice doesn’t count. A strong floor you can execute every day does. That’s why we measure—so we know the truth, not the story we tell ourselves.

Here’s how it looks:

The point isn’t perfection. It’s proof. A ceiling you hit twice on a whim won’t change your life. A floor you execute every single day will. Raise your floor, and transformation becomes inevitable.

The A³ Standards are one of the clearest ways to see floor and ceiling in action. We rotate through three sets of standards, testing one each month, so every set of standards gets tested four times a year.

The first time you take the test, your floor and your ceiling feel almost identical. None of the movements are easy. But as you train throughout the month and retest, the separation becomes obvious. What once felt like a ceiling starts to feel like your floor. You get feedback you can’t fake: you’re stronger, you move better, your endurance improves.

Take the wall sit for example. The first time you do it, your legs are quivering and you feel like you were in that position for an eternity. You check your stopwatch and you barely hit 2 minutes.

You train throughout the month and focus on improving strength, stability, zone 2 and zone 5 cardio. You spend at least 10 minutes a day on mobility to improve range of motion. The next time you test the wall sit you hit 4 minutes. Same feeling as before, same shaking and quivering, but double the time. The next time you try it, you break 6 minutes.

That’s the value of testing—it shines a light on the truth. It tells you if you’ve raised your floor or if you’ve been drifting.

The same principle is why we run monthly InBody scans. You can’t cram for these tests. You either did the work, or you get exposed. And when you do the work, the results speak for themselves. The spotlight shines back on you and says: this man raised his floor.

All progress starts with truth. The A³ Standards and InBody scans don’t lie. They show you exactly where your floor is today, how high you are raising your ceiling, and whether you’ve put in the boring, consistent work to close the gap between them.

At its core, raising your floor is grit in action.

Grit isn’t about talent. It’s not about peak performances or highlight reels. It’s about perseverance — showing up for the boring basics long after the excitement wears off. That’s what raising your floor requires.

Every time you hit your protein, shut it down at 9 pm, log your steps, or put pen to paper in your journal, you’re proving grit. The ceiling might inspire, but grit is what turns yesterday’s ceiling into today’s floor.

Here are three resources that connect directly to this truth:

Two cornerstone courses are about to launch inside Argent Alpha:

These courses are available only to Argent Alpha members. Every man who takes them increases his odds of making 2026 his best year yet.

Now’s the time to step in. Founding Member pricing is available — 50% off. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.

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Earlier this month, we held our fifth Argent Alpha LIVE in Minneapolis: Forged in the North. After a focused 12-week training block, every man showed up ready—and every man finished the five-hour Hunt strong, smiling.

The Hunt was built for squads, not individuals. Every mission demanded teamwork, communication, and grit. Squads rucked across the city, tackled strength and endurance challenges at each spoke, and proved what consistent training builds.

Beyond the Hunt, the weekend included Oxygen Advantage breathwork, kettlebell training, Wim Hof breathing, and deliberate recovery through sauna and lake plunges. Men also took part in a member-led Q&A, a silent team-building exercise, and wrote letters from their Future Self—sealed and to be opened one year later.

Live events are the connective tissue—where the work we put in together gets put to the test.

See for yourself in the recap video: Forged in the North