Joey Lechuga

Beyond Grit: What Navy SEALs Teach Us About True Toughness How to Respond, Not React, in a World of Pressure

“True toughness is quiet and comes deep from within. It’s about making the right choice under stress, uncertainty, and fatigue. It requires emotional control: cultivating the power to respond—not react—and making thoughtful, deliberate decisions during pressure-filled situations.”
- Steve Magness

How to be yourself, when you have no self. Lessons from Zhuangzi | Aeon Essays As Zhuangzi saw, there is no immutably true self. Instead our identity is as dynamic and alive as a butterfly in flight

“A narrow identity makes heavy demands of consistency, upon you and also upon the wider world… But the world is always changing, in ways that we cannot predict.”
- Alexander Douglas, Essence is Fluttering (2025)

“To make men, we must have ideals—broad, pure, and inspiring ends of living—not sordid money-getting, not apples of gold.”
- W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903)

“All men make mistakes, but a good man yields when he knows his course is wrong, and repairs the evil. The only crime is pride.”
- Sophocles, Antigone (442 BC)

“Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.”
- John Milton, Areopagitica (1644)