Law 13 · Build Before You Are Ready
The man who paid for his own risk.
Tom Hardy put $2.5 million into Taboo knowing half the room would hate it. On why permission never arrives, and why he stopped waiting for it.
Tom Hardy · Actor
Law 18 · Become Dangerous, Then Govern It
The challenges on the mat are bigger than on set.
The director has a black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. He says the mat is harder than any film set, because nobody can help you there.
Guy Ritchie · Director, jiu-jitsu black belt
Law 13 · Build Before You Are Ready
Doing things rather than dreaming about them.
DJ, actor, kickboxer, and now director. Elba on a father who died at seventy-two and the urgency that followed.
Idris Elba · Actor
The first cup is the quiet one.
A washed Colombian for the hour before the day gets its hands on you.
Red apple, panela, a long clean finish. Roasted in the UK to order and posted through the letterbox, so it is on the counter when you come down. Grind it while the kettle runs. Drink it before the phone.
Inside every bag there is a card. One of the twenty-two laws, printed on thick stock, yours to keep or pass on. The coffee is the point. The card is the gift.
250 g · Huila, Colombia · Washed · Whole bean or ground
More stories
All stories →One story a week.
Someone who earned their ground, read slowly, in your inbox on a Sunday. The coffee ships to the list first.
About the author
Shane Quigley
The people I interviewed
Actors, athletes, adventurers and founders. Tap a face to read their story.
A code · not motivation
The 22 Laws
of Growth & Freedom
Twenty-two patterns, found in the lives of people who had to earn their ground. Read them slowly. Come back to one.
A man does not rise in one heroic moment. He rises by returning to the work after comfort, failure, resentment, fear, and distraction have all invited him to stop.
One slow, painful brick at a time.
In life, everything meaningful is earned.
Rise Strong. Nothing’s Given.
A new story every week.
RSNG Coffee · No. 01
The Foundation
Washed Colombian. Red apple, panela, a long clean finish.
The first coffee in the range. A clean washed lot from Huila, roasted light to medium for clarity rather than weight, so it is as good black at six in the morning as it is with milk at ten. Roasted in the UK the week it ships, posted flat through the letterbox.
- Origin
- Huila, Colombia
- Process
- Washed
- Roast
- Light-medium
- Weight
- 250g
- Roasted
- UK · to order
- Inside
- One law card
The first roast is on its way.
Inside every bag
A card in every bag
Thick uncoated card, one colour, one of the twenty-two laws on the front and the whole of it on the back. It comes stapled to the back of the bag and tears off clean. Keep it on the fridge. Give it to someone who needs it.
Stop wishing it was. Start building.
rsng.com/laws/1
Later · the tool
Pocket will hold you
to the code.
It reaches you only when it needs you.
An agent on your phone that carries the 22 Laws as its operating code and runs one practice a day in the law's voice. It is not ready. The coffee, the laws and the proof are. Leave your email and you will hear when it is.
No blue. No streaks you did not earn. The accent appears only when something needs you.
Today
Become Hard To Threaten
You named your salary yesterday. If it stopped on Friday, what is the first thing you would do on Monday?
Practice
Do the work.
Short, plain exercises. Each one serves a law. Most take minutes a day. Pick one and start tonight.
Eric Lundgren · E-waste entrepreneur
A car from a landfill that went further than a Tesla.
He pulled a BMW out of a landfill, built the battery from dead laptops, and drove 748 miles on one charge. A Tesla does 335.
Asked why he set out to build a record-breaking car from trash:
It's a fun story to get people to talk about hybrid recycling but also, overall, it was the best demonstration that I could do to show that there's so much value still in this garbage. Charging your phone with your old batteries from your old phone – that’s not really a story interesting to anybody. So I thought, what is the biggest scale that we could do this on? How can we demonstrate what hybrid recycling is capable of?
Asked whether he meant to beat the car companies:
We didn’t plan on it but yes it happened and it's crazy because we're not car guys, we’re not even engineers. I'm a computer recycler and my buddies, we're all builders and we love DIY, we love hacking things. We're not trying to be better than Tesla. I'm not trying to build cars. I'm just trying to show people what's possible. Now, nobody in the world can say that 300 miles is the max range that a car can do. If I took the weight of all of the bells and whistles in a Tesla and I added that much weight to my car – mathematically, we've already figured this out. All of our data points show that we can build a car today that has all the bells and whistles and goes 580 miles on a charge – and everything that I'm using is old and used and trashed.
Asked what he would say to people who think making a difference is too hard:
I hope that you tell anybody who thinks that way that I'm a complete nobody from nowhere. I grew up picking berries and milking cows on a farm, in a place in America where people are forgotten, where people don't try to break the mould or try to impact the world. They just try to survive. I love that now, after years and years of having the tenacity to continue when people laughed at me and told me hybrid recycling is a joke, and you can't make money doing this and it's a waste of time; to go up against the status quo, the old-school recycling methods and to see every single year, we get three more Fortune 500 companies that start practising hybrid recycling. That's hundreds of millions of pounds of e-waste that are not going into a landfill now and are diverted just because of our little company. If I can do what I've done, then anybody can. I'm not special. I have a lot of tenacity, I don't take no for an answer but I never went to college. I come from a very poor family and now I'm a multimillionaire by doing recycling. I was told that I'd work on a farm for the rest of my life. I'm dyslexic, I can't even fricking read! Now I have 183 employees worldwide in five continents, so I feel like anything's really possible for anybody at this point in time.