The will is strong, but the flesh is weak.
Despite what all the “nice” people might tell you, becoming better isn’t easy, it isn’t fun, and it won’t always be a good experience, but becoming better at anything never is.
It’s like running a marathon with no end and no people cheering you on. If you’re sure you’re up for the challenge, then lace up your running shoes. Here’s how to be a better man.
This is part two. Read the first article here, “How to Be a Good Man.”
Before we start, you might be asking (you should be asking) who this guy is and why I should listen to him. You should always be asking that question.
So I must be some Gigachad millionaire with life completely sorted out, right? No, not exactly. I’m a work in progress, like everyone else. But I have a ton of experience helping clients become better men. Our most popular package was approx $10,000 (and thousands of people bought it). You’re going to get some of the same advice I gave them for free. So listen up.
Wise Words From a Taichi Master
Before we get into it, let me take you down a path in my memory. It won’t take long.
Circa 2013. Waking up before the sun started peaking over the mountains that surrounded our house in China, I crept out of the house with a laptop and a suit in my bag. By the time I arrived at my teacher’s house, the sun was up, and Beijing was alive.
He was full of energy. He always was. We found a spot by the lake, and he watched while I practiced.
This was intense Chen-style Tai Chi. I’d often leave drenched in sweat and covered in bruises. On this morning my teacher gave me some unexpected life advice.
“Push your strengths before pulling your weaknesses.”
If you’re good at baseball but suck at basketball, spend your time and energy pushing your strength further and become an incredible baseball player instead of a basketball player who doesn’t suck anymore.
There’s nothing worse than a man with no strengths and no competence. You need to have something that you’ve mastered.
It’s easy to apply this idea.
Habits to Become a Better Man
Learning how to fight
Fighting doesn’t make you a man, but knowing how certainly does.
Most people have never learned a martial art, so in a confrontation, they are really just hoping it doesn’t get physical. This means most bullies can get away with pushing people around because they rarely get any pushback.
When you’re confident in your ability to win a physical confrontation and (more importantly) not get hurt, it means you’re less likely to get pushed around.
Learning a martial art (even if you learn at home) will do wonders for your athleticism, but most importantly, it will make you more confident, and being a better man is never about being shy or scared. So go learn how to fight! You won’t regret it.
Cultivate Self Control
If you read the “How to Be a Good Man” prequel to this article, you’ll know how important strength is to being a man, but it isn’t only physical strength. A strong mindset is vital, too.
There is a really simple way to cultivate self-discipline: pick something you don’t want to do and do it.
- Don’t like waking up early? Wake up early
- Don’t like running? Go run
- Don’t like fasting? Fast for a day
- Don’t like talking to people? Force yourself to socialize
Frequently putting yourself in uncomfortable situations will build your mentality and self-control.
Build a Reading Habit
We now know there are different types of intelligence, but most people still act and talk as if there is only one. Let’s split intelligence in half for a moment, though.
There’s IQ intelligence, which is like a powerful CPU in a computer – it can do thousands of calculations a second. Math geniuses or Einstein had this type of intelligence.
Then there’s being “widely read,” like Stephen Fry, who can quote Shakespeare and the Greek roots of words. But Fry himself confesses that he has no skill in mathematics.
Becoming widely read will make you wise, and you’ll make better decisions in life. You’ll see the choices people have made throughout history and become more informed. It’s why governments never ask genius mathematicians for advice and prefer someone who knows their history instead.
Develop Your Career Skills
I don’t know what you do for a living, and I don’t know how much you make each month. But I do know that you could be better at it. Becoming more competent was discussed in the first article, How to Be a Good Man, but it’s worth restating.
I trained many clients to help them get new jobs or promotions and listed the career and personal development ideas we used for anyone to find.
Be More Charitable
“In as much as you did it to the least of them, you did it to me.”
This is Christ’s injunction to us to treat each other well. He says that by ignoring the needy, you might as well be ignoring him or ignoring a family member. Everyone goes through hard times, and although we may not all need the help of a charity or a donor, we all need help of some kind during our lives.
You may not want to give up your time for a charitable organization regularly, but you can at least see a family member in the eyes of a beggar and do what you can for them. It shows you’re reliable and competent.
Plan Your Time
You hear so many successful people argue the importance of waking up early. It’s not that waking up early actually gets you any more time to be productive, but it feels like it does.
Anyone who is able to plan their time and their tasks will get more done – regardless of what time they wake up.
Your life, when you think about it, is made up of the things you do. Spend a day in bed, and you’ve spent a part of your life in bed. The more you do each day, therefore, the more of a life you have. Though none of us know how long our lives will be, you can live twice as long simply by doing twice as much.
I’m sure you’ve had days this week where you could have done twice as much.
We have lots of resources here at Face Dragons to help you get a grip on your day because we know it slips away so easily. Here’s the simplest way to ensure you are getting more important tasks done each day.
- Write a list of important things you want to get done
- Look at the list
Dial in Your Diet
It’s not that eating well makes you a better man. But if you want to level up as a man, you must become thoughtful about what you put in your mouth.
- A good diet will keep you healthy
- Promote building muscle
- Give you more mental energy for learning or training
- It will keep you alive longer
- And make you look more masculine
Come up with a diet plan that would work for you. That gets you the protein and calories you need, won’t get boring, and isn’t too restrictive. Try it for a month. At the end of the month, make some adjustments and go for another month. Keep doing this until you find exactly the diet that works best for you. It doesn’t matter if its paleo, keto, vegan or whatever, it just has to work for you.
Learn to Hold People’s Attention
Learning to communicate better and be more charismatic will make a huge impact on your life. And people will notice it instantly.
- It’s the charismatic man who gets the job
- It’s the magnetic man that gets the girl
- It’s the charming man that makes the sale.
Imagine a world where everyone responds to you positively, where everyone pays attention to you, listens to what you say and seek approval from you. This attractiveness is one part of what makes someone an alpha male. But even if you’re not alpha male material, sigma males are great communicators too and can become even more successful.
Following the sigma male rules will build the skill of holding people’s attention.
