Ever wanted to grow a beard? Don’t know how? Follow this easy three step guide.

1. Be Born a Male.

This is the first and in many ways the easiest step. Your parents do all the work. Your job is simply to implant in the uterine wall, gestate for a lunar year, and descend out of your mother’s body.

This step is also the most treacherous. For example, if you are born a female, steps 2-3 won’t work for you without a lot of additional labor. It is possible to learn this power… but not from a Jedi.

2. Go through Puberty.

This step is hard. It is not hard technically to do. Puberty is something done to you by benevolent but pitiless hand of Father God and Mother Nature.

You have to wait through pimples, uneven limb size, emotional psychosis, and social awkwardness. You have to develop the vague (but now unshakable feeling) that perhaps life is meaningless.

At this point, your body will begin producing the chemicals needed to grow that beard. This may take a year, a couple of years, or up to a decade. Your job is, again, to wait. To paraphrase T. S. Eliot, “For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”

3. Do. Not. Shave.

This is the hardest step to do; this is the first step where you actually do something.

Don’t commit beardicide. Don’t Destroy the Beard.

Don’t shave. Also, do not put your chin too close to candles. Do not rub seeds into your beard and fall asleep near a horde of hungry hamsters.

If you follow these 3 steps a beard will appear on your face. You will stop avoiding what Nature has so generously gifted you.

Replies to Objections

Objection: Some men will object they they “can’t” grow a beard.
Answer: You mean you can’t grow a full, lush beard. But there is no perfect beard. Just your beard. If you naturally grow a fu-man-chuthen rock it.

Objection: Some men will object that bearded men are not as “kissable.”
Answer: But these are usually advertisers trying to sell you overpriced razors. Ignore such plaintive cries from the non-bearded.

Objection:Some women will object that bearded men are not as “kissable”.
Answer: Do not date these women.

Objection: Some young boys will object that they “can’t” grow a beard yet.
Answer: But they also break rule #3. If you follow rule #1-2 and #3, a beard will eventually appear. Wait, my son. Always two there are. A masterand an apprentice. Hear my words. Wait.

Epic Beards in Fact and Fantasy

Beards of Philosophers

Historian John Sellars describes the Stoic attitude toward the beard:

Epictetus “affirmed the philosopher’s beard as something almost sacred…to express the idea that philosophy is no mere intellectual hobby but rather a way of life that, by definition, transforms every aspect of one’s behavior, including one’s shaving habits. If someone continues to shave in order to look the part of a respectable Roman citizen, it is clear that they have not yet embraced philosophy conceived as a way of life and have not yet escaped the social customs of the majority…the true philosopher will only act according to reason or according to nature, rejecting the arbitrary conventions that guide the behavior of everyone else.”