Rivers & Swamps | FRIDAY FIELD NOTES

Are you consuming endless podcasts, books, and sermons but finding your life stuck in the exact same spot? In this episode of Friday Field Notes, Ryan Michler breaks down the critical difference between being a roaring river and a stagnant swamp. Most men don't have an information problem—they have a direction problem. Unapplied knowledge turns into a shallow, rotting pond that breeds resentment, irritability, and inaction. Discover how to establish rigid boundaries ("banks") in your life, implement the 48-Hour Rule for immediate execution, cap your inputs, and surround yourself with real accountability so your knowledge actually flows into meaningful strength. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS 00:00 The Analogy of Two Waters 01:30 Why a River Needs Banks to Have Power 02:26 You Don't Have an Information Problem 04:55 What Boundaries and Banks Actually Do 06:05 The Danger of Stagnant Knowledge 08:00 How Unused Insight Rotates into Resentment 09:45 Action Rule 1: The 48-Hour Rule 11:30 Action Rule 2: Single-Point Accountability 12:50 Action Rule 3: Cap Inputs, Raise Outputs 16:00 Feeding Everything Downstream Battle Planners: Pick yours up today! https://store.orderofman.com/products/order-of-man-annual-battle-planner Order Ryan's new book, The Masculinity Manifesto https://www.amazon.com/Masculinity-Manifesto-Establishes-Influence-Credibility/dp/1684513316/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1665048672&sr=8-1. For more information on the Iron Council brotherhood https://orderofman.link/iron-council. Want maximum health, wealth, relationships, and abundance in your life? Sign up for our free course, 30 Days to Battle Ready https://orderofman.link/battle-ready-0

• 0:00Speaker 00

  A swamp of information doesn't just fail to help anything downstream. It actively breeds things that hurt what's near it. And a man, again, with no banks, doesn't just fail to grow. He starts breeding things too. Resentment in your life because you have all the information, but it never gets addressed because you never acted on it. Maybe it's second guessing that that never revolves or resolves, I should say, into a decision. Guys, I want you to imagine two bodies of water. I started thinking about this really interesting analogy for how to live our lives and whether or not the information and the inputs that come into our lives

• 0:43Speaker 00

  are actually utilized and directed towards something meaningful. Or do they just sit stagnant, wasting space, attracting mosquitoes? I want you to think about a river. And then I want you to also think about a swamp. Stick with me for a minute on this one, and I think I'll make sense. I hope I do. With those two different bodies of water, it's the same source, right? It's the same rain, same runoff that's feeding them. And one, the river carves through a valley for 100 miles. It turns a mill. It waters a field. It gives a town even potentially something to build its entire population around.

• 1:26Speaker 00

  But the other, a swamp, spreads out flat. It just stops moving. It starts breeding mosquitoes. It's just wasted. Again, same water, same starting point. But the only difference, and this is what's very important for us to know, between a river and a swamp is that a river has banks. If you take those banks off, if you spread those banks out or carve them out or push them away off of a river, you don't get more water, you get less of a river, right? That current will disappear. The depth of the river will disappear. And then what's left is the same fresh water,

• 2:10Speaker 00

  except for now it's shallow and slow and it's not going anywhere. Nothing downstream gets fed anymore because there is no downstream without banks. There's just this spot where all this water happens to be sitting today, doing nothing. And I bring this up, and this is what's important. So this is what I was hoping you'd stick with me on. But I bring this up because I think most men are sitting in a swamp and telling themselves that they have a water problem, right? Or in the analogy, an information problem. Guys, you don't have that information problem. It's not the water or the source. I mean, look at how much you take in on a given week.

• 2:54Speaker 00

  Books and podcasts and sermons, even this one, right? Conversations with men who've got maybe a few more miles on them than you do. It's not a shortage of information. If that were the case, we wouldn't see how overwhelmed and frankly, a little sedated, most of us are. Okay, most of you, I don't know if most of you, but a lot of us, and I've been this way too. Andy Fasilla might call it an information or a learning zombie. Okay, most of you are just drowning in good inputs. I mean, you could quote everything. You can read sermons and quote scriptures that you heard eight months ago

• 3:39Speaker 00

  that still rattle around in your brain. And you know what? It's doing nothing. Same with books. Everybody's like, oh, I'm going to read 100 books this year. And then you ask, well, how many of the books did something for you? Do you actually implement something in your life? And usually it's a different story. Okay, that's the tell. It's good information. It's good water. It's sitting still. It's stagnant, not doing anything. You're not short on that input. What you're short on potentially, and I've been this way before, is the banks. It's the boundaries. It's what gives direction to the water, to the information. And the banks are the whole reason it has that direction.

