Built from Resistance
What begins as defiance can end as discipline
By the time I reached high school, I had already gone to more schools than most kids will ever see. Some of that was because my family moved often. The rest was because I kept finding trouble. Every move meant starting over in a new town, learning new rules, and navigating another set of social hierarchies. I was always the new kid, smaller than most, and easy to single out. My name, Gino, stood out too. In most of the places we lived, nobody had ever met a Gino before. It didn’t take much to draw attention, and sometimes attention was the last thing I wanted.
My parents put me into martial arts when I was still young enough to be wearing uniforms that didn’t fit right. It became the one steady line through all that movement. I learned how to defend myself, and it gave me something more valuable than confidence. It gave me control. I wasn’t the kind of kid who looked for fights, but I knew how to end them. That helped, but it didn’t solve everything. You can only fight so many times before you realize fists don’t fix what people misunderstand. So I learned to use my words, to read people, to find ways to make them like me or leave me alone. I adapted because I had to, and over time it became instinct.
Still, I never fit cleanly into the system. Most schools are designed for the majority, for kids who learn the same way, think the same way, and stay within the lines. I wasn’t wired for that. I needed to understand things for myself, to test boundaries, to see where the edges actually were. To some teachers that looked like defiance — to others, distraction. Either way, I became the problem they had to manage. Eventually, one school decided to give it a name: Oppositional Defiance Disorder.
It sounded serious, but to me, it just meant I didn’t fit their mold. I didn’t take offense, in fact, I almost liked it. They were right about one thing, I didn’t like being told what to do, especially by people who hadn’t earned the right to tell me. So I carried that label like armor. If the world was going to call me defiant, then I would make defiance useful.
Around that time, I read “Rogue Warrior” by Richard Marcinko the founder of SEAL Team Six. I had no idea what I was getting into, but the book hit hard. It wasn’t clean or polished, and it didn’t sound like something written to impress anyone. It was raw, direct, and full of the kind of honesty that doesn’t ask for permission. Marcinko wasn’t rebelling to prove a point. He was breaking barriers to get things done. He turned chaos into something functional, and for the first time, I saw a version of defiance that produced results instead of wreckage.
After finishing the book, I wrote him a letter. It was half a school report and half a personal reflection. I didn’t expect to hear back. But a few weeks later, a package showed up addressed to me. Inside was a signed photograph that read, “Dear Gino, attack life.” Included in the package, were a few small gifts. I remember sitting with that note for a long time, studying the words like a map. There was no lecture, no moral lesson, just a direction —“Attack life”.
That phrase changed how I saw everything. It gave purpose to the restlessness I had carried for years. It told me that resistance wasn’t something to hide from or fix. It was meant to be guided. From that point on, I started treating life like terrain, each challenge a place to study, understand, and move through with intent. Some days required speed and aggression, others required patience, and most require endurance. But all of it demanded movement.
As I got older, I began to see how that mindset connected to something much larger. It wasn’t far off from what Churchill meant when he told his people to fight on the beaches, in the fields, in the streets, and never surrender. The message was the same. Keep going. Do not yield to fear or fatigue. Life doesn’t let you choose your battleground, so you fight wherever you stand and with whatever you have left. That truth became a foundation for me.
Attacking life stopped being about charging forward at full speed. It started to mean standing firm when everything else tried to push me off balance. It meant staying composed when the situation demanded calm and using that control as a weapon. In time I learned that composure is just aggression that has learned to wait.
In work, training, and leadership, that lesson became constant. The people I respected most were not the loudest or the most impulsive. They were steady. They knew how to move quietly, how to make decisions without panic, and how to recover faster than anyone else. They attacked life in their own way — measured, patient, and deliberate.
Persistence became less about motivation and more about habit. It stopped being a burst of energy and became a kind of quiet duty. You show up when you are drained, you stay focused when you are distracted, and you do the work even when no one is watching. Those are the fights that build a person’s edge, not the loud or public ones, but the unseen repetition that sharpens your character over time.
I began to understand that Churchill’s defiance was never really about war —it was about living. “We shall go on to the end” applies to everything that demands strength beyond comfort. You fight apathy, you fight complacency, you fight the temptation to stop trying. That kind of endurance is sacred.
Over time, I realized that defiance and endurance are not opposites. They rely on each other. Defiance sparks movement and endurance keeps it alive when the air runs thin. I learned to be grateful for the fire that got me started, but even more grateful for the discipline that kept it burning.
There were plenty of failures along the way. There still are, but the lesson stayed simple. You do not grow from comfort, you grow from resistance. You grow from the times when everything in you wants to quit but something inside refuses. That is what “attack life” became to me; not noise or aggression, but intent. You show up, you fight your battles quietly, and you do not drift.
Churchill once said that surrender does not always happen with a flag. Sometimes it happens one small compromise at a time. You skip the work, you dull your edge, you lower your standards. That is how you lose yourself. Fighting on, even in silence, even when no one sees it, is how you stay alive in every way that matters.
Each person has to decide what they are willing to fight for. Some fight to prove people wrong, some fight to stay comfortable, others fight to stay true to what they believe is right. For me, it has always been about motion — forward, honest, deliberate motion. I still have that photograph Marcinko signed. “Dear Gino, attack life.” Those words still carry the same weight they did the first time I read them. They remind me that defiance can be shaped into discipline and that endurance can turn both into something lasting.
The world will always try to make you smaller, to turn sharp edges into something easy to hold. But life is not meant to be easy to hold. It is meant to be lived with conviction, shaped by the friction that tests you. To attack life is to walk toward that struggle willingly. It is to keep moving when you are bruised, uncertain, and tired. It is to build yourself through the fight, not around it. That is where the edges are earned.