The Project

One of the best pieces of advice that I ever received in the realm of marketing, was to buy your client’s products.

What this does is allow you to experience their business from the eye of a consumer, and that should allow you to write more effectively if you know how to communicate your thoughts.

That’s why when my previous client Bedros Keuilian offered for me to go through the experience he’s created with the Modern Day Knight Project, I happily said yes.

However, I really had no clue what I was getting myself into.

I saw some videos online, but a 60-second sizzle reel doesn’t do it justice. Think about a BUDS hell week (Basic Underwater Demolition Seal Training) packed into 75 hours with a mix of business and leadership training sprinkled in.

Now I’ll fully admit that I didn’t make it to hour 75, I cracked around hour 14.

I had little to no energy left, was beyond tired, sore in places I’d never been sore before, and really just didn’t feel like continuing to army crawl while dragging a sledgehammer through a loose gravel parking lot filled with old shrubs and twigs.

You may think I’m exaggerating, but that literally was what we were doing. It’s an exercise they call The Pit.

I’m not sure what hell looks like but I imagine that it’s just a never-ending crawl through the pit while everything is on fire around you.

In that moment of hell I asked myself…

“Why am I doing this? It’s so unnecessary.”

And shortly after, I quit. My inner critic took control of the wheel and I made a permanent decision on a temporary feeling.

At first, I was really bummed out that I quit. I sat in the back room after I rang the bell with Erin, the Chaplin of the project, completely broke down crying and was just all around a fucking mess.

I thought I was going to be able to beast my way through the challenge but I bitched out.

I can give myself all sorts of excuses and justifications, but that’s the hard truth.

While talking with Erin, I was saying things I don’t usually say, because unless you really know me, I’m not going to share with you my deepest pain points and vulnerabilities.

But it actually felt amazing to get those things out there, and to have someone who supported me in a positive way that didn’t feel like most of the spiritual stuff out there that just says a bunch of foo-foo bullshit that really lacks any meaning.

It felt like a very masculine way to look at my problems, my insecurities, and the parts of me that could use improvement.

After I got home and got a ton of much-needed sleep, I realized what they were doing, mainly because I could actually process my thoughts.

First of all, that shit was hard.

Like really hard.

I woke up sorer than I ever had in my life and I realized, “yeah of course I’m sore, when’s the last time I did three back-to-back workouts in a day that were as brutal as the evolutions they put together there?”

I basically did 4 hours of class work and 10 hours of some of the most brutal activities you can imagine. Doing a 302, crawling through the forest floor, crawling up dirt hills, running up and down extremely steep hills, then proceeding to carry a 300-pound box with 3 other men up those same hills in the middle of the night, and finishing out with bear crawling, and army crawling through a bunch of dirt.

One could argue that a lot of that is unnecessary, which is true, I mean that stuff doesn’t really have real-world application. I don’t usually spend Tuesday evening in the dirt. And that’s exactly what my inner critic told me and what caused me to ring the bell and quit.

But upon further reflection, I’ve started to realize what they’re doing, and I now understand that it’s not supposed to be a direct 1:1 translation into the real world.

It’s supposed to be unnecessary.

Truthfully a lot of what they’re trying to do is create a shock factor, they don’t feed you a whole lot, you’re doing these insane workouts, and the goal is really for you to lose all sense of self.

This lowers your barriers so the instructors can crack you open and pour into you when you’re experiencing a lot of vulnerability with them. It’s only in a state like that where you can share what you normally wouldn’t share with them so they can help you heal your trauma.

That’s exactly what I experienced, whether or not I finished doesn’t really matter to me, it was one of the best experiences I’ve had for strengthening me.

And after meeting some of the men going through The Project, I get why the instructors do it this way.

A lot of these dudes are having marriage issues, reliving traumatic past experiences, and lack of self-confidence, and it’s something they’re looking to work on.

Their WHY was stronger than my WHY: "Hey, let’s see what this whole project thing is about.”

There’s this quote I used in the sales letter I wrote for Bedros explaining The Project…

“Most men lead lives in quiet desperation.”

It was not until I talked to all these men that I realized what that meant.

Most of these guys just quietly suffer through life, with nothing all that notable to respect about themselves.

It’s like you look back at your life at 38 and realize you haven’t done anything, that seems to be the boat a lot of them are in.

Seeing that scared the living shit out of me, I don’t want to be that guy.

I get it, not everyone is meant to be “that guy” but almost everyone wants to be “that guy.”

And that’s something I at least have in one category of my life, I am “that guy” when it comes to my craft and making myself and others money.

I’ve put in the work, and I’ve done the things no one wanted to do, I did all the unnecessary shit, I put in my 10,000 hours.

It’s only when I thought about that, and how all that unnecessary shit got me to where I’m at now that I understood why they had me army crawling with a sledgehammer through the dirt.

I think I need to stop and realize, that I’m 23 and the fact that I’m this far ahead in my life is unreal.

It all happens so fast though, at times I’m so busy climbing the mountain that I forget to stop and enjoy the view.

So I definitely need to give myself credit there, because I deserve that.

But I also need to see the other areas where I need to improve, and that’s really what The Project showed me.

Thank you Bedros, Instructor Ray, Instructor Matt, Instructor Steve, and Instructor Erin for everything this has done for me.

To say it’s been profound is an understatement.