Why You Need To Start Your Self-Improvement Journey as a Young Man (and How to Do It)

Your 20s (and to some degree, your 30s) are a unique time.

They’re really the first time that you get to call most, if not all of the shots in your life and they’ll most likely be the last time that you’ll be able to do so (if you go the traditional route of a family, at least).

Stating this fact, it’s important that you know how to take advantage. And you do that through self-improvement.

for young men.

This article is going to be a cursory overview for self-improvement for young men in their 20s and 30s and how to go about it effectively so you can get the most you can out of life.

What is Self-Improvement? Why Is It Important As A Young Man?

In your 20s, you’re like a block of marble waiting to be sculpted.

But in order to make a beautiful statue, you need a chisel.

Self-improvement is that chisel.

Self improvement is a catch-all term for the purposeful cultivation of skills in any given activity with the intent to increase competency, resulting in an increase in status.

From this perspective, life as a whole can be seen as “self-improvement”.

As a man in 21st century society, there are some things that will increase your overall lifestyle (also known as “launchpad capital”) more so than others.

Things such as:

• Building a valuable skill
• Becoming a good public speaker
• Learning how to master one’s self
• Becoming good at generating cash

These are things that will help you acquire resources and become the man and person you dream of being.

The Truth About Self-Improvement As a Young Man In Your 20s and 30s

Despite self-improvement being so good for you, especially as a young man – many young men will not do it.

There’s several reasons why. I’ll list some of the most common ones and how to move past them.

1. It’s easy to waste time

Many people jack off their 20s and list it as a “write-off” decade.

You can pinpoint this to many reasons.

• Lack of motivation
• Too many distractions
• Glamorization by advertisers
• Etc.

But there’s a more ever present reason: time slips by so fast.

It’s very possible to spend much of your 20s doing inane bullshit and reach 30 with nothing to show for it.

Your 20s will blur by.

You never think it will happen to you until it happens to you.

How to fix: In order to make the most of today, start small.

Instead of thinking of “10 years away”, think of your life this year, this quarter, and this month.

In order to digest big goals, you need to break them down into smaller chunks.

Take this thought experiment. Someone reaches 19 and decides to “get serious” at 20 (this is what happened to me).

At 20, 10 years stretches before you at 30. So much expanse of time…

Every year has 4 seasons or 4 quarters. In a 10 year span, you will have experienced 40 quarters (4 quarters x 10 years = 40). If you took some goal and make it a focus of your quarter, what could you accomplish at the end of the year? At the end of 5 years? The decade?

Bringing this clarity and thought into your 20s is how you begin to live intentionally.

This is exactly what I talk about in 7 Surefire Ways to Dramatically Change Your Life.

2. No one tells you the race started

When you go to school, you often have a built-in network of friends, social opportunities, and structure supporting you.

You live in the college bubble and have other people (usually mom or dad) paying your tuition.

You then graduate, handed a degree and told “good luck”.

The rug gets pulled from under you and you become disoriented. You’re waiting for someone to come and give you a kick in the pants to get going.

But according to Meg Jay, the author of The Defining Decade:

“Our twenties can be like living beyond time. When we graduate from school, we leave behind the only lives we have ever known, ones that have been neatly packaged in semester-sized chunks with goals nestled within. Suddenly, life opens up and the syllabi are gone. There are days and weeks and months and years, but no clear way to know when or why any one thing should happen. It can be a disorienting, cave-like existence. As one twenty-something astutely put it, ‘The twenty-something years are a whole new way of thinking about time. There’s this big chunk of time and a whole bunch of stuff that needs to happen somehow.’”

You can spend years and a good amount of time in this state of perpetual dependence, waiting for things to happen to you.

How to fix: For your entire life, you have had a large portion of it directed by other people.

You have been told what to eat, what to study, basically how to live your life. You (unconsciously) develop a habit of dependence on other people.

No one really tells you that you are now in the driver’s seat. You now have to start steering the wheel in your own direction.

Start to think about some ways to be proactive rather than reactive and mold your life how YOU want it to be, not how someone else wants it to be for you.

3. You lack momentum

Following the last point above, when you’re first starting out in your adult life, you don’t have any current momentum to keep you going.

You’ll often have to build new habits from scratch (especially ones that are context dependent) and get into some type of routine to really make progress.

This involves conscious thought and using willpower to come out on top.

How to fix: Try and make success-based activities a habit.

