What Every Male Self-Improvement List Sounds Like
Do these 10 tips every day and you'll be unrecognizable in a month
Wake up early. 6:00AM? Ha! That might have worked for fraternity hazing, but it’s far too late for real adult life. Try 2:30AM. No man who wakes up at 4:00AM or earlier isn’t immediately successful in business, life, and warfare. That’s right, you’re at war with your day and waking up early is how you drop the first bombs before your day can fire back at you. REM sleep is a necessary civilian casualty if you want to be financially successful. Where’s the proof for this claim? If you woke up at 4:00AM you’d know where it is, coward.
Be direct about your priorities. Don’t agree to meet a friend for coffee or beer without a clear agenda and minutes from your last encounter. Remember: what happens in vagueness stays in vagueness. If your friends can’t abide by these rules, get new friends. If you have a romantic partner, don’t hesitate to let them know which conversations and date nights could have been an email.
Focus on what matters. Instead of small talk, embrace “tall talk.” Big topics get big results. To this end, avoid insignificant and unprofitable topics of conversation like sports, family, or emotions, and focus instead on cryptocurrency, side hustles, and how to turn your side hustle into cryptocurrency and vice versa.
Have tough conversations. Stop what you’re doing and text each of your friends their biggest strength, weakness, and how you would go about defeating them in single combat, right now, no questions asked. The sooner you get this stuff out in the open, the sooner you can move past it and embody the primal male duality of healing while dueling. As the saying goes: if you’re not dueling anybody, you’re not fooling anybody.
Try cold exposure. Fill up a kiddie pool with ice and take your Zoom meetings from there. This wakes you up, boosts your testosterone while shrinking your testicles, and will make you more alert during your meetings. As an added benefit, you can also skip those pesky bathroom breaks by peeing in the pool throughout the day, which saves you lots of time.
Embrace positive affirmations. Stare in the mirror and scream at yourself that you’re better than everyone else at least three times a day. Mix in a few rounds of “you’re terrible and no one likes you” to preserve your humility and conserve your dopamine reserves, then rinse and repeat. You’ll be amazed what this does to your self-esteem, work life, and the facial expressions of everyone else in the men’s bathroom at your local Equinox.
Minimize unnecessary delays in your day. You think Usain Bolt practiced walking to win all those gold medals for sprinting? Practice slow, win slow. True high performers do everything at high speed. Listen to all of your podcasts at 2x playback speed or higher— nobody cares that Michael Barbaro sounds like an over-caffeinated chipmunk when you’re too busy being super busy. When ordering food, inquire if it’s possible to get it instantly. Then apply these tactics to your conversations with your friends & family, asking everyone to speak at their maximum possible speed to maximize your conversational outcomes.
Use the power of incentives. Start financially penalizing your friends for conversational tangents by Venmo requesting them $5.00 for each one. That way your discussions can stay focused on exercise, startups, and mainlining investment advice. This can easily reduce the length of your conversations and/or number of friends by 66%. Either is a great outcome for your efficiency and productivity.
The small stuff adds up over time. Instruct your girlfriend or wife to avoid using adjectives since Andrew Huberman found that adjectives take up 38% of an average conversation while contributing just 2% of its essential information. Any time she starts sharing how her day was, save time by interrupting to explain this podcast statistic to her so she’ll immediately understand what your priorities are.
Utilize your network. Remind your network that you still exist by publishing curiously formatted LinkedIn posts that re-state how talented you are interspersed with unsolicited investment advice and cliché business truisms. Then watch the job offers and VC funding roll in. Pretty soon we’ll all be consuming your pithy guidelines for self improvement and Peloton selfies and the cycle will be complete.
What are you still reading for? In the time you spent reading this post you could have started 3 companies and sold 2 of them. No more excuses. It’s time to #riseandgrind, fellas…
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