How to Stop Being a Nice Guy and Start Living the Life You Deserve

If you’ve lived long enough, you’ve heard statements like:

“Nice guys finish last.”

“Nice guys never get the girl, you need to be a bad boy.”

Is it true? Is it true that nice guys generally don’t get what they want out of life?

If you’re reading this, then you realize:

1. That you yourself are a Nice Guy
2. That you need more to your personality than being the Nice Guy
3. That being a Nice Guy is unsustainable in the long-run

Don’t worry. This article is going to show you how to stop being a Nice Guy.

It’s also going to go into:

• Behaviors that characterize a Nice Guy and where they originate
• The root causes of being a Nice Guy
• The consequences of being a Nice Guy
• The better alternative to being a jerk or a “bad boy”

Let’s get started.

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What Exactly is a Nice Guy, Anyway?

“Just about everything a Nice Guy does is consciously or unconsciously calculated to gain someone’s approval or to avoid disapproval.” – Dr. Robert Glover, No More Mr. Nice Guy

If you ask most people if being “nice” is a good character trait to have, the majority of people would say “yes”.

Why?

Because being “nice” is confused for being “kind”. That’s not what “nice” is.

My definition of nice is this:

A collective set of behaviors and attitudes that are collectively agreed upon to contribute to the general well-being and functioning of society.

For example, it’s “nice” to hold the door open for someone.

It’s “nice” to say thank you.

It’s “nice” to not argue.

These things help human interactions proceed smoothly, but they don’t necessarily have to come from a place of true kindness.

All of these things are considered socially acceptable, so that’s why they’re considered “nice”.

Going off of that definition, a “nice guy” is someone who has bought into the socially accepted narrative about how our society works. They’ve created the paradigm of:

If I’m nice to people, then I’ll get what I want. I’ll get what I need to survive.

This is a paradigm created sometimes to manipulate but mostly out of fear and/or ignorance of how social dynamics work. It’s what I call the “myth of civilization” (more on that later).

Nice Guys inherently lack social status, so they try to compensate for it in other ways – nice, being one of them.

Generally speaking, these are behaviors and/or traits of the Nice Guy:

• Avoids conflict for the sake of avoiding conflict, is afraid of “friction”
• Seeks approval from others
• Tries to hide flaws and limitations
• Lives in a world of “theory” and fantasy rather than pragmatism, which leads to passivity
• Usually “in their head” rather than in their body
• Often indecisive even when it comes to trivial matters
• Has massive deficits in their dating life, social life, and family life
• Lacks tangible masculine energy

There’s more, but looking over these few should give you a clue if you are a Nice Guy.

The Creation and Origins of Nice Guys

Life is not about getting everyone to approve of you and avoiding all conflict and friction and keeping everything smooth. That’s a coward’s life… You are not meant for that life. – Dr. Aziz Gazipura, The Art of Extraordinary Confidence

If anyone asked me to sum up the predominant mental attitude of a Nice Guy, it would have to be fear rooted in powerlessness.

This fear is a fear of shame because it would lead to the destruction of their shaky self-image.

This fear and lack of agency creates an escapism into the realm of abstraction.

Nice Guys love ideas, theories, and intellectualism because they offer a brief respite from their overwhelming sense of powerlessness in the real world.

Nice Guys tend to have a very structured, dogmatic, and angular view of reality. Very 1+1=2, cause and effect type stuff.

When this paradigm starts to break down, Nice Guys become very isolated. In our modern world, Nice Guys inevitably set up fantasy realms in the world of pornography or video games, where everything goes well all the time.

An example of this Nice Guy paradigm would be a computer programmer who’s technically brilliant, but when it comes time for promotion – he gets passed over in favor of his colleague who is more assertive and “extroverted” but less skilled.

Or you’ll see it in the guy who’d make a great potential romantic partner but can’t tell women how he feels, so he gets passed over in favor of the guy who doesn’t give a shit about her but is more magnetically appealing.

When the Nice Guy manages to have a sexual encounter, he is unable to enjoy the experience because he is unable to remain in the moment, making his partner feel let down by the experience.

