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

Your 20s are a unique decade.

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 also be able to do so, at least for a long time.

So it’s pretty important that you know how to take advantage and you take advantage through self-improvement.

This article is going to be a cursory overview of why you should start self-improvement as a man in his 20s and how to go about it effectively so you can get the most you can out of life.

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What is Self-Improvement? Why is It Important to Personal Growth?

In your 20s, you’re like a block of marble waiting to be sculpted. In order to make a beautiful statue, you need a chisel.

Personal growth and 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”.

There are many areas of self-improvement and personal growth.

Some of them may be walking your dog, going on a date, even stretching.

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
• How to make social connections
• Time management
• Becoming a good public speaker

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

The Truth About Self-Improvement 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

One of these truths is – many people just 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.

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, go 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.

2. No one tells you the race started

When you go to school, you 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 from 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 build the foundation for you to do expansive things in your 20s.

Try and 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 I said before, your 20s are the first and last time (for a while) that you’ll have no one other than yourself to look after.

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 that 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.

Pieces of Self-Improvement to Consider In Your 20s and 30s

Here’s a short list of some personal growth activities and personal growth 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 problem will be money. Money will do magical things for you.

In your late teens and early 20s, you are often unskilled and 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. Date as many women as possible

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).

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 the ultimate form of self-development for a man.

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.

3. Get over your social anxiety/be more social

Being more social and getting rid of anxiety is a great personal growth activity and area of self-improvement.

I see a lot (and I do mean a lot) of people in their 20s who are 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.

You have to be completely honest with yourself, and it is tough.

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

It’s easier said than done, but here’s a quick guide to help you get started.

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.

If you do certain activities like chasing the money, becoming attractive to women, working hard, and getting over your social anxiety – you’ll be in a great place to capitalize on your 30s and the rest of your life.

I hope you liked this. Share it with at least two other men who you think would find this useful.

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