Most Saturdays I hand you one framework and take it apart. This Saturday is a SITREP.

In the field, a situation report is what a commander sends up the line: what he's seeing on the ground, where things stand, what's worth acting on right now. The straight read from where he stands.

This is my report this week — what's on my desk, my nightstand, and my calendar this Saturday morning. After years alongside hundreds of men over 50, I've learned that most of what we wrestle with, we wrestle with together. Better than eighty percent of it is common ground. So what's on my mind this morning is probably on yours, and when one of these is new to you, it can challenge a belief and create a breakthrough.

All of it is quick to act on. You can put any of them to work before you finish your coffee. These reports show up now and then, whenever I've got something worth sending up the line.

Each one stands on its own. Pull up a chair.

Each month in Argent Alpha we read a book that ties into our annual planning arc. It's a gym for the mind, where we train how we think the way we train the body. July's pick is Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke, a World Series of Poker champion who became a decision strategist.

You spent a career making calls with money on the line and rarely enough information to be certain. You assessed risk and reward with what you had and kept moving. Duke takes that skill and points it at your health.

Most of us live and die by our numbers — the monthly InBody scan, the fitness test, the sleep score. When they move the right way, we feel good. When they stall, we start tearing up a plan that was working.

The fix is to grade the decisions, not the scoreboard. The scoreboard is a lagging indicator. It matters, but it trails the decisions that drive it, and the decisions are the leading indicator you actually control.

A man always knows, in the moment, whether a decision was a good one. That makes it a filter he can't lie his way past.

The scoreboard misleads two ways: it's slow, and it's partial. A man who dials in his food, his training, and his sleep for three weeks is doing exactly what the outcome requires, while the scale still sits there.

The scale also reads the wrong thing. A man loses two pounds of fat and adds two pounds of muscle in a month, and the scale calls it a wash. The InBody tells the real story — body fat down, muscle up, metabolism improved. Grade the decisions and give the numbers time to report.

Live and die by the daily number and you'll walk away from the very decisions that were about to pay off.

Duke gives you a tool for aiming, too. She calls it backcasting: start from the man you fully intend to become, then work backward to what today asks of you. Set that target first, run the decisions it demands, and let the numbers arrive on their own schedule. That's the exact method we use to build our Future Self.

One caution she'd add. A man grades his own decisions poorly when he grades them alone. That's the reason to report to a room of men who tell each other the truth. It keeps the filter honest, and it keeps a good month from turning into a permission slip for bad decisions.

The other book on the stack is one I picked for myself: Theo of Golden by Allen Levi. It's the best kind of feel-good read, the kind that makes you want to be a better man.

Theo is 86. He moves alone to a small Georgia town where he knows no one, rents a third-floor walk-up, and carries his own suitcases up the stairs because he likes the effort. The man has vigor: bright-eyed, sharp, dressed with care, and warm to everyone he meets.

He buys a wall of pencil portraits from the local coffeehouse and returns each one to the person in it, asking for nothing but their story. One man, one conversation at a time, he pours what he has into the lives around him.

I'll put it plainly: I want to be like Theo. That's what a book like this is for. Most men over 50 drift toward whoever they'll become by default.

Theo is a man to aim at — 25 years up the road from me, still strong, still curious, still climbing his own stairs, using every bit of that capacity to serve the people in front of him. Ask yourself who you're becoming, and whether you chose him.

That's what the strength is for. You build a body that lasts so you have something left to give the people who count on you.

Yes, even men over 50 need role models, someone to pattern themselves after. In Argent Alpha, we have so many men delivering inspiration in so many facets of life.

Levi himself is worth a word. He practiced law for years, then left it to write songs, and published his first novel in his late sixties. Reinvention beats retirement, in the flesh.

I'm 17 chapters in. I don't know how it ends. I'm savoring each chapter. You know the feeling: you don't want it to end, so you slow it down a bit. That feels about right for a good man's story, read one chapter at a time, with the best of it still ahead.

Your body adapts to whatever you throw at it. It already handled the workout that got you here six months ago, which is why the key numbers quit moving. You hit a plateau, a roadblock. Instead of accepting this as your ceiling, add progressive overload to an area that needs a jumpstart. While it's typically used in the weight room, it can be used in other areas as well. But I'll stick with the workout side, because I've noticed this is where men often need some "grease" to get unstuck.

You can always make the same workout more challenging and more effective. Add a rep, take more or less rest, add a set, or slow it down. Some days I make a single set last two minutes on the same movement. Finding the right weight takes trial and error, but when you nail it, a set that looked easy turns brutal.

Pick one thing this week and make it harder.

Note: to learn more about how I used time under tension to add 4.2 lbs of muscle in just over 5 weeks, read issue #140 of Harder to Kill.

A man tells me he's bored — with his training, his routine, his week. I take it as an opportunity to teach and reinforce key concepts that I know help men grow. Boredom usually means the man he's building toward went blurry, and the work lost the reason behind it.

