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.
Nick Baker · Naturalist and presenter
Take back the tool kit you were born with.
Nick Baker has solo-dived with great white sharks and slept in a hammock 80 metres up in the Borneo rainforest. He says the wild starts at the end of your street.
Asked whether a phone full of answers is enough:
We are designed to look ahead and to look at a vista, and to process the natural colours and the natural sounds, and smells, and tastes and not lock ourselves to what is, effectively, a small sun in our pockets - your smartphone. [...] It's a really difficult discipline to get away from that, to turn off the mobile phone. What you've got, attached to your wallet, is a portal to the entire world, but it's not real and it's not in the moment.
Asked whether rewilding is the answer to that dependence:
If our computer passwords fail, or our computers crash and everything goes with it, we're crippled, and that does nothing for our self esteem because we feel, deep in ourselves, that we are attached to this stuff; we cannot live without it. Rewilding is about doing something about that. It's taking control of your own body, your own tool-kit that you've been born with, and using it to your advantage in a way that helps you cope with everything, really.
Asked how nature helped after a car crash left his mother on life support and his brother in a coma:
When something awful happens to somebody you know, you can't engage in a conversation with them without making some kind of reference to it. Sometimes you don't want that, or don't need it, or you feel awkward. Sometimes that completely un-judgemental presence of a space, of life of another kind, a non-human kind, can make a massive difference to your healing process. It’s nature therapy. This is what we're talking about, but it's nature therapy from a real place, almost to the point where I can't believe I'm saying this because anybody who knows me knows I have a history of being a blokey bloke. I'm certainly not a sensitive individual – I'm a social hand grenade – so for me to write a book like this is a bit of a surprise. But it's true. It comes from the heart.