Can people truly change? Or are we forever set in our ways?

It was April, 2026, and I was frustrated at myself. After ten years of military service, I was finally leaving active duty. I was burnt out and I needed a long break from everything. As I looked back at the last ten years, I realized I hadn’t become the man I wanted to be.

Sure, I gained more knowledge. I made new friends and mentors. I traveled to new places. I experienced some incredible events. But I hadn’t changed who I was – at my core.

My insecurities festered. My failures loomed over me. While I gained some skills, others languished. I had set out to achieve many goals in my career and I failed to reach many of them. Some were attributed to ill chance. Others stemmed from my inability to measure up. They encompassed my personal life and professional career. Over these last ten years I racked up a bill of regrets which threatened to overwhelm me. I looked in the mirror one morning and realized I wasn’t the man I needed to be.

So I decided to change.

But that doesn’t just happen. For some, it takes a life and death situation to change. Think of the alcoholic for whom it takes an emergency room visit to prevent liver failure that spurs sobriety. For the obese, it might take surviving their first heart attack to realize their lifestyle may need to change. Or it may be a wayward young man whose first encounter with a judge, who threatens him with a prison sentence if he doesn’t clean up his act, causes him to rethink his life. I’m happy to report that I’m not an alcoholic or obese and my family may be relieved to know that I never had to face a judge.

I needed something that wasn’t life or death to change me. What I needed was a system to aid me in my quest for inner excellence. I didn’t have to look far because I experienced such a change myself when I first entered the Marine Corps.

Ask any Marine and they’ll tell you that the person who entered boot camp was not the same person who left more than three months later. An uninitiated civilian arrives at boot camp. 13 weeks later, a U.S. Marine graduates from boot camp. The Marine Corps has one of the best personal transformations on the market. I could go in greater depth about how it goes about changing civilians into Marines, but I’ll keep it concise – what the Marine Corps offers every civilian is a challenge. They offer them the challenge to become a Marine over 13 weeks. They offer the challenge to mold one’s body into a lean and hardy frame. They offer the challenge to toughen the mind. They offer the challenge to aligns one spirit to live by a code of virtues – honor, courage and commitment. The mind, body and spirit are transformed. As I reflected on this process, a phrase floated into my mind – rite of passage.

The phrase was coined by the French ethnographer and folklorist Arnold van Gennep in his seminal work, Les Rites de Passage, published in 1909. Van Gennep analyzed various tribal ceremonies where individuals transitioned from one status to the next. While not specifically mentioned in his book, examples may include the first successful hunt, a wedding and childbirth. He found that rites of passage were composed of three stages which are separation, transition and incorporation. A person is first separated from their daily life. During the transition they face a challenge with consequences if they fail. In order to succeed the individual must change something within themself. Upon overcoming that challenge they are reincorporated back into society which bestows upon them higher status and privileges.

One such rite of passage is the bullet ant glove. Young men of the Sateré-Mawé tribe in the Amazon jungle must wear gloves laced with bullet ants – which have one of the most powerful insect stings in the world – for up to ten minutes. They must perform this ritual 20 times over the course of months before they are considered warriors and leaders within their tribe.

With the idea of a rite of passage in mind I began to consider how I could build my own rites of passage to create the positive change for myself. I eventually decided to journey across the world. I identified places where people go as they transition from one phase of their life to the next. For some, it was walking more than 100 kilometers along the famous Camino de Santiago hiking paths across Spain and Portugal to visit the Spanish cathedral in Santiago de Compostela where the apostle St. James is supposedly buried. For others it’s a trek through the Sahara desert in Morocco where the desert’s solitude quiets the inner mind. Some braver souls go to Nepal for high altitude hiking amongst the world’s tallest peaks.

I thought for weeks about the places I wanted to go and where I could perform my own rites of passage, and when I finally finished my deliberations I settled on seven countries. Portugal, Spain, Morocco, Turkey (just for a one-day layover), Nepal, Thailand and Japan. Each country has a unique opportunity, a passage, to challenge myself. Portugal and Spain offer the challenge of hiking the Camino de Santiago. Morocco offers a challenge to finding serenity and inner peace in the desert. Nepal offers the challenge of hiking at the highest altitude I have ever experienced. Thailand gives me the opportunity to train and humble myself amongst Muay Thai fighters while Japan offers the challenge to have conversations with strangers in Japanese as I trek across the mountainous island.

After spending weeks doing research, writing and rewriting my itineraries I felt confident I had my plan. It was solid. But then something happened. I began to have doubts. Something was missing. I couldn’t initially explain it, but the grand adventure seemed like only a series of experiences that, while meaningful, would not translate to the lasting change I needed. That’s when I realized that what I actually needed was a spiritual aspect. Marine Corps basic training instills in every recruit a set of values – honor, courage and commitment. Without them, one isn’t a Marine. I realized that I needed a set of virtues to live by in order for this to be more than just a journey. For me to fundamentally change, at my core, I thought of nine virtues to align my daily actions and thoughts. Courage, wisdom, self-discipline, justice, humility, compassion, toughness, integrity and fidelity. I will go into more detail on a different post, but those are the core values that will form my own code, a code to hold myself accountable and to be part of the system for me to change.

So what is this system? Well, it’s not gloves laced with bullet ants but that may be my punishment should I fail. It’s daily actions and intentions that will form into habits which align with my nine virtues as written in my personal code. It’s moving through five passages during my world travels. And finally, it’s this blog. Writing about my progress and sharing my own passages with you all – hopefully with some nuggets of wisdom and not random ramblings.

How do people change? They change because they have a support system and faith in themselves. That is a way to find inner excellence.