--:-- Ryan Hanley: Hello everyone and welcome back to the show. This is the Monday Mindset, and today we're going to do something that I've wanted to do for a very long time—a piece of content, a piece of information that I've wanted to share with you guys for a long time, an ideal, particularly it's a speech. It is the Citizen in a Republic speech by Teddy Roosevelt. And oftentimes a piece of this is pulled out and you will know it as the man in the arena speech, but the official title of it is the Citizen in the Republic. And while the portion of the speech that is so commonly known, this idea of being the man in the arena is really just one segment of what I believe outlines the ideals of what it means to not only be a citizen of America but to be a quality human, to be a productive and quality human, a member of your community, a member of your family, a member of whatever tribe it is that you support and grow with, that these are in part the ideals that are missing from, I think, our current society.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I think there are outliers, there are independent journalists, independent creators who share a lot of these concepts. But in the mainstream, this is not what we're hearing. And while, you know, this isn't meant to be in any way a political episode of the show, I do think that there are a set of ideals or is a mindset that puts us in a position to win, to be successful, to be a contributing member to ourselves, to our family, to our community, to our nation at large. And those ideals, I think, have been lost and replaced with things like narcissism, materialism, hedonism, this kind of it's about me right now mentality.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: And while I'm not a believer in the classic concept of paying your dues, right? I don't think there should be some arbitrary time period that you have to go through in order to earn your place, that if you work hard and you achieve and you show results and you can play with a team and you can innovate and you're willing to sacrifice, that timetable can be reduced or some of those barriers can be sidestepped. There is a methodology, there is a psychology to believing in something bigger than yourself. I think it's why religion is so important. While I'm a Christian and practicing. I think religion in general is very important.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Without a religion or whatever you choose, as a religion, you find religion. And I think a lot of the narcissism, materialism, hedonism that we experience today as a society is because people have lost their faith in God or a God or a religious mentality, a religious belief structure, and replaced it with kind of materialism and nihilism and narcissism and all these things that I was talking about.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So, all right, that's a little heady. Not necessarily where I wanted to go with this, but I think that this speech just embodies what it means to be an American. And I love this country. I love what this country stands for, even if at times we are wholly imperfect. I think that we as individuals, if we can operate through a structure of believing in ourselves and taking care of ourselves, of believing in our family and taking care of our family and believing in our community and taking care of our communities, that we ultimately press upon. If each individual were to adopt these things and live by these virtues and value structures, everything gets better.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: And that's why I wanted to take a few minutes here today and read this speech and inject some of my own kind of commentary into it and some of my own thoughts. I think for a lot of you, this will probably be the first time that you hear this man in arena speech, the citizenship in a republic. I think it'll be the first time that you hear the entire thing. Hopefully you find value in it. And as I know, the first time I read it, I did. I like a few other essays, speeches and stuff that I keep over in my reading nook. This is something that I come back to a couple of times a year and I reread it and I think about it. And sometimes I underline new things. There's blue, red, and black underlines in this document from just different times that I've read it and new thoughts based on whatever season I'm in at that moment or whatever mindset I'm in in that moment strike me.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So I'm going to read this to you before we get there. I want to first just thank you for watching the show. If you enjoy this, if you have comments on this speech or my commentary on the speech, or you have thoughts and ideas that you think extend this conversation or things that you think I may have misunderstood, leave them in the comments on the YouTube channel. The YouTube channel is just a great place to collect all the comments. I get DMs on different platforms and I love that. And I tried my best to respond to them, but things get missed. If everything is in the YouTube channel, then that makes it very easy for me to take comments and respond to them. Obviously you can always email me, but the YouTube channel provides that. So if you're not subscribed on the YouTube channel, you don't necessarily have to watch the video, but if you want to jump over and leave comments, that's a great way to do it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: And obviously if you enjoy watching the video, that's wonderful as well. These all go out in audio format. And if you like the audio, subscribe on your favorite audio feed, because that just makes sure you get more of these. And we do two episodes a week. We do the Monday mindset, which obviously comes out on Mondays and then interview shows, which are usually slightly longer. They come out on Thursdays. And we have a wonderful lineup for this fall coming out. If you're listening to this the week that it comes out. But if you're listening to this in the future at some point, then, you know, as of the production of this show, we have a wonderful lineup coming out, which you've probably heard or will hear if you're starting back from the beginning.