4 Pitfalls Men Under 35 Must Avoid If They Want to Be Successful

If you’re a man who’s under the age of 35 (especially if you’re Gen Z), the world is a much different place than the one your grandparents or even parents grew up in.

World population is at its highest point at any point in known human history. Right now, we’re at 8.2 billion people, and we are expected to hit 10 bil by the mid 2080s.

Technology is changing our expectations and reactions faster than we know what to do with. All of us have felt and seen this, which is what a large part of this podcast is about.

The dating landscape is different with the rise of social media and apps, many people have never not used these apps and believe this is the default way to date and as a result, have different expectations from dating.

As a result, you have a world where the advice of previous generations may be non-applicable, outright ineffective, or even counterproductive.

And it’s not because it’s bad advice. On the contrary, much of it is very good. However, many parents and grandparents just don’t know what’s going on in today’s world when it comes to younger folk.

While I do not consider myself an enlightened sage; as a man who:

• Is under 35
• has gone through his young formative years in one piece
• and generally pays attention to what’s going on

I do believe that I have some suggestions that will help any guy who is in this age bracket.

In this article, I’ll be going into:

• The biggest pitfalls Gen Z and millennial men face
• Why it’s easier (and paradoxically harder) to become a fully self-actualized person in the modern world
• What you can do to avoid these pitfalls and live life more abundant

This article is also available in as a podcast:

The Curious Case of Delayed Adulthood

In 2023, there are many conveniences that are afforded to us now that were just a dream 100 years ago.

In today’s society, you can:

• Move to a new city every couple of years and reinvent yourself
• Decide to delay marriage or never even get married at all
• Quit your job and become an entrepreneur
• Travel around the world for less than 10k
• Change careers multiple times

These things were either a remote possibility or non-possibility for our grandparents. Our grandparents lived relatively static lives.

They probably worked the same job for many years (possibly all their life), met one person and immediately or shortly thereafter settled down, and could go years of their life without really learning new things and they’d be just fine.

One set of my grandparents were born in a foreign country, in a relatively small country, in a smaller city, got married and had 7 children during their early 20s to early 30s.

Contrast that to myself – I was born in America, I live in a mid-to-large sized city, I am not married and have no children.

The lifestyle is completely different.

Regardless of that fact, there are still universal laws that are operant no matter what time you live in or where you are located.

Ignorance of these universal principles leave a man open up to the real possibility that he may end up “becoming Peter Pan“.

What do I mean by this?

I mean the real possibility of becoming the guy who:

• Never takes on significant responsibility
• Runs away from challenges
• Thinks life is one big party that never, ever stops

There’s always been these types of guys in society, but we’re collectively reaching a point where there are tons of guys who fail to get over this period way past the point they should have already done so

Call it “extended adolescence” or “failure to launch“.

There’s a lot of reasons for this but one of the main ones is–indulgence.

Why is indulgence so bad for men?

If you look across the globe, most civilizations contain some variation of “the zero to hero” myth (see The Hero with a Thousand Faces).

Meaning, the hero is usually a young man often very unschooled in the ways of life who has to achieve some sort of grand objective.

It may be in the form of:

• Saving a damsel in distress
• Rescuing an entire empire from destruction
• Gaining redemption for a family, clan, or tribe

In between him and these goals are various pitfalls, dangers, and challenges that force the young man to “level up” in different ways.

As a result, the man is often a very different one from the one who began the story, many times dramatically so.

This is an example of a masculine archetype.

Why is this important?

Societies of the past realized that in order to get men, especially young men to guard against degeneracy, they needed to have some kind of “rite of passage” in addition to learning about tales of noble character traits.

A society has been successful to the extent that it separates a worthy goal from its male members with a barrier of socialization.

For example: if you wanted:

• Status
• Mating opportunities
• Living a comfortable life
• Some degree of financial independence

You had to be a relatively productive member of society.

You had to be someone who was immersed in the real world if you wanted access to these things.

It required “leveling up”, it required maturity.

The modern world possesses a wide amount of opportunity male or female.

However, it is very possible for the modern man to completely piss away his life because his desire for status, sex, and money can be satisfied with “consolation prizes”.

What are some of these consolation prizes?

Well, in order to get a good perspective of them – you’ll need to be aware of the pitfalls that many young men are finding themselves entangled in.

