My dear friend, Tiffiny Anderson, has a stepson who graduated from high school last week. She asked me if I could send him a copy of my book, 101 Things All Young Adults Should Know. I did and it’s a good gift. I genuinely believe any young American that reads and absorbs that book will learn lessons that will put them 20 years ahead of everyone else their age without having to get that education through the school of hard knocks.

However, in this case, I wanted to do something extra special, so I put together a column noting the 20 best quotes every young man should read before he goes into the real world. Not all of them are happy and fun, but I think any young man who reads them and absorbs them will have a better life. Not necessarily an EASIER LIFE, but a BETTER LIFE.

This column may have specifically been written for Jackson Anderson, but if there’s a young man you know graduating from high school or college soon, you should send this over to them. It will help them on their journey.

20) “I wish I could be the bearer of good tidings and tell you that you have unlimited time to stare at the ball and decide what you’re going to do with it, but that’s not reality. Like all games, the game of life must end—and the clock is ticking as you read this.” — Robert Ringer

19) “Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.” — Albert Einstein

18) “He who cannot obey himself will be commanded.” — Nietzsche

17) “If you plan on being anything less than you are capable of being, you will probably be unhappy all the days of your life.” — Abraham Maslow

16) “There is certainly nothing more important in life than what we do at the present moment. A person’s entire life consists of nothing more than one moment piled on top of another, over and over again. Once enlightened to this, the warrior has nothing else to worry about, because he realizes that he has only to live in the present moment with the utmost intensity.” — Yamamoto Tsunetomo

15) “If you are bored with life, if you don’t get up every morning with a burning desire to do things – you don’t have enough goals.” — Lou Holtz

14) “The more things you can do to get outside of that zone that makes you feel good, the stronger your mind is going to get. It starts getting used to doing sh*t like this. It’s not fun, but now my mind is used to it.” — David Goggins

13) “There are no solutions, only trade-offs.” — Thomas Sowell

12) “Our greatest fear should not be of failure but of succeeding at things in life that don’t really matter.” — Francis Chan

11) “The high standards you apply to your desires must be applied to yourself. Do you want a woman who is not overweight? Then you must eliminate your overweight. Do you want a woman who is intellectually brilliant? Then you must hit the books, read the classics, think, and expand your mind. Do you want a woman who is athletic? Then you too must become athletic.” — Pook

10) “My life is simple, my food is plain, and my quarters are uncluttered. In all things, I have sought clarity. I face the troubles and problems of life and death willingly. Virtue, integrity, and courage are my priorities. I can be approached, but never pushed; befriended but never coerced; killed but never shamed.” — Yi Sun-sin

9) “I spent my whole life trying not to be careless. Women and children can afford to be careless, but not men.” — Mario Puzo

8) “There is one thing that 99 percent of ‘failures’ and ‘successful’ folks have in common — they all hate doing the same things. The difference is successful people do them anyway.” — Darren Hardy

7) “It was men who stopped slavery. It was men who ran up the stairs in the Twin Towers to rescue people. It was men who gave up their seats on the lifeboats of the Titanic.” — John Eldredge.

6) “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” — Teddy Roosevelt

5) “I hate the term ‘Mixed Signals’ or ‘Mixed Messages’. More often than not there’s nothing ‘Mixed’ being communicated and rather it’s a failure (willful or not) to read what a woman is communicating to a man. The average guy tends to ‘get’ exactly what a woman has implied with her words, but it takes practice to read her behavior and then more practice in self-control to apply it to his own interpretation. When a woman goes from hot to cold and back again, this IS the message – she’s got buyer’s remorse, you’re not her first priority, she’s deliberating between you and what she perceives is a better prospect, you were better looking when she was drunk, etc. – the message isn’t the ‘what ifs’, the message IS her own hesitation and how her behavior manifests it. Ten dates before sex? This IS the message. Canceling dates? Flaking? Strong interest to weak interest? This IS the message. Women with high-interest level won’t confuse you.” — Rollo Tomassi

4) “Hold yourself responsible for a higher standard than anybody else expects of you. Never excuse yourself. Never pity yourself. Be a hard master to yourself – and be lenient to everybody else.” — Henry Ward Beecher

3) “Masculinity is tragic. Masculinity is a lifelong struggle; a gauntlet run against nature and other men to demonstrate virility and prove one’s worthiness as a man in the eyes of other men. Masculinity is a challenge to honor that ends only in death - a challenge to win coupled with a guarantee that, eventually, even the best man will lose.” — Jack Donavan

2) “The chief cause of failure and unhappiness is trading what you want most for what you want right now.” — Zig Ziglar

1) “Hard choices, easy life. Easy choices, hard life.” — Jerzy Gregorek

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101 things All Young Adults Should Know