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So with all that, guys, I appreciate you for listening to this show. I love you for listening to this show. And again, sharing the show, commenting on the show, all these things help us grow the show. I do this work. This is something I do as a labor of love. I purposely don't have any sponsorships right now because I want to focus on the work. And I do this around my full-time work, which is being the founder and CEO of Rogue Risk, National Digital Insurance agency, if you're unfamiliar with us, we're three year at this time, three year plus old startup growing. And three years, we're almost at 25 people. We are, you know, have thousands of clients and are growing rapidly and trying to innovate in the insurance industry. And what I do is I take the lessons, the beats, the obstacles, the successes, wins, all that kind of stuff that I learned through my work in Rogris, et cetera. And I try to apply it here to you because I want you to know that you're not alone in your own journey.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: And whether it's physical health, mental health, being a better leader, being a better salesperson, how we communicate, you know, so being a better communicator, some of the tactical things that we do share all that stuff. This is a show about getting better, about finding our peak performance, about human optimization, and really just the journey that it is to be the best version of ourselves. So if you're into all that stuff, I hope you subscribe. If not, then just thank you for listening anyways.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So with all that, let's get on to citizenship in a republic, better known and commonly known as the man in the arena speech.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: [reading from a document] All right, this is Teddy Roosevelt. Today I shall speak to you on the subject of individual citizenship. And I underlined individual citizenship because I think that we need to take personal responsibility, personal agency. We've talked in the past. I've written some articles on ryanhanley.com, which is my website, about personal agency. I think we're passing the buck too much. I think our current culture passes the buck. Someone else will take care of that. I'm too busy. What impact will I have? Personal responsibility. Personal agency. You are an individual. You are a citizen in this nation. Your actions have consequences, whether you realize them or not, on both yourself, your family, your community, and this nation at large. So individual citizenship, very, very, very important.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: The one subject of vital importance to you, my hearers, and to me, my countrymen, because you and we are great citizens of great democratic republics. A democratic republic such as ours, an effort to realize in its full sense government by, of, and for the people represents the most gigantic of all possible social experiments. The one fraught with great responsibilities, there's that responsibility word, alike from good and evil. The success of republics like yours and like ours means the glory and our failure of despair of mankind. And for you and for us, the question of the quality of the individual citizen is supreme.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Under other forms of government, under the rule of one man or very few men, the quality of the leaders is all important. If, under such governments, the quality of the rulers is high enough, then the nations for generations lead a brilliant career and add substantially to the sum of the world achievement, no matter how low the quality of the average citizen, because the average citizen is almost negligible quantity and working out the final results of that type of national greatness. But with you and us, the case is different. With you here and with us in my own home, in the long run, success or failure will be conditioned upon the way in which the average man, the average woman does his or her duty, first in the ordinary, everyday affairs of life, and next in those great occasions, cries, which call for heroic virtues.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Again, does his or her duty, personal responsibility, personal agency, individual actions impact the greater good, the greater whole. The average citizen must be a good citizen if the main source of national power, the average citizen must be a good citizen if our republics are to succeed. The stream will not permanently rise higher than the main source. I just, I love this sentence. I've underlined it twice, once in red and once in black, because to me, what this, the stream will not permanently rise higher than the main source means is that if each individual member, if each individual citizen of a society isn't elevating their personal agency, their personal quality, then the entire ecosystem cannot rise. And we've seen this in our society today, as the average citizen lowers their educational standards, their moral standards, right? Their drive, their willpower, the greater cannot rise above that of the source. And the source is each individual human. I love that sentence. The stream will not permanently rise higher than the main source.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: And the main source of national power and national greatness is found in the average citizenship of the nation. Therefore, it behooves us to do our best to see that the standard of the average citizen is kept high. And the average cannot be kept high unless the standard of the leaders is very much higher. I wish that our leaders today embodied that. It is, although I do think Robert F. Kennedy and Vivek have embraced a lot of that. It is well if a large proportion of the leaders in any republic, in any democracy are, as a matter of course, drawn from the classes represented in this audience today, but only provided that those classes possess the gifts of sympathy with plain people and of devotion to great ideals.