Not a post of any healthy length, but a reposting of some glorious self-help from the Art of Manliness, which is an excellent guide not just for men, but for those who have had it with self-defeat, externalizing failures, and stagnation.
http://www.artofmanliness.com/2014/05/19/10-overlooked-truths-about-taking-action/
What we should take away from this is that gifted with intelligence though we may be, our intellect does not exist in abstraction or in theory, but in a hard physical reality. Our thoughts can be deep as the Marinas Trench and they still mean nothing, not to our fellow man and not even to God. Though God can see into your heart, faith and righteousness are born out by living out your principles, taking action in the world we inhabit. We find the old and new stories of heroism and success so timeless because we do not experience in our own lives the characters of those who went out knowing nothing, saw, and conquered. We idolize the pre-industrial age because, in our minds, it was a time when there was not a society to ‘fit into’, but a new world to build ourselves.
We are privileged with great wealth and education in excess of our ancestors. Let’s put those to work.
From the City on a Hill 