What I'm talking about is a clear, vivid, and motivating Future Self — the man you are building. Sharpen that picture and the boredom burns off. When you know exactly who you're becoming, the boring work is just the cost of getting there, and you pay it without a second thought. When the picture is vague, every set feels like a chore, because it is.

I haven't been bored in years. The target stays sharp and the curiosity stays on. A curious mind never gets bored.

And by the way, if for some reason you do find yourself bored, consider savoring it. Don't reach for the phone. Don't create a distraction. Sit with the boredom and turn it into a silent retreat of sorts. We recently did a one-hour silent meditation at Argent Alpha LIVE VI, and every man I talked to said it was an amazing experience, something he needed and realized was lacking in his life: silence. Maybe that's just another word for boredom?

So this week, get specific about the man you're building toward. Give your curiosity something worth chasing, and boredom won't find much room to sit.

Benjamin Hardy wrote Be Your Future Self Now to help you draw that man in sharp detail. Read it.

You have three levers on your nutrition: quality, quantity, and timing. Pull one and you make progress. Pull two and it shows fast. Pull all three and you're cooking with gas (figuratively speaking, of course).

Start with quality, because it does the most work. Eat whole, single-ingredient food — meat, eggs, fish, vegetables, fruit — and go organic, raised the way it was meant to be: grass-fed, not grain-fed beef; wild-caught, not farm-raised salmon. Overeating gets hard to pull off. Food companies engineer the processed stuff to slide right past the point where your body says enough. Anyone else ever start and finish a pint of Ben & Jerry's? Whole food fills you up before it runs up the caloric tab. Plus, processed foods tend to have tons of sugar and bad fats like canola oil, wreaking havoc on your metabolic health, waistline, and blood labs.

Make high-quality protein the centerpiece of every plate. It builds and holds your muscle while you drop fat, and it keeps you full for hours.

Quantity is where you measure and track. Early on, a man has no feel for a real portion. A serving of peanut butter is two tablespoons, about 190 calories. You spoon out three big scoops, call it a light snack, and you're near 600. Same with nuts, salted snacks, ice cream. I won't call any of it "bad," per se, but how many of us hold the line on quantity? It's designed for you to eat more than the "serving" that is disclosed on the label.

Log your food in an app until you train your eye — I use MacroFactor, and there are others that do the job. Master it and you graduate to eating by feel. The tracking is how you earn it.

Timing is the third lever, and it's easy to overthink. Intermittent fasting lives here, but it's a deep topic that wraps men around the axle, so save it for another day.

The simple moves work fine. Avoid snacking between meals. Stop eating three hours before bed and you sleep better. When dinner's done, brush and floss. A clean mouth kills the urge to snack, and the kitchen's closed for the night.

Pull one lever this week. When you only have room for one, make it quality.

The best training tool I know is a date on the calendar. It's a real event, months out, that you've made a commitment to — with cash, and by sharing it with others.

A booked date reaches backward. When something hard is locked in for October, you train differently in July. The date does the pulling, and it supplies the motivation you'd otherwise have to dig up.

It works as a filter too. You measure every workout, every meal, every late night against the thing you signed up for. A man with a date on the books makes different choices than a man who plans to start soon. Soon has no teeth, and it never comes. Soon is the same as someday, the busiest day of the week. Skip that, find an event, commit, and train for it.

For me, that date is LIVE VII, our next event, October 2nd through 4th at Camp Foley in Minnesota. Yours can be anything, as long as it's real and it scares you a little. Sign up for a race, book a climb, schedule the physical you've been dodging, commit to a reunion. Put it on the calendar and let it start pulling you forward today. And if you're an Argent Alpha member reading this — or a soon-to-be member, see the end — consider this your invitation to join us at Camp Foley.

SISU (pronounced see-soo) is a unique Finnish cultural concept that translates to a combination of extraordinary determination, grit, resilience, and stoic bravery. We thought it was the right name for LIVE VII.

Three of the items mentioned above circled the same idea without me planning it. Backcasting from Thinking in Bets, getting specific about the man you're becoming, booking a date that pulls you forward — each one starts at the future and works back to today.

Argent Alpha runs that move on repeat. Every man writes a clear picture of who he's becoming, his Future Self, then works backward into daily standards he follows to start making small but meaningful changes.

Then he reports. Every week, men put their numbers in front of the group, because a decision you report out loud is a decision you are more likely to honor. That's the truth-telling room Annie Duke says sharpens every call.

Every month the data checks the story: InBody scans for body composition, A³ standards for strength and conditioning. Twice a year we put a date on the calendar and gather in person, and LIVE VII is the next one.

Define the future man, score daily, report weekly, test monthly, and let the event date fine-tune your actions. It's a proven process used by hundreds of men over 50.

This runs best with other men in it. Inside Argent Alpha, they're reading the same books, sharpening the same target, and reporting to each other every week. It's free to join.

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