I arrived a decade after World War II ended, the first of five children born into a poor family. I spent my early years navigating the concrete landscape of a government housing project. Drive-by shootings had not yet become a regular headline, but the place stayed rough and unforgiving. I still recall standing in our apartment around kindergarten age on a vinyl asbestos tile floor, listening to my parents argue, as they regularly did, looking at my surroundings, and thinking with a strange, quiet clarity, I do not belong here. I spoke to some cosmic power in the sky, certain it had misplaced me. From that age, a singular, unshakeable need drove me to make something better of my life.
That drive never fit neatly into traditional boxes. I attended and completed classes at Rutgers University, the New Jersey Institute of Technology, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but I never collected a degree. At my core, I am an autodidact. Finding institutional pacing, bureaucracy, and standardized curricula restrictive and redundant, I skipped the prescribed path. Instead, I forged my own education fueled by restless curiosity, streetwise resourcefulness, and disciplined focus.
I founded a company that leaned on what was a new way of networking using a technology called NNTP to connect scientific and engineering professionals. The company grew so rapidly that it ranked in the top 200 of the Inc.500 list just seven years after I founded it.
As a highly active pre-internet networker, I constantly pounded the pavement, which uncannily put me in the right places at the right times. While at MIT, a student handed me early software originating from CERN, created by Tim Berners-Lee. To my eye, it looked like Apple’s HyperCard, except instead of linking documents on a single machine, it moved them across a wide area network using TCP/IP. That foundational code for HTTP birthed the World Wide Web. I saw the potential early, found brilliant mentors, worked relentlessly, and patented an internet-based process long before most people knew what the internet was.
Over the years, I grew businesses and I crashed some. In such a dynamic environment, one learns many “Behold!” and “Beware!” lessons, as Jim Rohn would say. I developed wonderful relationships around the world, and, through my own missteps, I burned bridges too. I tried to extract the lesson from every single experience, and the book you hold distills those hard-won truths.
Through all of it, I did not become a billionaire. But I achieved the one thing that mattered: absolute financial independence. Today, I live very comfortably and entirely debt-free in a quiet, semi-rural community on the East Coast of the USA. I carry no mortgage or car payments, and secured enough that the interest on the principal will outlast both me and my generous lifestyle, while leaving a substantial foundation for my children and theirs. Wealth, rightly understood, amounts to the freedom and options it provides. By that metric, a kid from the projects did all right.
I have retired from the daily mechanics of building businesses, but I will never retire from purpose. A serial entrepreneur’s drive does not switch off; it just hunts for a more lasting material to build with. Convention might hand a person my age the title of Sage. I decline it and take the lesser one: Witness. I was there, I took notes, and I kept the receipts. What follows cost me time, effort, and error. I would rather you have it than pay the same way I did.
I began this book as a simple booklet of life rules for my six grandchildren, three girls and three boys, ranging from a toddler to college students studying nursing and engineering. I meant it as a private inheritance, a way to hand down what I value and leave something permanent behind. But the writing demanded more of me. Thirty principles grew to fifty, and fifty grew to two hundred and thirty.
My grandsons drove that expansion. I love all six of those children equally, and I worry about them unequally. My granddaughters will face their own hard roads, and much of this book will serve them there. But when I look at the world waiting for my grandsons, I see a particular danger, one I have watched build for most of my adult life.
I watched the work change first. The factory floors that once gave a young man without a diploma a wage, a trade, and a place among other men closed or moved overseas. The economy that replaced them rewards credentials, and the classrooms that issue those credentials now graduate more women than men. I begrudge no woman her degree. I only notice who is missing from the room.
Then the map disappeared. My generation inherited one: finish school, find work, marry, join a church or a lodge or a union hall, raise children, and a life assembled itself around you. You could reject the map, as I did, but you needed a map in order to reject it. Those institutions have thinned, and no one has drawn a replacement. We hand a young man a blank page and tell him the blankness is freedom. It does not feel like freedom to him. It feels as though no one expected him.
The friendships went with the institutions. Men build friendship over the shared task: the team, the crew, the shift, the project. Remove the task and you remove the friendship with it. Too many young men now go weeks without a conversation that matters, and nobody notices they have gone quiet, because nobody was counting on them to show up.
They withdraw. The screen offers what the world withholds. A game hands out progress on schedule. Pornography hands out intimacy without risk. Both are counterfeits, and most of the young men using them know it. Then the culture adds insult, speaking of them mainly as a problem to manage or a punchline to enjoy. A man who hears often enough that he is the problem stops asking for help. He checks out quietly, and some never check back in.
I wrote directly to them, to my grandsons and to every young man standing where they stand. And somewhere in the writing I recognized what I had described, because I had felt it first at five years old, standing on a vinyl asbestos floor in a housing project, looking around at a life that did not fit me. I hear that same note underneath all of it. Not laziness and not weakness. A young man stands in a room, looks around, and thinks, I do not belong here.
But my not-belonging came with a direction, and theirs does not. I knew somewhere else existed, and that certainty organized the next sixty years of my life. A young man today feels every bit of that displacement and finds nowhere to point it. A need with no direction turns inward and rots.
My simple booklet outgrew the task: two hundred and thirty principles for reclaiming meaning, mastery, and manhood. I call the philosophy Ascendant Humanism, and I chose both words with care.
Humanism, because the philosophy starts with the human being and what a human being can do. It does not quarrel with faith. I spoke to the sky at five years old, and I have not entirely stopped. But it refuses to wait on heaven, government, luck, or anyone’s permission. It holds that you own your life, you answer for your choices, and you build your character with your own hands, the way anyone builds anything: by showing up and doing the work.
Ascendant, because the direction is up, and because direction is the whole point. I do not mean up the way the world keeps score, in money and titles, though I despise neither. I mean the daily climb from the person you are toward the person you could respect. That climb never finishes. It asks only that you stand a little higher tonight than you stood this morning. I found that direction at five years old, and I want to hand it to the young man who has none.
I aimed the book at young men because that is where I see the fire. But very little in it belongs to men alone. Discipline has no gender. Neither does honesty, nor courage, nor the long work of building a worthy life. My granddaughters will read this book, and I wrote every page knowing they would.
Two hundred and thirty principles is a great many, and I do not expect anyone to swallow them whole. I did not learn them that way. As you will learn in the Introduction, they are rendered into a structure of five concentric rings. Read one at a time. Argue with it. Test it against your own week. Keep what holds and come back later for the rest. Some of these cost me a year to learn and some cost me a company. Not one came free.
This book belongs to anyone real and unfinished, anyone honest enough to stand in the middle of their own life and admit they do not belong there. I stood there once. Somewhere else exists. These pages hold the directions I wish someone had handed me.
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