It hit me recently—something that, frankly, kind of pissed me off. If you want to be a chef, you train your palate. If you want to be a writer, you train your craft. You write everything you can—essays, stories, scripts, technical manuals—anything to stretch your capabilities. I did. When I trained in martial arts, I didn’t just stick to one style. I sparred with people across disciplines to test myself, grow, adapt. But what do we do to train as human beings?
Nothing. At least, not deliberately.
Sure, we go through school—reading, writing, math—but that’s basic infrastructure. We’re taught to function, not to feel better, or to understand life more deeply. There’s no structured emotional education. No curriculum that says: here’s how to grieve, here’s how to grow empathy, here’s how to process loss or experience joy more richly.
We just... live. And hope we pick it up as we go.
When I was in my twenties, movies were just entertainment. I enjoyed them, but they didn’t really reach me. Now, decades later, I find myself deeply moved—sometimes wrecked—by things I wouldn’t have blinked at back then. Why? Because somewhere along the line, I began to train those emotional muscles.
I’ve lost friends. I’ve lost family. I lost my dog, and that didn’t hit me until I was well into my sixties. Recently, someone on a podcast spoke about losing their best friend—someone famous, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was how raw and real his grief was. And I felt it. Like it was my own. Because I’ve been there. I’ve lost people who mattered. My friend Mark, especially. And this time, I really felt it—not just intellectually, but bone-deep. That’s the result of training. Not intentional training, maybe—but training nonetheless.
And that’s the part that really got to me. We don't think of emotional capacity—empathy, resilience, depth—as something we can train. We assume life will just take care of that. But it doesn’t. Not unless we engage with it intentionally. I knew, even as a teenager, that I was emotionally behind some of my peers. I could feel it. I now believe that’s one reason young men are sent to war: they haven’t yet developed the emotional depth to question the enormity of what they’re doing. They haven’t trained for the moral weight.
So here’s the epiphany: being human—truly human—requires training. Not just experience, but engagement. Practice. Intention. We need to stop treating emotional maturity like something that “just happens” and start treating it with the same seriousness we bring to our careers, our skills, our passions.
Train your heart. Train your grief. Train your capacity for awe, for anger, for forgiveness. Don’t wait until you’re 60 to feel a movie, or 70 to truly mourn, or 80 to know you could have loved better.
Train now. Be human on purpose.
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