I am not at all convinced that what lonely disaffected male millennials need to hear most is that performative masculinity will make them feel happy or fulfilled. The question is whether their answers are the right ones. I have no doubt that the Petersonists are responding to a real need felt by their audience. I would suggest that this kind of sloppiness tells us something about the moral character of all the parties involved, but I'm afraid I haven't got any anecdotes at hand about Kim Jong Un's devilish propensity for, say, comma splices. His editors either do not know or do not care about the difference between, for example, cumulative and coordinate adjectives, which is why we get phrases like 'I ran to the beach with my black, rubber flippers' and 'The life jacket was a small, rubberized bladder' within a sentence of each other. McRaven is not trying to reach experienced adult readers. But who am I to argue with a man who has written a 144-page book about the number of push-ups he can do? Attempting to present all of it as the hard-won result of McRaven's military service seems (no doubt unintentionally) to cheapen the latter. It's that it could just as easily appear in Uncle Rico's high-school yearbook. The problem here is not so much with the advice itself, which hits all the right Hallmark notes. Without pushing your limits, without occasionally sliding down the rope headfirst, without daring greatly, you will never know what is truly possible in your life.

Life is a struggle and the potential for failure is ever present, but those who live in fear of failure, or hardship, or embarrassment will never achieve their potential. Instead he tells us about how when he was in boot camp he was very good at making his own bed, so good that when his instructor threw a quarter at the mattress it 'jumped several inches off the bed.' Who could fail to be impressed by an anecdote like that, or the one that follows it in which he makes his bed for the first time after being laid up following a parachute accident? 'It was,' he tells us, 'my way of showing that I had conquered the injury.' Not just conquered, I'm sure, but simply annihilated it with that single, Siegfried-like triumph over the unruly sheets and recalcitrant pillows. McRaven, a retired Navy SEAL admiral, does not so much argue this point. Failure to complete it suggests not mere laziness or indifference to real or perceived social norms but advanced, indeed very likely terminal moral decay. The premise of the book is exactly what the title suggests - i.e., that the diurnal stretching and folding of linen over a rectangle of polyurethane foam is a task of well-nigh existential importance.

Mcraven bed