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: You and those like have received special advantages. You have all of you had the opportunity for mental training. Many of you have had leisure. Most of you have had a chance for enjoyment in life far greater than comes to the majority of your fellows. To you and your kind, much has been given and from much should be expected, which means this is kind of like the Spider-Man quote with great power comes great responsibility, right? If you are given a gift, and that gift might be mental capacity, it might be willpower, drive, it may be purely monetary inheritance. With that gift comes a responsibility to use it for good in the greater community. I think that is something that is wholly lost on us at scale today.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yet there are certain failings against which it is especially incumbent that both men of trained and cultivated intellect and men of inherited wealth and position should especially guard themselves because to these failings they are especially liable and if yielded to their your chances of useful service are at an end. Let the man of learning, the man of lettered leisure, beware of that queer and cheap temptation to pose to himself and to others as a cynic, as the man who has outgrown emotions and beliefs, the man to whom good and evil are as one. This is nihilism. Nihilism is the enemy. The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: When you meet these people in your life who feel like their ability to call out shit that doesn't work somehow makes them smarter and of greater ilk than those who play in the muck, build, grow, and learn. There are many men who feel a kind of twisted pride in cynicism. There are many who confine themselves to criticism of the way others do what they themselves dare not even attempt. There is no more unhealthy being, no man less worthy of respect than he who either really holds or feigns to hold an attitude of sneering disbelief towards all that is great and lofty, whether an achievement or in that noble effort which, even if it fails, comes to second achievement. A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticize work, which the critics himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness, which will not accept contact with life's realities. All these are marks, not as the possessor would feign to think of superiority, but of weakness.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Think of all the people on Twitter who just sit and watch those who are efforting and criticize them as if somehow they are holier than thou. These are the lowest form of individuals in a citizenship. They mark the men unfit to bear their part painfully in the stern strife of living, who seek in the affection of contempt of the achievements of others to hide from others, from themselves and their own weakness. The role is easy. There is none easier, save only the role of the man who sneers alike at both criticism and performance. It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strongman stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming. But who does actually strive to do deeds, who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: What up guys? Sorry to take you away from the episode, but as you know, we do not run ads on this show. And in exchange for that, I need your help. If you're loving this episode, if you enjoy this podcast, whether you're watching on YouTube or you're listening on your favorite podcast platform, I would love for you to subscribe, share, comment if you're on YouTube, leave a rating review if you're on Spotify or Apple iTunes, etc. This helps the show grow. It helps me bring more guests in. We have a tremendous lineup of people coming in, men and women who've done incredible things, sharing their stories around peak performance, leadership, growth, sales, the things that are going to help you grow as a person and grow your business. But they all check out comments, ratings, reviews. They check out all this information before they come on. So as I reach out to more and more people and want to bring them in and share their stories with you, I need your help. Share the show, subscribe if you're not subscribed, and I'd love for you to leave a comment about the show because I read all the comments or if you're on Apple or Spotify, leave a rating review of this show. I love you for listening to this show and I hope you enjoy it listening as much as I do creating the show for you. All right, I'm out of here. Peace.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Let's get back to the episode. This is the man in the arena portion of this. This hangs in my living room. I think that those might be some of the greatest words ever written in the history of mankind. Certainly on the list. Certainly up for debate, but words to live by. Shame on the man of cultivated taste who permits refinement to develop into festivitiveness that unfits him for doing the rough work of the workaday world, meaning the person who's got all the opinions, but ain't willing to put his blood, sweat, and tears on the line and wants to comment. I think we all know that person. Don't be that person.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Among the free peoples who govern themselves, there is but a small field of usefulness open for the men of cloistered life who shrink from contact with their fellows, meaning don't rescind away from a life worth living. Still less room is there for those who deride or slight what is done by those who actually bear the brunt of the day, nor yet for those others who always profess that they would like to take action. If only the conditions of life were not actually what they actually are, meaning they wait for perfection. Get to work. Imperfect is perfect. The man who does nothing cuts the same sordid figure in the pages of history whether he be a cynic, a flop, or a voluptuor. There is little use for the being whose timid soul knows nothing of great and generous emotion of high pride, the stern belief, the lost in the lofty enthusiasm of the men who quell the storm and ride the thunder god. That's a great line. Well for these men, if they succeed well also, though not so well, if they fail, given only that they have nobly ventured and have put forth all their heart and strength.