Things like waking up early, planning, staying in shape, proper sleep, proper diet – all of these are things that will help you build your foundation.

A good way to help do this is via the practice and process of accountability.

Keep yourself accountable with a journal or a friend who’s also on the same journey you’re on.

4. Lure of fun

This one is a bit harder to put into words, but it encompasses the whole “experience” of being in your 20s.

As previously stated, your 20s are the first and last time (for a while) that you’ll have no one other than yourself to look after (if you’re going a more “traditional route”).

Your parents are still alive and well, you most likely have your health, and for the first time in a while you have disposable income.

What do you do with that money?

Trips. Eating Out. Going Out. Parties. Fun, fun, fun, fun, fun.

You can waste your entire 20s seeking after fun and seeking after pleasure because it seems better than the alternative.

But what you don’t realize is: most of the people you had fun with in later college/early 20s won’t be there in your late 20s/early 30s. They just won’t.

I personally wasted a lot of time partying with people in my late college years up to my early 20s who didn’t have my best interest at heart or who weren’t “ride or die” friends.

It was time I could have been spending productively and I’d be a lot further ahead than I am now.

How to fix: I’m not saying don’t have fun. But some people take it way too far and compulsively go out every single weekend or waste time on doing things that don’t help move them ahead in life.

Use the seasonality method I mentioned above.

Use one portion of the year to dedicate mainly towards skill acquisition and getting better at something, then use the other portion to being more social.

That way, you still have a life while working towards things that are long-term.

Self-Improvement For Young Men In Their 20s and 30s (5 Things to Consider)

Here’s a short list of some goals you should strive for in your 20s. This list will be somewhat unconventional. It’s not “mainstream” advice.

1. Focus on maximizing your financial gains

For most people, right out the gate – the main barrier between you and doing things will be money.

In your late teens and early 20s, you are often unskilled. You will be paid what the market thinks you’re worth, which is virtually nothing.

That’s perfectly ok.

What’s not ok is staying there.

The next few years should be spent angling yourself into position and trying to maximize your income based off of your current and future skillset.

Learn how to negotiate, change jobs if you need to.

Since you have little financial capital, you’ll have to spend some of your time working for money. Then once you have enough money, you make that money work for you so you can reclaim your time.

Numerous studies show that you don’t need to make a killing either, 75,000 USD a year is the number that is consistently proven to provide a maximum level of happiness.

Main lesson: focus on putting yourself in position to make as much money as possible.

Here’s some thoughts to think about in relation to this topic:

2. Focus on skill development

Your ability to develop skills and become competent at them will do more to improve the quality of your life than most things you can do or acquire.

Three main reasons why this is so:

1. Skills provide value to others, which often translates to monetary compensation
2. The diligence and patience it requires to become competent at a skill builds character
3. Learning and doing hard things allows you to learn and do MORE hard things
4. Most things in life are skills at some level, which means you can become extraordinary or at the very least competent at them

Skills provide value

Think of any skill.

Plumbing. HVAC. Computer programming. Stonemasonry. Painting. Cooking. Etc.

At any given time, there is a large portion of the population who do not possess some or even all of these skills.

That makes them valuable by default because it places a premium on those who can do those things.

This helps lubricate the gears of the economy and free enterprise because skills create an exchange of value (money for time/service/product).

Skills build character

A specific mindset is required to build a skill of value.

It’s one where you have to set aside short-term gratifcation for longer term considerations.

That alone is a barrier for some people to build skills. They just can’t wait be diligent long enough.

If you build this into yourself, this will translate to other arenas. It makes it easier to do more things.

Skills allow you to do more things

There’s a theory that competence or expertise in one area increase the ability to do it in other areas.

Mainly it’s because the process of learning, once applied once, can be used as a model to achieve competence or expertise in other areas faster.

Being strong at weightlifting and flexible at yoga will probably make you a more mobile, agile, injury resistant individual in your daily life.

Most things in life are skills

Most things we do in life are in essence–skills.

Focus is a skill.
Dating is a skill.
Walking is a skill.
Reading is a skill.
Riding a bike is a skill.
Tying your shoes is a skill.
Building a business is a skill.
Playing musical instruments is a skill.
Approaching women in a confident and secure manner is a skill.

There is nothing you cannot learn given enough time and practice.

Does that mean you’ll be the Mozart or Picasso equivalent in [insert thing here]? Most likely not.

