Plant Your Flag and They Will Come

Good is Drawn to Good

“No matter how isolated you are and how lonely you feel, if you do your work truly and conscientiously, unknown friends will come and seek you.”

April 4th, 2025

Writing to you from Denver.

There are many guarantees of The Preparation - education, competency, character growth, unique experiences, unimaginable opportunities, and a vast network of interesting people - just to name a few.

Of course, these are only guarantees if you bring consistent effort and ambition to the table.

At just under two years of being the beta tester for the program, I’ve experienced every single one of those benefits that were merely theory when the program was conceived.

It’s amazing.

Perhaps one of the most rewarding benefits (although somewhat harder to gain) is the vast network of interesting people.

The friends I’ve made and the preexisting relationships that have quickly improved over this short period of time, I am convinced, could not have been formed and cultivated in an institution like college.

Stay Out or Get Out

In college, just as in any other institution, you’re just another face in a sea of people. Not to mention that nearly all of the people you are around are going through life unconsciously.

Why else would they flood into a system that’ll chew ‘em up and spit ‘em out with a piece of paper and a mountain of debt?

Nobody in their right mind would do that. At least not without a good reason for taking that path…

The chances of meeting interesting people - and by that I mean good people, people who are consciously choosing their path, people who are getting stuff done - are tiny in a setting that makes life dull and linear.

Not only that, but it’s hard to stand out from the crowd in a place where nobody cares or wants you to stand out from the rest.

Toe the line…or else.

But, when you separate yourself from institutions, go at it alone, and as Carl Jung said, “do your work truly and conscientiously…” And, along the way you plant your flag and say: “Here I am and here’s what I am doing.”

Then, those good and interesting people will come your way.

I know, it sounds crazy, but it’s true. They literally come out of the blue and you will cross paths in ways that (to use Carl Jung again) could be called moments of synchronicity.

Diamonds in the Rough

Take a friend of mine that I met last year as an example…

He had been reading my posts here on Substack for a little while. As he told me, he didn’t quite understand The Preparation at the time, but he really was unknowingly following the program by seeking to learn skills on his own.

Anyway, during summer of last year, both he and I happened to be working on wildfires in Oregon at the same time and in the same area.

When he saw that I was also working on wildfires after writing about it in a post, he reached out to me and we met in Eugene, Oregon a couple weeks later.

The stars really had to align for everything to work out the way it did.

He’s a good guy on his own path, putting in lots of time and effort to learn skills and become a better man.

And, that’s just one example.

I recently met another young and ambitious guy in Montevideo, Uruguay. I’ve made a few relationships with good men in Colorado. Improved my relationship with some friends in Washington.

And, I’ve met plenty of other people from many different parts of the world that I wouldn’t have met if I was walking to my 9am class at the University of Denver right now.

Good people…interesting people…they are diamonds in the rough.

Set yourself on your own path, act as the man you wish to be, do what the man you wish to be would do, and they will come to you…

-Maxim Benjamin Smith