Are you thriving, or just surviving?
"Be Relentless" is your wake-up call to stop drifting through life and start forging your purpose-driven path. Drawing from hard-earned wisdom and real-life experience, this book provides the scaffolding to help you transform yourself from a spectator into a WayMaker, someone who transforms obstacles into opportunities and creates lasting value.
Life is mercilessly short. Each day you spend numb, dissatisfied, and dying while drawing breath is a gift wasted. You know there is more, you feel it in your bones. That yearning for purpose is not weakness, it is wisdom.
This book will not save you. But it will show you how to save yourself by becoming indomitable. How to forge intentionally crafted discipline, build resilience, and create value that extends beyond your lifetime.
The cost of staying asleep is measured in regret. The time to wake up is now.
Your next battle is not with the world, but with the reflection in your mirror. The path forward demands everything you have. No mercy, no excuses.
Will you answer the call?
What a gift it is for someone to wake up to the fact that they were sleeping through life.
It was 0300, somewhere in the Mojave Desert at the National Training Center.
The static of the radios could be heard mixed with the thunder of field artillery cannons on the horizon line as I stumbled my way through the pitch black to the battalion operations center.
I opened the tent flap, my eyes adjusting to the scene of exhausted soldiers hovering over maps and computer screens. It was the final assault on the “enemy” compound, and First Lieutenant Jonathan Mayo was standing in front of the battle-board giving orders through our radio. He was, by all accounts, a rockstar officer within our battalion, and with his imposing frame and shaved head, he had a commanding presence.
At that moment, he was flawlessly coordinating hundreds of high-explosive artillery shells onto targets, bounding hundreds of millions of dollars of equipment and hundreds of soldiers across a battlefield in the dead of night. I couldn’t help but admire him. He was the quintessential super soldier and was a fast-tracking junior officer by all metrics the Army cared about. I learned quickly to empower him with far more responsibility than even I could manage, and he handled it seemingly with ease (luckily for me). Despite me being his first-line supervisor and several years his senior, it was clear that Jon would eclipse me within my military career, and I couldn’t be more proud to watch it happen.
Days later, Jon pulled me aside and told me he was leaving the Army. The news blindsided me and everyone that knew him. Plenty of senior officers tried to persuade him to stay, but his mind was already made, and behind the Superman “S” and cape, something was very broken.
Little did I know, Jon was about to embark on a long and painful yet fascinating new personal journey of growth and development, and he was taking me with him.
For Jon, this was his wake-up to the start of the rest of his life. Intent on burning off everything that was holding him back in life, he constructed his forge of searing heat and climbed inside. And when he emerged, he wrote: “Be Relentless.”
“Be Relentless” is the amalgamation of all the lessons learned in a lifetime of introspective analysis from the most driven human I have ever met. It is an invitation to what is possible. If you are reading this, you already have a competitive edge. And if read with deliberate, intentional care, this book will be an empowering guide to bridge the gap between who you are, and who you can become. Purpose-built for anyone with a heartbeat who wants to maximize their life, this is the mental scaffolding for you to ask the question, what if?
The book does not stop there, for what is an idea without action? Each chapter is a catalyst that will help you take charge of your life and experience life lived with intention.
Who could you become? Why don’t you find out…
Brother, Partner, Friend,
Kirk Van Everen
Co-Founder | Owner Sisu Perform