• 4:24Speaker 00

  They're not holding the water back out of spite. They're not the enemy of the water, right? Sometimes people will say, well, when I put in boundaries in place or I'm disciplined that somehow it hinders me. No, it's the reason the water becomes useful instead of just being there. Okay, direction is what banks give you. And direction is what turns that water into, quite honestly, a powerful force instead of just a puddle or something. And again, when most guys hear the word boundaries, they tend to think of it as a therapy word. It's like something you say when you're protecting your feelings from your wife or your mother-in-law. And that's not what I'm talking about.

• 5:08Speaker 00

  If you implement boundaries done right, it isn't a wall to keep things out. It's the barriers to build. So the good things that you already have don't just spread out and die when they land. Okay, banks are not restrictions. Banks are what make the water go somewhere on purpose. And think about what a swamp actually is, like mechanically what it is. It's not water that's absent. It's water with nowhere to go. It spreads because nothing is there telling it where the edge of this water is. And the wider it spreads, the shallower it gets. And the shallower it gets, the warmer it gets, the warmer it gets,

• 5:53Speaker 00

  the faster things start rotting in it. Okay, a swamp isn't dangerous because it lacks water. Just like you're not dangerous because you lack information. You don't. It's because you lack direction. And stagnant things, if you leave alone long enough, always start to rot away and breed something. Bacteria, mosquitoes, the most horrible things on this earth. That's a man with no banks. Okay, again, he's not short on knowledge or conviction or good intention. We all have all of that, right? You have knowledge. You listen to this podcast every week. You have conviction. You have strong beliefs and what you stand for. You have good intention.

• 6:37Speaker 00

  You want to be a good and decent human being. But if you spread that out over 100 acres, 1,000 acres, just an inch deep, just warming up, just starting to smell and rot, that's a problem. So guys, listen to something that should change how you lead your family. And then it just sits there for a week and it just evaporates. I mean, again, how many books have we read where you've just forgotten more information than you ever read? You read something that should change how you handle your money, not just for the sake of reading. And then by the following Tuesday, you're back into the same habits. You're making the same dumb financial decisions

• 7:21Speaker 00

  because the insight had nowhere to run. It had no direction to it. I hear this all the time. Guys will say, well, Ryan, how do you retain the information that you read in books? Well, number one, I don't read as many as I used to because reading isn't the goal in and of itself. It's the knowledge that I'm gaining and more importantly, the wisdom to apply it appropriately. Okay, if you're just sitting on that information, it's just pulled up next to all the other insights, next to all the other podcasts, next to all the other books on your nightstand, next to the Bible that's not cracked open. It's just a collection. It's a library that's just collecting dust. You know who I'm talking about.

• 8:07Speaker 00

  It might even be you some days. Yeah, I know I have. And the problem was never that I hadn't heard something that was true. The problem was I hadn't built anything for the truth to run through it. And here's the part that I think should bother you maybe, probably more than it does. A swamp of information doesn't just fail to help anything downstream. It actively breeds things that hurt what's near it. Disease, mosquitoes. And that's not a metaphor I'm reaching for. That's just what stagnant water does over time. And a man, again, with no banks, doesn't just fail to grow.

• 8:51Speaker 00

  He starts breeding things too. Resentment in your life because you have all the information, but it never gets addressed because you never acted on it. Maybe it's second guessing that that never revolves or resolves, I should say, into a decision. It's this like low-grade, under the surface irritability that might show up when you're at the dinner table trying to be there for your wife and kids.

• 9:22Speaker 00

  The reason, or the problem isn't at the dinner table. It's, the reason is upstream. It's that water that's been sitting too long. A river, again, doesn't have that problem. It's not because it's smarter, or more motivated, or more disciplined. In some weird sense, we often say that. The reason that guy's successful is because he's better connected. Or the reason he's successful is because he got lucky. Or this guy was successful because he had more money. Or this guy, and then fill in the blank with your justification of choice. It's not that he was smarter or more connected. It's that he put it into practice. He put it into work.

• 10:06Speaker 00

  He turned information, knowledge, into wisdom. So if you're a man who's honestly evaluating yourself right now, and you're finding a swamp in your life instead of a river, the fix was never to consume less necessarily. Okay, cutting off the rain doesn't turn a swamp into a river. You could stop every podcast, you could close every single book, and you just have a little bit of a smaller swamp. The fix is building the edges in your life that give you what you already have somewhere to go. And I have three ways that you can start doing that this week.

• 10:49Speaker 00

  Okay, so number one is, I don't know if you want to call it a 24-hour rule or a 48-hour rule, but I have a 48-hour rule on anything that moves me. When something that I hear actually lands, whether it's on a podcast, or in a book, or on a billboard, whatever. If you know it's true, and you know it applies to you, then you have 48 hours to convert it into one specific action. Or you just let it go. Not, "Hey, I need to think about this more." I'm talking about one visible action inside of a two-day window. And that's a bank.