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: It is war-worn Hotspur spent with hard fighting. He of the many errors and valiant end who over whose memory we love to linger, not over the memory of the young Lord who put for vile guns would have been a valiant soldier. Meaning the man who steps out into the war, heirs, but strives, will always be held in higher regard than those who perceive themselves as something they were never willing to test.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Character must show itself in the man's performance, both of duty he owes himself and of the duty he owes the state. The man's foremost duty is owed to himself and his family. And he can do this duty only by earning money, by providing what is essential to material well-being. It is only after this has been done that he can hope to build a higher superstructure on the solid material foundation. It is only after this has been done that he can help in his movements for the general well-being. He must pull his own weight first, personal agency, personal responsibility. And only after this can his surplus strength be of use to the general public.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: It is not good to excite that bitter laughter which expresses contempt. The contempt is what we feel for the being whose enthusiasm to benefit mankind is such that he is a burden to those nearest him. Those who sacrifice, thinking of this like those who sacrifice their family or others in exchange for an attempt to be of well-being. Whose wishes to do great things for humanity in the abstract, but who cannot keep his wife in comfort or educate his children. Nevertheless, while laying all stress on this point, while not merely acknowledging, but insisting upon the fact that there must be a basis of material well-being for the individual, as for the nation, let us with equal emphasis insist that this material well-being represents nothing but the foundation, and that the foundation, though indispensable, is worthless, unless upon it is raised the superstructure of a higher life.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: That is why I decline to recognize the mere multimillionaire, the man of mere wealth as an asset of value to any country, and especially not as an asset to my own country. If he has earned or uses his wealth in a way that makes him a real benefit and of real use, and such is often the case, why? Then he does become an asset of real worth, but it is the way in which it has been earned and used and not the mere fact of wealth that entitles him to his credit. Just because daddy gave you money doesn't make you special or important.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: There is need in business and in most other forms of human activity of the great guiding intelligences. Their places cannot be supplied by any number of lesser intelligences. It is a good thing that they should have ample recognition, ample reward, but we must not transfer our admiration to the reward instead of to the deed reward. And I just love this line because basically what he's saying is we look at the person who has the amazing house and we admire the house. We don't admire the fact that they grinded for 10 years, blood, sweat, tears, pain, anxiety, stress, to build something that adds real value to our world. We admire the house. And that's a misalignment of value structure and admiration.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: And if what should be the reward exists without the service having been rendered, then admiration will only come from those who are mean of soul. The truth is that after a certain measure of tangible material success, reward has been achieved. The question of increasing it becomes of constantly less importance compared to the other things that can be done in life. It is a bad thing for a nation to raise and to admire a false standard of success. And there could be no falser standard than that set by the deification of material well-being in and for itself. But the man who, having far surpassed the limits of providing for the wants, both of the body and the mind, of himself and those depending on him, then piles up a great fortune for the acquisition or retention of which he returns no corresponding benefit to the nation as a whole, should himself be made to feel that, so far from being desirable, he is an unworthy citizen of the community. It means if you have a bunch of shit and you hoard it, you are worthless. That he is to be neither admired nor envied. That his right-thinking fellow countrymen put him low in the scale of citizenship. Leave him to be consoled by the admiration of those whose level of purpose is even lower than his own.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: My position as regards the moneyed interests can be put in a few words. In every civilized society, property rights must be carefully safeguarded. Ordinarily, and in great majority of cases, human rights and property rights are fundamentally and in the long run identical. But when it clearly appears that there is a real conflict between them, human rights must have the upper hand for property belongs to man and not man to property. In fact, it is essential to good citizenship clearly to understand that there are certain qualities which we in a democracy are prone to admiring and of themselves which ought by rights to be judged admirable or the reverse solely from the standpoint of the use made of them. Foremost among these I should include two very distinct gifts—the gift of money making and the gift of oratory. Money making, the money touch I have spoken of above—it is a quality which a moderate degree is essential. It may be useful when developed to a very great degree, but only if accompanied and controlled by other qualities. And without such control, the professor tends to develop into one of the least attractive types produced by the modern industrial democracy.