4 Things That Waste a Young Man’s Life and Potential

I want to start off this section by saying: your life is your life. You are free to do with it what you choose.

I am not here to force people to do things.

I can’t tell anyone how to live their life. I can’t force anyone to do anything and neither can you. I can only make suggestions.

However, the vast majority of men either don’t think these things are problems or they don’t even know that these things can become problems.

They can only become problems because it is possible to throw away chunks of your life pursuing and doing these things with little or no return.

Pitfall #1: Video Games

I’ll say this: there is nothing wrong with video games.

People find themselves up in arms whenever someone attacks video games and thinks that the person attacking them is some uptight boomer who has never touched a controller.

On the contrary, I was a massive competitive video gamer in my teens and early 20s.

I had almost every console, had played almost every major release, knew tips and tricks on how to dominate and blow away competition.

However – I realized that in order for me to advance to different stages in my life and my self development, I would either have to decrease my time dramatically or stop playing altogether.

I didn’t want to do the latter, so I ended up reducing my time on it.

However, as I started to get more involved with the world around me and in my own self development–my taste for video games started to diminish dramatically until it got to the point where it became a chore to even have them in my house. I ended up giving away my consoles to charity and selling most of my games.

That was almost a decade ago and now video games are even more popular than when I was playing.

According to TrueList, the gaming industry is a $300 BILLION dollar industry and 3 billion people consider themselves “gamers”.

That’s a large percentage of people.

Even further, 3-4% of gamers have a bonafide addiction. That may sound like a small number, but keep in mind – 3-4% of 3 billion is around 90-120 million people.

And that’s the amount of people who have admitted it.

That’s a significant amount of people and especially men–who are finding it hard to function as valuable members of society because of a gaming addiction.

But I knew it was a big deal because I remember when I was first starting to develop my thinking around this topic, back in like 2015 or 2016, I wrote an article for a friend’s blog about why you should stop playing a lot of video games and we thought it was just going to be another good piece of content.

That post ended up blowing up and went viral and became the #1 most trafficked piece of content on his site.

After that, I had a TON of guys flooding my email inbox asking for help on this issue.

Since this is not my area of expertise, I pointed them in the direction of this site called “Game Quitters”.

Game Quitters does just what it sounds like – helps people and especially young men, decenter video games from their life.

Whether that looks like a vast reduction of the time spent on it or quitting entirely, is really up to the individual.

They’ve been around for a long time now – over a decade I believe and they seem to be doing great work.

Pitfall #2: Lack of Financial Literacy and Access to Easy Money

In today’s world, it is ridiculously easy to make money. In fact, it is easier than ever to make money on the side and do it in a productive and scalable way.

It’s possible to create a “patchwork career” where instead of working a traditional 9-5 job, you “cut and paste“ various odd jobs in the sharing economy.

In addition, it is easier than ever to make the jump to self-employment.

Regardless of that fact, most people in a first world environment such as America either:

A: don’t know how to make money

or

B: don’t even know how to hold onto (and make grow) what they have.

Enter the realm of credit cards.

Various banks and financial institutions wouldn’t hesitate to give a credit card to a dog because it’s too damn easy to spend money.

Likewise, most banks and financial institutions would love for you to max our your credit card and owe them interest upon interest.

As of 2024, Americans have a walloping $1.7 TRILLION of credit card debt, back up to near pre-pandemic levels.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with a credit card – but when most people don’t understand financial basics such as compound interest, that’s a massive problem.

Funnily enough, most Gen Zers believe that they will be financially well off one day. There’s nothing wrong with being optimistic, but when only 2% of adults are millionaires – it’s quite clear that not everyone’s going to make it there, especially not without a strategy or financial know-how.

And if you don’t know how compound interest works, it’s possible that you will spend your entire life just paying down debt and never building true wealth.

I have much more I can say about this topic – but I’ll stop here.

There is one resource I recommend to everyone, no matter who they are and how many financial concepts they know. That’s mainly because managing money is ultimately psychological.

But the resource is a small booklet called If You Can by William J. Bernstein. He is a brilliant man who has spent many years synthesizing these concepts and he’s put them into a book you can read in less than a week.

Pitfall #3: Female Idolatry

Putting women on a pedestal comes in various forms for many guys.

