Principles to Live By is available today.

My book is out.

Principles to Live By: How to Become the Man That All Men Respect and All Women Adore is available today, after years of writing, rewriting, and a couple of long stretches where I was fairly sure it would never exist.

Let me start with the subtitle, because I know how it sounds.

If you read "the man that all men respect and all women adore" and heard a promise about technique — say the right things, hold the right frame, get the outcome — put the book down. That book already exists in a hundred versions and it doesn't work, because the whole premise is backwards.

Here's the premise of mine: respect and admiration are byproducts. They are what trails behind a certain kind of man. They are never what he is chasing.

The moment you chase them, you forfeit them. Paul knew this:

Men can smell the performance. So can women — usually faster. What people actually respect is a man who would do the right thing whether or not anyone found out. And you cannot fake that into existence. You can only become it, slowly, on purpose, over years.

Solomon put his finger on the shortage:

Plenty of men will announce their character. The rare one simply walks in it, and the evidence shows up a generation later in his kids. That's the man this book is about.

There are fifteen principles in the book, and I put perseverance early on purpose. Not because it's the noblest one, but because it's load-bearing. Every other principle — integrity, self-control, faithfulness, courage — is only worth anything if it holds up on the day it costs you something. And most of them cost you something on a Tuesday, quietly, with nobody watching.

I learned that the hard way in my marriage. Marriage is where spiritual warfare gets personal. It doesn't announce itself — it just grinds. There were seasons where I was doing everything I knew to do and the ground kept shifting anyway. The enemy doesn't need to win outright; he just needs you tired enough to quit. And I came close. Not to leaving — but to going through the motions, which is its own kind of leaving.

What I found in those years is that spiritual warfare doesn't break a man who is rooted. It breaks the performance. It strips away everything you were relying on that wasn't actually load-bearing. That is not a comfortable process. But what comes out the other side — if you don't bail — is a man who knows what he's made of, because he's been tested down to the studs.

We still rise as eagles. Not because we were strong enough, but because we held on to the One who is.

What I understand now, that I didn't then, is that the difficulty wasn't an obstacle to becoming that kind of man. It was the mechanism.

Let perseverance have its perfect work. Perseverance has a job to do in a man, and it's possible to cut that job short. Every shortcut I reached for — every rationalization, every "this doesn't count," every exit I dressed up as wisdom — was me trying to take the work out of perseverance's hands before it was done.

Peter lists the same thing as a chain, and look at what sits in the middle of it:

Self-control produces perseverance. Perseverance produces godliness. You do not get to the end of that chain by skipping a link.

This is the part I wish someone had told me at twenty-five.

Read it carefully. The righteous man in that proverb falls seven times. That's not the exception written into the verse — it's the description. What separates him isn't a clean record. It's that he gets up. Again. Seven times.

I have never once met a man I deeply respected who had no failures in his past. I've met plenty I respected who had a great many, and had stopped hiding them. The men who command real respect are the ones who have been down and come back, and who tell the truth about both.

The reason I can't write a pure self-improvement book is that self-improvement ran out on me — not once, but many times. I would build a system, hold it together through willpower, and then watch it collapse the moment the pressure got heavy enough. I'd get back up, build a better system, and it would collapse again. After enough cycles of that, you start to notice the pattern isn't the system. The pattern is you. And you are not enough.

Notice who runs out of gas in that passage. Not the weak — the choice young men. The ones with reserves. The ones who lift, who grind, who have a system. They stumble badly. The ones who last are the ones whose strength is on loan from someone who doesn't get tired.

Paul says the same to Timothy, and it's as clean a mission statement as I know:

Flee, and pursue. Two verbs, both of them active, neither of them optional.

If respect is earned by character, what about adoration?

Same answer, one degree harder. Scripture never tells a man how to be adored. It tells him how to love:

That is the standard, and it is brutal. Not love her as much as she loves you. Not love her when she's easy to love. Love her the way a man loved a bride who was not yet beautiful, at the cost of his own life, in order to make her so.

A woman does not adore a performance. She may be impressed by one for a while. What she comes to trust — and trust is the soil adoration grows in — is a pattern: the same man on the hard day as on the easy one. Which brings us right back to perseverance. You cannot be consistent for one week and call it a pattern.

Nobody becomes trustworthy at the big moment. You arrive at the big moment as whatever you already were. The man who cuts corners on the invoice will cut corners on the vow. It's the same man.

And this is where the title comes from. Jesus didn't say the wise man was the one who heard:

Two men, same sermon, same storm. The only variable is whether the words got built into anything. Principles you agree with are worth nothing. Principles you live by are a foundation.

Principles to Live By is fifteen chapters, one principle each, built from two years of writing and a lifetime of learning things the hard way. Each one comes with the story of how I learned it, usually badly, and what God's Word says about it.

It isn't a system. It's not a program with a 30-day plan. I'm suspicious of those now — they promise in weeks what actually takes decades.

I wrote it for the man who wants to build on rock — not sand. The man who is done chasing shortcuts and wants something that will hold up under pressure, something he can pass to his sons, something worth more than silver and gold because it cannot be taken from him.

Four commands and then the one that keeps the other four from turning into something ugly. That verse is, more or less, the whole book.

Some of you are reading this in a season with no visible finish line. I'm not going to tell you it'll all be worth it, because I don't know your ending and neither do you. I'll tell you what I do know:

The finishing isn't on you. It never was. That isn't permission to coast — it's the ground you stand on when you've got nothing left.

Principles to Live By is available now in paperback on Amazon.

Three things that would help, if the book means something to you:

1. Leave an honest review on Amazon or Goodreads. Two sentences is plenty. Reviews in the first two weeks matter more than almost anything else.
2. Hand it to one man. Not a broadcast — one specific man who came to mind while you were reading this.
3. Ask your library to order a copy. Free to request, and it reaches men who'd never buy one.

Thank you for being here through the long quiet part. Some of you have been on this list since 2026, back when all I had was a promise I wasn't sure I could keep.

Paul wrote that at the end of everything. I'm nowhere near there. But today I finished one course, and I wanted you to be the first to know.

— R.S. Ellis

Scripture quotations taken from the (LSB®) Legacy Standard Bible®, Copyright © 2021 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.