These Nice Guys start to retreat more into isolation because of these traumatic experiences. As a result, they become weak men and lack efficacy, strengthening this downward cycle.

Nice Guys have a dark side (like everyone does) that they want to shield from the light of day, because they fear that they’ll be shamed for these impulses. It’s not uncommon to hear of a Nice Guy having some type of behavioral or substance addiction that no one knew about.

As a result, this dark side grows larger and larger until the facade just cracks and the Nice Guy ends up going postal on himself or unfortunately, others.

How does this happen? Where do guys like this come from? Well, in my personal opinion, there’s three main sources.

Parental Conditioning

Your earliest model of how to act came from your parents. Since your parents are also human, they have some degree of dysfunction. Regardless, they did the best they could with the knowledge they had at the time.

Your father may have been a Nice Guy who failed to show you some sort of masculine direction, he may have been abusive, or he may have been wholly absent from your life, in which case, your mom had to step in.

Nice Guys (some, not all) come from families where there was a good degree of repression and/or massive underlying trauma. It could be one of a very conservative religious background, emotional neutrality, or an abusive family dynamic. They created a social mask in order to fit into the family unit and go along without any problems.

Peer Conditioning

If you find yourself a bit on the introverted side, a little shy, a little un-athletic, or a bit smaller than the other kids, you’ll find it hard to really assert yourself and speak up for what you want. You then get shoved to the back of the pack and you start to see it as a way of life.

Kids very early on start to say to themselves “I guess this is how it’ll be” and start to accept their lot in life as a guy who isn’t respected by his peers or potential lovers.

This becomes a self-perpetuating and self-fulfilling prophecy that continues on into adulthood. It’s a form of learned helplessness.

Societal Conditioning

In general mainstream media, you get indoctrinated with the belief that the good guy always wins, he always gets girl, he always gets a happy ending. When someone who’s a Nice Guy doesn’t win, it’s seen as a general injustice.

In reality, good guys don’t always win and more often than not, they don’t always get the girl (or else there wouldn’t be a 50% divorce rate in America).

Mainstream society socializes the average human being to be very passive, to take on a victim and scarcity mentality, to be reactive instead of proactive and pragmatic. This creates a society of passive-aggressive Nice Guys who behave in pathological ways to get what they truly want.

You see this all the time in the belief that some guys, especially Nice Guys have that sex is a commodity that you need to “get” or “take” from another person.

Consequences of Being a Nice Guy

If you’re a Nice Guy, your goal is to break the spell that these three aforementioned sources placed on you.

Just as there’s ramifications to being socially obtuse, there’s also drawbacks to being a Nice Guy.

Say goodbye to a great dating life. If you’re a Nice Guy, you won’t be able to get the love life you want with the women you want. If you somehow do get a woman you’re attracted to, you’ll quickly lose her due to your lack of boundaries. Women have their own problems with being Nice Girls in dating, but Nice Guys will find it much harder to date let alone attract high quality partners due to the fact that men are seen as the “pursuers” in dating.

No true friends or love. Let’s be honest…no one really respects Nice Guys. They see them as good guys and convenient to be around, but they don’t inspire passion and loyalty that makes people call on them or check on them how they’re doing. Their family also doesn’t really respect them either.

Treadmill existence. Nice Guys generally live a “Groundhog Day” existence where they just run in circles repeating the same scenarios over and over because of their underlying feeling of passivity and hopelessness.

Average, mediocre life and expectations.Being a Nice Guy will ensure you live a below-average to “average” existence. “Average” is the upper ceiling of a Nice Guy’s paradigm. Ok job, ok marriage, ok friendships, living paycheck to paycheck, being content with coasting… You’re doing “alright” in life but you aren’t really thriving. Many of the things that people want take work and massive amounts of action. Nice Guys are unable to truly assert themselves in a certain direction and get the cream of the crop, so they have to settle for less in a world of more.

How to Stop Being a Nice Guy With 3 Powerful Tactics

I was a variant of a Nice Guy in my younger years, so I know all this too well. For myself, I often found that I was lacking power in social situations and everyday activities, so I ended up retreating to the realm of intangibility.

