Let me begin by assuring you that this copy is being written by a human; namely, Dennis Anthony Procopio, owner and founder of Man-UP! Life Coaching (MULC). I am sitting at a wooden table with a live edge, drinking water from a copper mug.... the kind you'd expect to be served if you ordered a Moscow mule.
On the table next to me as I type: a hand-carved wooden bowl; a copy of the King James Bible; a copy of Itzhak Bentov's Stalking the Wild Pendulum; and a copy of Sam Greenlee's The Spook Who Sat by the Door.
In the background, there is a ticking clock. Here in the high desert, nights are so quiet that all of the house noises are an ambient wash of white noise, but with distinct punctuators. The fridge motor when it kicks on, making a dull whir that hits the ear like a muffled cicada. Again, the clock literally sounds like "Clock, clock. Clock, clock. Clock, clock." Not in an upsetting way, like a ticking time bomb, but soothing, like the ticking alarm clock that people wrap in a blanket and place in a puppy's bed to simulate its mothers metronomic heartbeat.
What does this have to do with elitism?
My business is literally branded as "Elite Life Coaching for Men". Now one might imagine that this language is meant to signal that here we wear designer clothing, have cocktails at country clubs, drink our beverages pinky-up, live in gated communities, keep within an exclusive circle of vetted acquaintances, and are shamelessly the 1% you're always hearing about. Wealthy folk. Accomplished. Better than.
But that isn't it. It's true that many of the men in this community have achieved significant wealth, and that for many their net worth statistically does put them in the 1% as far as their value on paper; but also there are guys just getting started, many of whom come from the polar opposite of wealth, priviledge, or security.
I am one such person.
If you've been following me on my journey, which is to say the 13+ years that I have been building my brand, then you may already know some things about my backstory. For those just joining us, let me share some facts that absolutely do not signal elitism.
I am a survivor of extreme poverty. I am a survivor of extreme and prolonged childhood abuse (physical, psychological, and sexual), I have attended 24 different schools. I have lived in many of our 50 United States. I have been in foster care. I have been in juvenile detention facilities. I have been in jails in several states for significant stays, the worst of which was probably Riker's Island in the 90s. I have been homeless. I have lived as a fugitive from justice for violent felonies committed while intoxicated. I have been a womanizer. A drug user. A sexual offender. A victimizer. What many would consider an irredeemable recidivist unfit for society.
Even now, I feel shame sharing these truths. But I did the work, and earned the right to call myself a leader of men. I have both knowledge and wisdom to share, for which I have paid "the iron price".
Now in fairness, I do have some impressive accolades to tout. I began reading at two years old. I have always been identified as a gifted child, whose IQ was regularly tested between 145-150. I have shown proficiency in math, science, languages, writing, music, and art. In short, I'm a polymath. It is apropos that I earned full scholarship to attend the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. But more -- and this is a critical point -- I did it on my own.
I had no help. None. No family. No friends. I was literally homeless in high school. But Cooper was my hail Mary pass, my chance to go to college, precisely because its founder -- Peter Cooper -- established the school with the purpose of offering qualified students a full scholarship on the merits of their exceptional character and abilities. And dammit, that's just what the fuck I did. I grinded and EARNED my place in a school where Lincoln famously made his "Right Makes Might" speech, which arguably won him New York and the presidency.
Life tried to kill me. I fought back. I struggled and won. And I went to school with the pinky-up crowd in spite of my derelict origin story. I proved that being exceptional is about mindset, discipline, and sheer determination.
And THAT is what makes me exceptional. Like Snoop Dogg delivering his now famous "I'd like to thank me" speech during his Hollywood Walk of Fame star ceremony in 2018, I proudly salute myself -- Dennis Anthony Procopio -- for all of the hard work I have done, and the suffering I have experienced in darkness and isolation, so that I can now be here helping other men, and paying these lessons forward.
So again, where does the elitism piece tie in?
Well, what does it truly mean to be elite? It means that you are in a class of people who are exceptional, rather than merely average. And yes, that title fits me. I am elite. However, I do not believe in gatekeeping the path to elitism. In fact, I urge men to strive for elite status in whatever they do in life. And so, I offer "Elite Life Coaching for Men". Hits differently in this context, doesn't it?
Okay, so why the picture of Ecco Homo, transformed by a well-intentioned but ultimately botched restoration effort and now famously regarded as "Potato Christ", or "Monkey Christ"?
Because this is what I see happening in our world. This degradation, by degrees, from exceptionalism to mediocrity, and then mediocrity to offensively crude bastardization. And the worst part is that, like the Potato Christ, there is an uprising of people who would actually defend this affront to exceptionalism, and argue that it has some sort of meritable validity in its own right.
And you know what? Who am I to argue? Maybe the world would prefer a simpler, more naive aesthetic as a contropposto to the emergence of AI and its frighteningly convincing deepfakes. I mean, I was in art school in the late 80s early 90s, and even at that time -- which is to say pre-cellphone, pre-Internet -- the "what is art" arguments were room dividers, with some standing on the side of classical beauty, and others on the side of abstract expressionism.
And here, we get the root of the issue.
Robert Pirsig spent four years in a trailer in a slough in rural Minnesota writing Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, trying to sort this out for himself; an engineer trying to grok the intersection between groovy Hippie culture and industrial pragmatism. He set out to use his talent for analytical reasoning to pin down the very slippery term "quality", and define to the best of his ability just exactly what it is.... or isn't. And comically, it wasn't his answer that made him famous, it was his effort. A case where the journey is the destination. And to be clear, the book is exceptional. And also, it does a shit job of defining quality.
This said, it's not only the fact that he tried, but how he tried -- the effort, the emotion, the storytelling, the hope, the belief that he really might be onto something -- that speaks to the human condition; and again, to that quest for exceptionalism.
There is an artistic and intellectual laziness that seems to be dumbing humanity down at an alarming rate, and I hold social media and AI responsible for the exponential acceleration of this mindwashing.
I have been coached by marketers to follow a formula that will help my content to be seen and prioritized by Googlebot, Claude, and GPT, and thus improve my SEO as well as my AISO. The formula includes the use of headers, subheaders, bolding keywords and catchy phrases, using block quotes for visual breaks, and essentially spoon-feeding my content to the modern user whose attention span is now down to about 3-10 seconds.
No, I will not.
If you can't look at a page of text like this without your amygdala going into panic mode, and some defiant part of your brain reiterating the common quip seen in social media comments -- "Yeah, I'm not reading all that" -- then you, my poor mind-fucked friend, are not my target demographic.
This content is for people who read words. This content is for people who think critically. This is for people who meditate. Who play chess. Who touch grass. Who identify smells. Who taste food. Who kiss slowly and deliberately. This is for people who master their respective crafts, putting in the 10,000 or so hours and gruelling reps necessary to even begin to achieve excellence. This content is for people who are alive with passion and purpose. People who can stop and really smell the flowers, rather than clumsily trampling them in a crackhead scramble to their next dopamine hit.
My name is Dennis Anthony Procopio, and here at Man-UP! Life Coaching, we not only cater to elitists, we manufacture them. And like cultivating an award-winning vineyard, it takes time. And no, like anything exceptional, we do not apologize.
[Note: there may or may not be typos. This was written in one take and published.]
If you have built an externally elite life and the inside has not caught up, our life coaching for executives program is built for exactly that gap.