• 11:32Speaker 00

  It stops that insight from spreading out and evaporating and not being used, and it forces that information to start carving a channel into your life. Okay, so that's number one, 48-hour rule. Number two, I want you to pick one person in your life who gets to ask you if you did it. If you actually did that 48-hour rule. Okay, not like a general accountability group that you check in when it's convenient. But I'm saying one man by name, who has standing permission to ask you next week whether you actually did the thing that you said this thing was going to change.

• 12:15Speaker 00

  Right? A river doesn't sit there and argue with its banks. If a man has that permission to hold you to the edge, you'll stay in it a lot more. And a lot more often than maybe you would if you just went on your own word. And if you don't have that kind of man in your life who could do that, build it. I've talked about this at length. Go to the gym, go to the chamber, go to Rotary, go to business functions, join networking groups, join accountability groups, join a brotherhood like the Iron Council. But you can find men who will do this, and you're going to create the bank to actually apply the information. It's what we do every day in the Iron Council. Okay, the last thing, and I'll leave you with this.

• 12:58Speaker 00

  I want you to cap your inputs before you raise your outputs. So if you're taking in more than you're building, or teaching, or fixing, or leading in a given week, you don't need a new podcast. Okay, we have this horrible thing that I think has been exacerbated by technology and the internet, and just the ease of modernity, where we have just become these consuming monsters. Consume, consume, consume, consume. And I've often said, you guys have heard me say this, that a boy becomes a man when he learns to produce more than he consumes.

• 13:43Speaker 00

  So I'm not telling you to not consume. I'm telling you to outpace your consumption with production. Okay, you need to go close the tab down and build something. That's what we often hear, like, "Go touch grass." Or a phrase that I hear that resonates with me is being too online. You're getting caught in these screens and devices, and you're not actually doing anything with it. So stop consumption for a little bit. Okay, you are going to be overwhelmed. And eventually, if you consume too much, the water's going to overflow over the banks. We had that happen here in Southern Utah

• 14:26Speaker 00

  just in the past week or so. Massive flooding in Southern Utah where I live. And there was just too much water, right? So the banks couldn't hold. The water came over the edge and ruined roads and fields and people's homes. So that's a risk if you're just consume, consume, consume, consume, and the banks can't hold it. Okay, none of this is complicated. And none of what you're doing in life requires more information than I think you already have. And that's the trick and the trap. Is that we think, "Oh, the next book will teach me. The next podcast I listen to.

• 15:10Speaker 00

  The next event that I go to. The next, the next, the next, the next." Well, you've been to all of them, and life isn't changing. So what's the problem? Okay, so please, stop waiting on a better book, or a sharper podcast, or a smarter man to tell you the next thing that you already know you should be doing. Okay, build those edges for the water that's already sitting there. Again, we don't need more rain. It just creates a problem. And that's where the resentment and the frustration and everything else comes in. So focus on those things, guys. I want you, like a river, to feed everything downstream of the water.

• 15:55Speaker 00

  When you read the book, I want it to be productive. I want you to learn about money. And now you're making smarter financial decisions, and you're paying off debt. Or Bedros Koulia, a friend of mine, often says that he believes every man has a moral duty and responsibility to build as much wealth as he possibly can. And that's a little counterintuitive for a lot of people. But I think it's true. Because if we have more wealth and abundance, then isn't what's downstream of us going to be fed more properly? Because we're actually going to be able to water the people and the projects and the businesses that we want to help and build. Your wife's going to be served by it, your kids,

• 16:38Speaker 00

  the men who are watching how you carry yourself, whether they say it or not. Build those banks, guys. Let the water move. And I hope that makes sense. I hope I didn't ramble too much. It was kind of an interesting concept and analogy that I got thinking about, especially with the flooding that was happening here in Southern Utah. Moving water's good. It's powerful. It creates energy. It helps feed people. It keeps us hydrated. It helps us build. We just need somewhere for it to go. And so do you. You need somewhere for that information to go to. So guys, if something landed with you on this podcast, if it resonated with you, don't let it sit. That's the whole lesson today. Take it into the Iron Council.

• 17:22Speaker 00

  Put it in front of men who will hold you to it. Have that accountability like I talked about. And build that bank before that water goes flat again. If you guys are interested in learning more about these concepts and some of the things that I'm sharing, you could do one of two things. You can check out the Iron Council at orderofman.com/ironcouncil. Or second, you can go to orderofman.com/warroom. Every single month, we will be hosting a war room where we actually share meaningful insight into lessons like this. But we do it all together. It's completely free. We've had, I think the last one, 150-something people registered for that. So very excited about the opportunities and actually taking my own advice

• 18:07Speaker 00

  and putting this information and knowledge into direction. So guys, we'll be back next week for our interview. Until then, go out there, take action, build the banks, and become the man you are meant to be.

• 18:20Speaker 01

  Thank you for listening to the Order of Man Podcast. You ready to take charge of your life and be more of the man you are meant to be? We invite you to join the order at orderofman.com.