20 Pieces of Advice Just for Young Men

I’ve written a whole book of advice for young Americans called 101 Things All Young Adults Should Know. If I do say so myself, it’s a good book, it’s timeless, and everything in it is just as relevant today as the day it was released. However, the world has definitely gotten tougher for guys since then, and it feels like young men need a little specialized advice for the environment they’re facing.

If you’re a young man, the world is not offering you a beautiful future on a silver platter. It’s offering you a long, hard road with a lot of pitfalls between where you are and where you want to be. Those of us who are a little older and wiser have a duty to try to help – and so, here’s something that will do it. Keep in mind, some of this is probably going to be different from what you’ve heard before for three reasons:

A) Principles don’t change over time, but some things do shift from decade to decade. Many things about the world my grandparents lived in are the same today, but others are as different as the ocean is from the desert. For that reason, every piece of common wisdom from back then doesn’t work today.

B) A lot of people are failing in life, and so, they either believe things that have led to that failure, or they’ve embraced ideas that excuse their failures. They then offer these mistaken ideas up as advice to people that don’t know any better.

C) People LOVE, LOVE, LOVE easy. They want to know the “one trick” to lose 50 pounds, how to get “2-minute” abs, and how to find every shortcut to success. So, when you start saying, “Hey, that won’t work, you actually need to do this difficult, unpleasant, time-consuming thing,” it just doesn’t sell as well as promising an easy solution. People say they want what works, but most of them just chase, “easy.”

So, enjoy this, feel free to add some things or disagree in the comments, and I hope you’ll share this with some young men in your life.

1) You’re never going to have a better opportunity to throw yourself into succeeding at something than when you’re young, unmarried, and have everything to prove. If you want to trade balance in your life to get ahead of the game, now is the time.

2) Be careful about time sinks. I just spoke to a friend who told me they put 3,000 hours into a video game. That’s the equivalent of almost a YEAR AND A HALF worth of 40-hour weeks. You can do this watching sports, with pornography, cell phone games, social media, politics, doom-scrolling, chatting on forums, TV, podcasts, watching influencers, and with an endless number of other distractions, and what do you have to show for it when it’s over? Nothing really. Having fun is fine, but we’ve gotten to the point where pleasant distractions can consume a big portion of your life if you’re not careful.

3) You need to get used to being uncomfortable and doing unpleasant things, working long hours, and feeling fear and doing it anyway. As Rocky said in the movie:

Life is going to come at you hard and you need to be able to take it and keep going. If you can’t do that, you’re going to end up as a sad, unpitied failure. Everyone wants to offer a hand up to a pretty girl. You? Not so much. Accept that, learn to take what life dishes out, and keep getting after it until you get what you want.

4) 40 hours is just the standard for work. If you want to become a manager, run your own business, make big money, and get ahead, you’re going to have to work more than 40 hours. Maybe WAY MORE than 40 hours. If you want to do even better than that and become elite, you’re going to have to become obsessed. At the absolute top of the pyramid, work is life and life is work.

5) You need to take the time to figure out what you want out of life and what your dreams are, because if you just go with the flow in life, you probably won’t like where you end up. It’s very easy to spend all your time helping other people achieve their dreams. That’s what you’re doing when you’re watching the UFC, listening to a podcast, going to a Chiefs game, listening to a talk-radio host, buying a Tesla, going to a comedy show, etc., etc. You’re helping someone else achieve THEIR DREAMS of running a successful corporation, being a successful athlete, or having legions of fans. It’s okay to do some of that, but you should never forget that achieving your dreams is more important to you, and you should be putting most of your time into doing that, not helping someone who doesn’t know or care about you achieve their dreams.

6) Be very careful with porn. Not just for moral reasons, but because of the nature of what it is. Over time, it trains you to become sexually attracted to ever more extreme and specific things on a screen. That’s a problem because real women are not on a screen; they probably don’t fit well into the niche categories you may grow to like there, and pornography is a very poor substitute for a pretty woman on your arm.