But you can become a highly competent individual who can execute at a higher level than most people you interact with.

And that’s worth striving for.

So…how do you build skills?

I’ve written about it here:

The Definitive Field Guide for the Journeyman to Master Their Craft will show you how to build skills, attain expertise, and use it to help craft your ideal life.

3. Focus on being social and developing social intelligence

The human being is a social creature.

We emerged from small tribes where we had to communicate and bind together to form a wall against the outside elements.

Fast forward 100,000+ years later, we still have the same programming.

It’s one thing to not be social on purpose, to pursue some other type of goal that requires long days of isolation.

It’s another thing completely to not want to be social whatsoever.

I see a lot (and I do mean a lot) of people in their 20s who’re depressed or anxious and end up taking medication for these things.

It’s one thing if you have a chemical imbalance, it’s a completely different thing if you are taking a pill just to get rid of negative emotions.

Everyone has a resting threshold of anxiety, uncertainty, and ambiguity that they can withstand. This threshold increases or decreases based on what actions the person takes during their life.

One of the easiest ways to get rid of anxiety, especially social anxiety is to:

1. Increase the exposure you have towards strangers and strange environments
2. Decrease the amount you care about other people’s opinions

You have to develop a type of “inner armor” that will allow you to move through the world being yourself, while also protecting you from the baseless thoughts and opinions of other people who don’t mean well for you.

This is only done by getting out there and becoming comfortable with being uncomfortable.

4. Focus on learning the dating process

As a young man, you fall in one of three camps:

• You’re dating a woman you met in college or earlier
• You are casually dating people with varying degrees of success
• You haven’t dated anyone in a while (if ever)

If you’re in the first group, this doesn’t really apply to you (though I think that you should be able to attract women period, if you break up – you’re out of luck).

I would argue that dating, learning how to pick up women, and overcoming rejection are one of the most important things a man can do in his life.

Dating will highlight your fears, insecurities, and weaknesses like nothing else will. It is one of the ultimate forms of self-improvement for young men.

Knowing how to confidently ask from a number or a date will position you to be able to succeed in other areas in life. You then have options and choice because you select a girl that’s right for you from a frame of abundance instead of scarcity.

5. Focus on building your emotional and mental foundation

Even if you leave your 20s with no real tangible “wins” that would signal to others that you’re a “responsible” adult, if you’ve built a foundation for the future – that is a win in and of itself.

Once upon a time before now, most people didn’t expect people in their 20s to be anything much.

It was mainly a time spent learning and growing, planting seeds – not harvesting them.

But in the 21st century, people somehow think they need to WIN BIG and WIN NOW or else they will never win again.

Maybe. But it’s more likely that you should spend this time doing something like:

• Clarifying and solidifying your life goals and values
• Building valuable skills
• Creating a strong network of professional and personal contacts
• Deciding what you do and don’t want in your life and lifestyle

And the list goes on. That’s what should be going on during this time, not expecting to win big.

Because the fact of the matter is that your brain isn’t even finished forming yet. Your brain doesn’t have all of its hardware in place yet.

You can’t even run for President of the United States until you’re 35.

So cut yourself some slack if you aren’t “successful” yet. You’re building your foundation.

Conclusion + Wrap Up

Your 20s are the first and often last time you will have so much time and space to yourself. As you get older, life tends to crowd out introspective and self-development behavior with concerns of familial and work responsibilities. As such, you should spend as much time maximizing your life and what you get out of it.

There are unique obstacles that prevent you from doing this; some of them being the illusion that you have a lot of time to mess around, no one telling you that you are responsible from this point forward, and wanting to have fun and chase enjoyment.

After reading all of this, you might have come to the conclusion that life is self development.

At least, that’s the conclusion I came to during my self development journey.

But there’s a lot of things that can get in between you and self development. You and living, basically.

It’s possible to spend many hours, days, weeks, months, and years doing things which do not build you up as a person.

The road to becoming your greatest self is very narrow. But by making more money, building more skills, being more social, and building a strong lifestyle foundation–you will make it more possible that you will eventually become that greatest self.

All it requires is you taking the first step.

And this is why I created Cornerstone.

Cornerstone is a self development program for serious and success-minded individuals who are tired of wasting their time and want to get to their version of success faster by learning and using universal principles.

You can find more information about Cornerstone here:

What are you doing to expand in your 20s? How’s it going for you? Let me know in the comments!