How I Improved Myself As a Young Man (5 Essentials)

July 21, 2024 Sim Camp

I started my journey to self-improve as a man at the fresh-faced age of 19.

During that time, there weren’t a lot of resources around like there are now. As a result, I spent many years in a state of trial and error. And while I internalized the lessons I learned during that time at a deep level, I realized that I could have shortened the time horizon between where I was and where I wanted to be.

These are 5 essential things you should consider doing (and that I did) to improve your life and your life outcomes as a result.

My hope with this article is that you’ll be able to use this as a shortcut between where you are right now and where you want to be in the future.

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How to Self-Improve As A Man

1. Get In the Gym // Pursue Physical Fitness

As I said in another article, I originally had a bad experience with working out and going to the gym.

At the time, my self-image was that of a physically fit individual, but I had never really gone to the gym.

I did calisthenics here and there and I was involved in sports throughout my teenage years and very early young adult life, but I never felt an appeal to pumping iron.

That is…until I found a reason. And that reason was simple: to develop more physical presence.

Whether you like it or not, first impressions are everything. They give someone a hint as to the person on the inside. In addition to that, we are wired as human beings to make split-second judgments about other humans. This was a trait our ancestors developed in order to avoid danger.

And while I had no problem with my size or how much I weighed, I realized that it was affecting my ability to be taken seriously by my peers.

So, I went to work. And that work happened over the summer before my senior year while I was working on campus at my college library. Every day after work, I would make a habit to go to the gym.

I was able to embarrass myself in the relative emptiness and isolation of my college gym, getting my form down, before it got flooded with college students returning for the new semester.

And while I didn’t gain much mass then (I still had to get my nutrition right), I was able to build a foundation of physical fitness that I took with me into the next semester.

Once I got the eating down, it was game over. I ended up gaining 20 pounds in 12 weeks (hooray for newbie gains!). And from that experience, it shed a light on all of the personal development work I had been doing since about a year prior.

The major lesson I learned from that was: with enough grit, determination, and perservance, dramatic change is possible. In fact, my change was so dramatic, people often asked me:

“Sim, what the fuck are you doing?”

And all I was doing was eating right and training right over a long period of time.

Fast forward to today, lifting weights is a cornerstone of my self development foundation and fundamentally shaped me as a person.

This can be the same for you, if you want it to be.

If you’re someone who is in my position needing to bulk up (around 5-10% of the population) or even if you’re coming from the other end of the spectrum and needing to slim down (the rest of the 90-95% of the population) make sure you:

Eat more (or less) calories that you burn per day/week- also known as your energy balance
Eat a clean diet most of the time
Get a good night’s sleep
Life progressively heavier weights – also known as progressive overload
Remain consistent and persistent throughout time

That’s about all you have to do to enjoy stellar levels of health and fitness throughout your adult life.

If you’d like to learn more, these are the resources that helped me out when I started:

2. Read (More) Books

Reading books is a fundamental part of self-improvement for most people and I am no exception to this.

My journey started via Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. This was then my gateway to Stoic philosophy, which then was a larger gateway to self-improvement.

Since that time and now, I’ve read cover-to-cover over 400 books in the areas of:

Biographies and Autobiographies
Spirituality + Religion
General Success
Philosophy
Psychology
Business
Strategy
History
Health
Etc.

Each of these books had something to tell me at the time for the situation I was in. So it will be for you.

But why read?

Simple answer: there’s only so much your environment can give you.

And while I do not know your unique life circumstances, I can guarantee that unless your parents/friends/peers are:

Killing it in their own lives and achieving the success they desire
Has a background of developing themselves over time
Can communicate those lessons in a digestible way

Then you most likely aren’t getting the guidance and/or support you need to achieve your goals (especially if they’re big ones).

This is where you seek out other resources, such as books.

Once you start reading, I can guarantee you’ll never stop. And as the First American once said:

An investment in knowledge pays the best interest. – Benjamin Franklin

If you want to self-improve as a man, I highly recommend you start reading. And while you don’t need to read as many books as I did to self-improve as a man, you should at least read a few.

If you want a list of the 16 most impactful books you can read as a young man, check out 16 Superior Self-Improvement Books For Young Men.