This can range all the way from fantasizing about “the perfect one” and developing “oneitis” all the way to being a full blown pornography addict with a capital A.

And if every man is being honest, every man has had oneitis and every man has at least seen porn, both of these occurring at some point in their lives.

Many men live their entire lives pining after “The One” or fantasizing about beautiful women – all the while they make no new effort to meet new women.

This then makes a man a prime candidate to be a porn addict.

Because of this, pornography is more profitable than Major League Baseball, the NBA, and the NFL combined.

Multiple studies have been done showing the link between active pornography use and decreased brain function.

And of course, why should you make the effort to talk to your crush when you can pull up the internet and easily find someone who looks like her?

However, if you want to be a dynamic and active man in your life, you’ll need to break this addiction and the terrible habit of oneitis.

And at the root of idolizing women is the fact that most men do not have a clue on how to interact with women.

This issue stems very deep for some guys, more than I’d care to cover here – but this is also another psychological issue.

I am also not a porn addiction recovery coach or a dating coach, but there are TONS of resources out there if you need help with both of these issues.

My intention is to bring your awareness to these things so that you can go and uncover your own solutions to these things.

Pitfall #4: Listening to Mainstream Information

It’s no secret that most of the media out in society is negative.

Most of the news is negative, most of the sites on the Internet are negative, and most people are flat out–negative.

There’s a biological reason for this. We have an inherent negativity bias that has helped to keep the species alive for millennia, but despite this – we live in the safest era ever in history regardless of what the news says. I know, it sounds crazy – but look it up. All the data points to it.

You are less likely to be randomly killed or have something dangerous happen to you now in 2024 than you were at any time previously.

In addition to that, most mainstream information does not teach you how to be a better person because most people don’t have a growth mindset or practice self development.

Therefore, the advice the mainstream gives is watered down and diluted mainly because people do not have a background of training to properly use it.

It’s like a baby drinking milk instead of eating actual food. The baby cannot properly digest the food, so it needs to be given milk until they can digest proper food and get all of the nourishment that comes with it.

Therefore, most suggestions and “advice” that comes from a mainstream narrative should be carefully examined or ignored, if the need be because many things that are “mainstream” will most likely not get you to where you want to be.

One good example I like to use is fitness.

Lots of people would love to get in great shape. But many people are not willing to do what it takes to get in amazing shape. In comparison to a lot of other goals out there, it’s not that difficult.

Building your physique isn’t necessarily a walk in the park…but the degree of difficulty is not like building a multimillion dollar business from scratch. But again – many people are not prepared mentally to go through the journey.

On these morning shows or these talk shows, they always bring in this personal trainer who comes in and shows the audience to do these workouts that are ineffective for building muscle and getting yourself “toned”.

Sure, it’s better than nothing – but this will not help you get the physique of your dreams.

When I was building my body, I was in the gym minimum 4 days a week. Sometimes I’d do an upper lower split – hitting different muscle groups 2 or 3 times a week, other times it would be push, pull, legs, repeat.

Either way – I was pressing, squatting, pulling, curling heavy weight for as many reps as possible.

And two of my best body parts are my arms and my calves. Especially my calves. People often comment on them. I didn’t have genetically elite calves when I started training, but they responded well to training.

I’ve also had guys tell me that they just can’t grow their calves no matter how hard they try.

I ask them how many times a week do they train them.

They say something along the lines of like – uuuuuhhhh – 3 sets a week or even – get this – 0 sets, because their calves get worked during squats.

And I’m like – so let me get this – you train a muscle you stand on and support your entire body weight on only 3 sets a week and expect them to grow.

Are you kidding me? That’s not like even maintenance volume.

I had skinny calves when I first started and I trained them 3 times a week, 5-6 sets each workout, and I was just working the fuck out them – then they blew up.

I won’t even address the people who don’t even train their calves – because if you don’t train them, why would they grow.

But because the principle of specificity isn’t even talked about in mainstream fitness circles, you’ll never know that. You’ll just hear “keep squatting and one day leave toothpick calves behind”!

And even for the women – a lot of women hear mainstream advice that training with weights will make them “bulky”.

But I know a woman who has one of the most amazing bodies I have ever seen on a woman weight trains every. single. week.

