The Laws of the Ring Read Online Free

and second professional fights, when the prospect of making a career in a sport that then consisted of competing in semilegal fights on Indian reservations was still a wild long shot, I sat around with a group of friends and talked about my big plans. I have a tendency to do this—I just can’t help it. I’m a motivated guy, and I want everyone around me to feel the same way.
    During this particular conversation, my buddy Will Creger interrupted me and asked, “Why are you so confident about everything ? Where does that come from?”
    His tone wasn’t angry or challenging. My attitude just blew him away, and he was both curious and amused. He was a successful guy who came from a successful family. His mother was a schoolteacher and his father was a top executive with a construction company. It’s safe to assume he’d been around positive, happy people throughout his life, and yet he couldn’t get his mind around the way I approached mine.
    It’s just the way I am. I make a point to stay positive and I’m always looking forward to the next thing to feed my excitement. When something bad happens in my life, I’m pretty good about shrugging it off and going forward. In reality you have to anyway, right?
    I don’t think I’d ever given my disposition a conscious thought until then. When I did give it some thought, though, I realized my upbringing was largely responsible for my mentality. My parents had me and my older brother, Ryan, while living in a New Hope Christian commune in Isla Vista, California. My name, which means “God is my light,” is a lasting symbol of those days. From the little I remember, the place had a heavy hippie vibe. You know, anything goes, love everybody, do what you do, and don’t judge. It seems paradoxical today, in an age where fundamentalist Christianity is conservative and uptight, that such a place could also be based on religion. It was, though—charismatic Christianity carried the day.
    Even after we left the commune, the strain of positivity that was cultivated in the commune proved pretty durable among the Fabers. It stuck around in separate households after my parents divorced. It has, in fact, stayed with me all these years later.
    My dad, Theo, is the happiest, easiest-going person I have ever met. He had some difficult times following his breakup with my mom, with alcohol and despair darkening his disposition, but most of the time I think he’s fundamentally incapable of feeling stress. His mind-set hasn’t always produced the best results when it comes to his career and his finances, but he’s sure a lot of fun to be around.
    My mom Suzanne’s positivity was more of the aggressive sort. She came from a broken family and was consequently adamant that her children grow up cultured, educated, and financially secure. She was highly disciplined and ambitious, and she expected her children to be the same. The walls of her home were always papered with inspirational sayings. She even made us write out goals and tape them to the wall in our rooms to serve as constant reminders of what we should be striving toward.
    I vividly remember the saying that was on our refrigerator for years. It read:
    Dream impossible dreams. When those dreams come true, make the next ones more impossible.
    My mom was always running down a list of the things her kids could do. We could cook, we could play sports, we could build things. You name it, we could do it. She pushed confidence, positivity, and self-sufficiency on us like they were magic vitamins.
    During my short stint as a child model and actor, I did commercial television shoots, for a radio station and a local hospital, among others. (It was all pretty small-time.) On one of the shoots, when I was in fifth or sixth grade, I remember talking with one of the producers, who asked if I liked to dance. “I can’t really dance, but my brother is really good,” I said