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So it is with the orator. It is highly desirable that a leader of opinion in democracy should be able to state his views clearly and convincingly, but all that the oratory can do of value to the community is enable the man thus to explain himself. If it enables the orator to put false values on things, it merely makes him power of mischief. Some excellent public servants have not that gift at all and must merely rely on their deeds to speak for them, and unless oratory does represent genuine conviction based on good common sense and able to be translated into efficient performance, then the better the orator, the greater the damage to the public it deserves. These are the people who talk about it, but don't be about it. Instead, it is a sign of marked political weakness in any commonwealth. If the people tend to be carried away by mere oratory, if they tend to value words in and for themselves as divorced from the deeds for which they are supposed to stand.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: The praise maker, the praise monger, the ready talker, however great his power, whose speech does not make for Kurd sobriety and right understanding is simply a noxious element in the body politic. And it speaks ill for the public if he has influence over them. To admire the gift of oratory without regard for the moral quality behind the gift is to do wrong to the republic. Just look at our politicians today and many of our leaders.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: The citizen must have high ideals, yet he must be able to achieve them in practical fashion. No permanent good comes from aspirations so lofty that they have grown fantastic and have become impossible and indeed undesirable to realize. This would go counter to say Benjamin Hardy's 10x easier than 2x idea that you should aim for the highest regard. Although I think what Teddy Roosevelt is saying here is that do not create a goal so outside the realm of considerableness that it is unachievable and therefore you do not start. I'm reading into that a little bit, but that's my opinion of what he is saying here.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: The impractical visionary is far less often to guide and precursor than he is the embittered foe of a real reformer, of a man who, with stumblings and shortcomings, yet does in some shape and practical fashion give effect to the hopes and desires of those who strive for better things. And I think that second sentence essentially marks true, in my opinion.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Woe to the empty praise maker, to the empty idolist, who, instead of making ready the ground for the man of action turns against him when he appears and hampers him when he does work. Moreover, the preacher of ideals must remember how sorry and contemptible is the figure which he will cut, how great the damage that he will do if he does not himself in his own life strive measurably to realize the ideals that he preaches for others. Again, don't talk about it if you ain't going to be about it. That is the idea here is personal agency. Own your own values and virtues and live them. Do not put what you believe others should do onto them if you are unwilling to do these things yourself.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Let him remember also that the worth of the ideal must be largely determined by the success with which it can, in practice, be realized. We should abhor the so-called practical men whose practicality assumes the shape of that peculiar baseness which finds its expression in disbelief in morality and decency, in disregard of high standards of living and conduct, such a creature is the worst enemy of the body politic, but only less desirable as a citizen, and his nominal opponent and real ally, the man of fantastic vision, who makes the impossible better forever the enemy of the possible good. This to me is incredibly meaningful. You could use this as a roadmap for your life, for governing your adult life, but it comes back to personal agency. It comes back to owning who you are, living by a set of virtues, values, standards, and while and projecting those virtues, value standards out in the world only so much as you embody them, right?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: It doesn't mean you can't have aspirational virtues. It doesn't mean you won't make mistakes. It doesn't mean you won't stumble, fall, or fail. All those things, quite frankly, are necessary for growth and realities of the universe. However, what we cannot be is external virtuous and internally live immoral, self-flagellating, narcissistic, materialistic lives. Yet we're gonna press upon others' virtues that we are unwilling to live by ourselves. This simple ideal that hold others only to a standard as high as you are willing to hold yourself, I feel it is a core to greatness. I feel it is a core happiness, being happiness, being a derivative of meaning and purpose, and that people don't talk like this anymore, but they should.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: My friends, I hope this Monday Mindset connected with you. I hope the Citizenship in a Republic speech connects with you. Would love for you to comment on YouTube. Would love for you to share this episode if it's meaningful to you. I think conversations like this, ideas like this, speeches like this need to be shared. More people need to hear these things because if we can start to define our lives by the things that we are willing to hold ourselves accountable to, I think not only our own individual lives get better, but the lives of our family and those we care about, our community improves and ultimately this nation improves.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: And while that may seem that fourth step, the nation improving may seem a step too far for you. If everyone believes that, then it never actually gets better. And it is these little things that we do day to day that actually matter. It's why I do this show. It's why I love sharing these thoughts with you. And it's why I love that you listen to the show. I appreciate you. I hope you'll continue to watch the show. I hope you'll share your comments on the YouTube channel. And if you're not subscribed, I hope you will. My friends, I wish you an absolutely wonderful week. I'm out of here. Peace.
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