“The trials you face will introduce you to your strengths.” — Epictetus
One of the things men don’t talk about enough is how much of our lives we spend trying to avoid the trial. We optimize, we plan, we build systems — all in service of getting to a place where things stop being hard. And I get it. I’ve been there. But what I’ve come to learn, through some of the hardest years of my life, is that the trial isn’t the obstacle between you and the man you want to become. The trial is the path.
Every hardship I’ve been through, I came out the other side with something I couldn’t have gotten any other way: strength. People who know me often say I’m one of the most resilient people they’ve ever met, that I could get hit by a train and keep moving. Honestly, for a long time I didn’t think of myself that way. But I’ve started to see it. Optimism, resilience, the ability to look at a hard situation and believe something good is on the other side of it — those aren’t things I decided to have, but they were all given to me by my trials.
That’s what Epictetus is pointing at. The trial doesn’t break you. It introduces you to an opportunity to be your best.
The summit isn’t the purpose. Setting out to climb it is. Somewhere on the way up, you find out what you’re made of. You encounter the hardship you forecasted and the one you didn’t, and on the other side of both, there’s something waiting: self-belief. The quiet internal knowing that you’re worth it, that you can keep going.
You don’t get that from staying comfortable.
Which brings me to Pamplona, Spain.
It’s June of 2024. I’d just made the final, irreversible decision to end my marriage a couple of months earlier, and I needed to do something that would reconnect me with who I was underneath everything I was managing. I committed to a Wim Hof retreat — a week in the mountains of Marbella, Spain. A man from my men’s team, Ben, who we call Fox, heard about it and asked to come along. The retreat was phenomenal, and few days before we flew back home, Fox called me and said, “Bill, you’re not going to believe what’s happening while we’re out here.”
What was it? The running of the bulls in Pamplona.
I said, “Well, I guess we’re doing that too.”
The city was unlike anything I’d ever seen. White and red colors everywhere. Thousands of people in the streets, food, music, energy everywhere you look. The first day, Fox and I rented a balcony and watched the run from above — bulls released, charging through cobblestone streets, people scattering. Pure, beautiful chaos. The next morning, we were in it.
We stood among 2,000 people, in a narrow road that leads straight to the Coliseum. We waited. A rocket was shot into the air. It was a warning: the bulls are coming soon. Then a second rocket went off: the bulls are running now… right at you.
What I remember most was watching the crowd’s energy change like a wave. You could literally see the vibration increasing. Heads bouncing faster and faster the closer the bulls got. Then the crowd just opens up and out come these big animals running twenty miles an hour at you, and everyone goes. Photos can’t do it justice.
People were falling everywhere on the cobblestone. The biggest risk honestly isn’t the bull — it’s tripping over the people in front of you. I was hurdling fallen runners like lunges in a workout, trying to stay on my feet and stay close. It’s over in seconds. But the aliveness of it doesn’t leave you.
A lot of people said I was crazy. Maybe. But here’s what I know: that kind of voluntary risk — the kind you choose, the one you show up for — is a completely different animal from the reckless risks I was taking earlier in my life. Earlier, my risks were driven by the void in me, the need to fill something that had no bottom. Running with the bulls was the opposite. I was present. I was choosing the summit because I wanted to climb it.
This week’s lesson: Your trial is there to show you who you are.
Next, Here’s What’s Trending in Men’s Health, Sports, & Entrepreneurship
Tiger Woods Released From Jail After DUI Arrest; Eyes Appear Bloodshot in Booking Photo
Entrepreneurs Say They Run on Coffee. What If Coffee Is Running Them Into the Ground?
The Tiger Woods story hit me differently than it seemed to hit most people. I saw the memes. The Wolf of Wall Street jokes. People treating a man’s moment of crisis like content. And what I kept thinking was: here’s an opportunity.
Tiger has had everything the world tells men they need — the talent, the trophies, the money, the women, the fame. And he still couldn’t outrun what he was carrying internally. I’ve been in a version of that story. Not at his level, but the internal architecture is the same. There’s a void. And men, we are extraordinarily capable of achieving things when we’re running on that void. We use it as propulsion. We build on it, compete on it, grind on it. And then we arrive at sacred success, but the void is still there.
What I see in that mug shot isn’t a punchline. I see a man who may be standing at the most important crossroad of his life. That’s something to be hopeful about. Because rock bottom, as painful as it is to watch, is where transformation begins. The men who’ve done the deepest work I’ve ever seen all had a moment like this — a moment where the weight of what they’d been carrying finally became impossible to ignore. That moment is a gift, even if it doesn’t feel like one yet.
My hope for Tiger is that he finds a guide. That he does the deep work. Because on the other side of that mountain is something worth having that no trophy could ever give him.
In other news this week, Entrepreneur Magazine ran a piece on what’s actually inside the coffee most high-performance founders are drinking on autopilot — mold contamination, acrylamide, heavy metals, undisclosed fillers. The argument: entrepreneurs obsess over optimizing every input in their lives except the one they consume before they’ve even opened their laptops.
I’ll be honest, there was a period where I was drinking five or six cups of coffee a day, then two or three energy drinks on top of that. I thought I was performing. I was just feeding a habit that had dressed itself up as discipline. What changed it for me was education. I read deep into what’s actually in commercial coffee. Now I buy high-quality beans from someone I know personally, someone who inspects and roasts them right. I grind them fresh each morning. I limit myself to one cup. After that, if I need energy, I go get it differently: breathwork, movement, water. Tony Robbins has great techniques for this.
Here’s the line worth sitting with: a tool that serves you is one you’re in control of. A habit wearing a productivity costume is one that’s in control of you. That’s a summit worth checking on — not whether you’re up at 5 AM, but whether what you’re putting in your body is building the man you’re after being.