Nice round shoulders, strong arms, powerful legs, a ridiculous back, and an absolute dump truck – she is training 3-4x a week with heavy weights.

So long story short – if you don’t want the results that most people have, you’ll need to get comfortable with doing the things that most people won’t do.

So – now that we’ve covered these 4 pitfalls, listen on for my suggestions on how to avoid these in your life.

How to Avoid the 4 Pitfalls

On their own, these pitfalls are dangerous. However, when they’re combined together – they are catastrophic.

In addition, this is just scratching the surface of things which Gen Z and millennial men need to be aware of

But all hope is not lost. You can avoid these with some degree of conscientiousness, intentionality, and of course – effort.

Here’s some ways on doing that.

1. Get Involved

According to many studies and reports, Gen Z are the most risk averse generation in history. And while risk aversion is good, the fact of the matter is–life is risk.

You cannot mitigate risk from every area of life and if you try, you will end up missing out on many things.

A man should be getting more involved in the world, not less.

• Go to more events.
• Talk to more women.
• Get into more conversations.
• Get involved in more hobbies.
• Find ways to be helpful to more people.

This will remove you from your self-imposed isolation that many younger people find themselves in.

2. Reduce your reliance on digital media

Many young guys spend A LOT of time on the Internet.

Most of that time is spent searching, scrolling, looking, and whatever else. And while the Internet is a great tool (you wouldn’t be reading this if it wasn’t for the Internet), it is a terrible master.

Much of what you see on the Internet is a dumbed down, hyped up, or completely false version of reality.

And if you pay attention to what much of social media is telling you, you’ll either develop a social media addiction or a very pessimistic worldview (or both).

The goal is to use the Internet and other related devices as a tool, rather than as an outlet.

Again, if you want to do this – you’ll need to get involved in the world around you and stop being a passive spectator in your own life.

3. Create an environment of artificial scarcity

If you live in the first world, it’s no secret that we live in a world of abundance. Information is readily accessible, amenities are everywhere, and access to some form of cash is easily available.

However, despite this seeming abundance – the individual would do best to create some limitation in order to prevent the bottomless pit of “more”.

What are some examples?

• Stop watching pornography
• Spend less time on the Internet
• Wean yourself off of your parents’ pocketbook
• Stop running to entertainment when you’re bored
• Live a lifestyle not dependent on drugs and alcohol
• Taking a basic apartment in a “decent yet safe” area of town
• Try and live on as little money as possible and save most of it

And these are just a few examples.

The main goal is to separate yourself from living a life of unawareness and bring yourself deeper into the light of self-awareness.

These constraints will force you to think in creative ways and become the man you’re meant to be (with time). It is only by experiencing the pain that comes from lack that you’ll be motivated to launch towards the pleasure of a good life.

If you want a deeper dive on how indulgence erodes your self-confidence, masculinity, and drive – check out that podcast episode.

4. Start a self-development lifestyle

A self-development lifestyle will naturally barricade you from many of the dangers that many younger men naturally face.

It will inform you, prepare you, and make you more mentally strong for any of the challenges that life will inevitably throw at you.

You can start living a self development lifestyle by:

• Finding ways to push yourself out of your comfort zone
• Seeing your life as one giant “project” with which you are gaining competence daily
• Integrating new hobbies and activities into your lifestyle
• Reading self development books
• Taking self development courses.

This is why I created Cornerstone, a course designed to help you build, live, and maintain and active and dynamic self-development lifestyle.

It is a set of 4 modules based around 4 key areas in holistic human self-improvement.

I highly recommend checking that out if you’re looking to level up in life.

Conclusion + Wrapping Up

In our modern environment, there’s many more distractions that the average young man has to content with than at any other time in human history.

Regardless of that fact, there’s more opportunity around than you can shake a stick at. However, you can only grasp that opportunity when (and if) you decide to get involved in the living of life, reduce your reliance on digital media, create an environment of artificial scarcity, and start living a self-development lifestyle.

Always ask yourself: “if I continue on this path, where will I be in 10 years?” In fact – don’t even ask about 10 years – where will you be by this time next year if you keep doing what you’re doing?

You don’t want to be that 40-something or 50-something year old guy who looks back on his prime years with shame and regret knowing that he could have done so much better.