Or, if you’re a more auditory learner, check out this podcast episode:

3. Planning Time

“Prior preparation prevents poor performance”. – James Baker

If you want to self-improve as a man, I highly recommend you start planning your days.

Anyone who doesn’t have a plan on how to execute their dreams needs to be prepared to fail. Period.

While great success does happen to come to those who don’t have plans, they are more the exception rather than the rule.

And the general rule is: the better prepared you are, the better off you’ll be.

One way to make plans is by incremental steps towards an objective. For example, let’s say you want to become a great pianist and your goal is to play in public in front of an audience. Great. You have your objective. Now it’s time to set the plans in motion.

You decide that you will practice 30 minutes per day, every day for several weeks on end and then reassess.

You then also decide to put in place the time, the day, and the location where you will practice (this is also known as “implementation intention“).

Then, you get to work.

What happens if you plan falls apart? Simple. Go back to the drawing board.

Regardless, keep executing on that plan over and over for different areas of your life (also known as what I call “launchpad capital”) and you’ll be able to achieve great progress in a short amount of time.

One of the best ways to self-improve as a man is to become highly socially adept.

Humans are a social species.

We are one of the weakest and most-ill adapted land mammals on Earth. Without other people, our species would have perished some time ago.

Alone, we are near powerless. Add another person, we have more power. Add 10 more people, even more. Add 100 people, you get an unstoppable force.

We also need other people for other reasons, though. People provide a feedback mechanism that allows us to adjust our behavior in real time.

Have you ever been told:

“Hey, you have something on your face”
“I really liked your speech, it was great”
“I think what you said to so and so was messed up, you should apologize”

These are all examples of social feedback which allows us to correct our behavior.

But not all social feedback is good, however. And this is where it pays to be socially intelligent and develop social acumen.

If you want more information on how to improve your social intelligence, check out this podcast episode:

5. Track Your Metrics

“What gets measured, gets managed.” – Peter Drucker

It’s impossible to know you’re going in the right direction if you’re using the wrong map.

In that same vein, it’s impossible to know how to self-improve as a man, keep score, and ultimately know how you’re doing in life (or any other activity) if you don’t have an objective way to measure it. Metrics provide this accountability.

So many people use “a gut feeling” or “a best guess” to inform their next actions.

And again, you can get “lucky”, but if you need to repeat your “luck”, chances are: you won’t/can’t.

Therefore, we need to keep score.

These are known as “key lifestyle indicators” or KLIs. And similar to the idea of launchpad capital, you have KLIs in every area of your life.

I’ll reference back up to the first topic of this article: physical fitness. In physical fitness, you have certain indicators that determine if you are on track for your goals or not. These are:

Amount of repetitions and sets (also known as “volume”)
Your adherence to a workout routine
Your percentages of 1 rep max
Your weight (over time)
Your caloric intake/day

These will all provide a picture as to where you are currently headed in that respective journey.

As of this writing, these are the metrics I track regularly:

Bed time
Weight/week
Wakeup time
Workout metrics
Calories eaten/day
Time spent sleeping
New people met/week
Water drank/day in oz
New email subscribers/week
Time spent in deep work/day
Time spent in meditation/day
Time spent connecting with loved ones/week
Outreach emails sent to people I want to connect with/week

I have several more here that I’m not putting, but that’s the gist of it.

I track things that are important to me. If I notice I am headed in an adverse direction, I can easily course correct.

That’s the power of tracking your metrics.

Conclusion + Wrapping Up

A life of progress is built on solid fundamentals. Solid fundamentals will provide a shortcut to self-improve as a man. If you practice these fundamentals, you will be miles ahead of most people.

But just because they’re fundamentals doesn’t mean they’re basic. These require diligence, conscientiousness, and most importantly–discipline to execute on a high level.

An easy way to help make that happen is to enroll in Cornerstone. Cornerstone will help you “cut corners” in your self-development journey by allowing you to bypass mistakes most people make when first starting out–and learn concepts most people will never know, helping you achieve your goals faster and become more successful than you are right now.

How have you self-improved as a man? What steps did you take? Let me know in the comments.