I was only able to break this fixation by slowly asserting myself in the real world and creating self-efficacy in it.

Here are 3 strategies you can use to eliminate your Nice Guy tendencies.

1. Stop Chasing Validation

In order to stop this behavior, it’s necessary to understand the core needs of a Nice Guy.

Nice Guys are after validation through whatever means necessary. It can be through people pleasing, social media, sexual validation, etc.

This validation reinforces the Nice Guy paradigm. Instead, you need to learn to act even when there’s no validation. What’s an easy way to do this?

Go on a trip by yourself and don’t post it to social media. No Instagram pics, no Snapchats, nothing. Just bask in the moment of that trip. How do you feel when you don’t have people +1ing your pictures (and in extension, your life)?

If you feel some kind of way about that, it shows there’s a chink in your armor.

Climb a mountain, tell no one.

2. Just Say No/Act Assertive and Authentic

Self-assertiveness means honoring my wants, needs, and values and seeking appropriate forms of their expression in reality…Self-assertion does not mean belligerence or inappropriate aggressiveness, it does not mean pushing to the front of the line…It simply means the willingness to stand up for myself…It means the refusal to fake my person to be liked. – Nathaniel Branden, The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem

Nancy Reagan’s famous “just say no” anti-drug campaign was famous in the 80s, for good reason. It’s the same approach you need to take when you’re pressured into doing something you don’t want to do.

Nice Guys have trouble saying “no” because they fall into the people-pleaser frame. They can’t stand the tension that comes when people don’t necessarily jive with what you’re doing and what you’re saying.

But you need to realize that this is YOUR life and you need to make sure it’s the best it’ll be, because you don’t get another shot. If that means ditching a party early to get some shut-eye, or saying “no” to your boss when he asks you to stay over, you need to develop that assertiveness and stand up for YOU.

Being assertive overlaps with the practice of saying “no”, but it occupies a different realm. At it’s best, being assertive means you are upholding standards of behavior and thought that lead you to your highest self.

It doesn’t mean being a jerk, it doesn’t mean being an asshole, it doesn’t mean acting selfishly. At its quintessential form, it is self-care and a sense of dignity.

Here’s an example: someone tries to drag you into a conversation talking about how bad the world is, how bad the government is, etc, etc. You value your state of mind, so you don’t want to go in that direction. You can either tell him “I don’t appreciate this conversation” or you can change the subject.

The ultimate act of assertiveness is breaking away from parents who want to live through you vicariously and establishing yourself as an independent adult who can see with them eye-to-eye. Another high act of assertiveness and authenticity is approaching a woman you find attractive with the intention to start a relationship with her, not being “friends and seeing where it goes”.

Part of being assertive is the ability to act with courage. You need to stand up for what you believe is right no matter what will or can happen. Easier said than done.

3. Stop Being So Dogmatic

What is almost universal for Nice Guys is that they tend to be sticklers for the rules, consciously or unconsciously.

Nice Guys have bought into what I call “the myth of civilization”, the belief that if they follow all of society’s rules and guidelines, they’ll live a good life.

While yes, there are universal rules and laws that I believe we should all be aware of, the biggest underlying facet is that there is no one way to go about life.

Life itself is seemingly chaotic and disorderly and there is no one path to nirvana. The best solution is to create your own blueprint and maximize that blueprint to get the success you desire. Take bits and pieces from people who have gotten success in areas that you want to get success in and then reformulate it to fit your life circumstances.

Wrapping Up + The Alternative

Instead of being simply “nice”, aim to be authentic. You need to accept that you are a multi-dimensional being with thoughts, desires, impulses, needs, wants, dreams, and various other modalities that make a human being a human being.

It’s all about processing emotions through a filter of maturity, something that’s an art that takes time, reflection, and nuance. Doing the deep inner work will put you in touch with this nuance and enable you to come out the other side as a more authentic version of yourself.

Now I want to hear from you…are you a Nice Guy? What are you doing to stop being “nice” and start being authentic?