7) If you have money, under no circumstances imaginable should you get married without a pre-nup. If you acquire money during the marriage and you get a sense things are headed toward divorce, start documenting everything and quietly consult an experienced lawyer to get advice on how to safeguard your interests. This is necessary because if you’re a man in America, divorce court is HEAVILY rigged against you and no matter how sweet your wife may seem today, you may be shocked at how demonic she gets when she decides the relationship is over, she doesn’t need you anymore, and a lawyer starts whispering in her ear about how she can potentially extract the most resources out of you.

8) Do everything possible to avoid ever hitting a woman. Even if she deserves it, the police, everyone you know, and society are almost certain to take her side unless there’s video proving you did the right thing, and even that’s no guarantee. If a woman you’re dating hits you, the relationship has to end immediately because society will consider you wrong, even for defending yourself, and the police will take her word over yours by default unless there’s some kind of stone-cold proof in your favor, at which point you will STILL probably lose.

9) At the end of a relationship with a woman, try to be nice about it. If you have any sort of questions about whether she could be vindictive, be nice about it AND document everything. It may save you a lot of hurt feelings and drama at best, and false accusations and undying hatred at worst.

10) If you’re interested in a woman and she’s giving you any kind of signs she’s interested in you, ask her out. The odds may be against you, but if she goes for it, AWESOME, and if she doesn’t, you’re in the same place you were before. Once you’ve done it enough times, the “noes” won’t even sting anymore because you’ll realize it often has nothing to do with you personally. Maybe she’s in a relationship, a bad mood, doesn’t want to date anybody, or you’re just not her type. Whatever it may be, it’s fine. But what if you are her type and you ask her out? Well, that can lead to some of the best times of your life.

11) Don’t hate women and don’t put women on a pedestal above you. They aren’t more important than you; what they want isn’t more important than what you want, and just as they’re pursuing their own interests in their dealings with you, you should do the same with them.

12) Embrace masculinity. Other men will respect you more, most women prefer masculine men, and the women who say they like more effeminate men usually eventually conclude that they’re weak, they don’t respect them, and that’s not what they want either.

13) Get some real training that will teach you to handle a gun and handle yourself in a fight. There’s no chance that you’re ever going to regret doing those things. Furthermore, if you need those skills, they really matter, and having them will make you more confident, surer of yourself, and will change the way you view the world around you for the better.

14) Keep learning and building skills. One day, that typing class, learning Spanish, or figuring out how to change the oil in a car may come in really handy, and as your life goes on, you can keep accumulating those skills. The more you know and the more you can do, the more valuable you are to yourself and everyone else.

15) Start out with the mentality that nobody owes you anything, and you’re going to earn every single thing you get in life, twice over, if need be. That kind of thinking get you in the right headspace to be a success at life.

16) Pay yourself first and start investing NOW. Put money in your 401k. Buy gold, silver, Bitcoin, or index funds. You want things that will be around in 20 years, not fly-by-night crypto coins and anything that can be out of business a year from now. Very small amounts are fine because if you get in the habit, the amounts will grow over time while compounding, and consistency will turn them into large amounts as you get older.

17) When you’re young, you feel invincible, but life is cumulative, and mistakes you make with your health early on can stick with you long term. Remember:

18) Don’t assume that the people in your life “just know” that they’re important to you. Show them. Tell them. Act as if they’re important, and that will increase the chances they stay around. Even when they do die one day, it does a lot for you to KNOW THAT THEY KNEW you loved them and cared about them because you told them so.

19) Deny this if you like, but if you do, life will remind you of it the hard way:

20) Think in terms of the “future you” a lot. Would “future you” want you to smoke? Do drugs? Commit a crime that could get you sent to jail? Risk getting an STD or getting a woman you don’t care about pregnant? How would he feel about you taking ethical shortcuts you’d be deeply ashamed of if anybody found out? Would he want you to keep bench pressing heavy even though your shoulder is injured? Getting into debt? Just think a little bit about what’s best for him because one day, “future you” is going to be here and he is going to have to live with your decisions.

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