Having good habits or bad habits can be the difference between success and failure, riches and poverty, or happiness and misery.
Depending on your habits, you will either be a highly successful man, financially and emotionally, or a complete loser with zero girls, zero money, and a bunch of fake friends.
That’s why it’s so important to have good habits—they are literally the foundation upon which you improve yourself.
Good habits not only improve the quality of your life, but they also improve the quality of your life, too. Here’s 4 of the best habits that every man should practice.
Why Are Good Habits Important?
As I’ve discussed before, there’s something known as the slight edge effect. This is the idea that small changes in your life might not seem significant at first, but over time, they actually add up to massive improvements.
Think about it: at first, once you start working out, you might not notice that much of a difference. In fact, you might hate it! But after a few months, you’ll start to lose some weight and build some muscle.
Your confidence will go up, and as you continue to workout over the years, your increased confidence, happiness, and physical vitality will bleed into other areas of your life.
By just using the slight edge effect, and improving yourself by 1% every single day, you’ll blow away your competitors within a few years.
This is why habits are so important—these are the things that improve your life by just 1% every day. They aren’t noticeable at first, but after a few months, a few years, and ultimately, a few DECADES, they will create massive differences between you and someone who didn’t have these habits.
With this in mind, these are 4 good habits that every man must have. They’ll improve you in every way possible over time, and will eventually give you a far better life than you ever thought possible.
1. Lift Weights
Physical strength is one of the most, if not the most, distinguishing features of men. In fact, it’s one of the 4 tactical virtues that defines masculinity on a primal level.
Modern day men have been robbed of this once common idea.
Now, it isn’t politically correct to say things like this. Some people might find it “offensive,” but do you know what? See how far those people get in life. They won’t get far at all.
Strength remains of the biggest differences between men and women, if not the biggest difference, and when you put in the effort to become strong, you reap all kinds of rewards.
When you’re physically strong, you become mentally strong.
Physical strength bleeds into all other areas of your life. Do you think that a mentally weak person would be able to deadlift 500 pounds? No, they would’ve given up at 135.
When you’re physically strong, people will respect you more.
Maybe it’s shallow, maybe it’s not, but either way it’s true. We’re animals by nature, and have a subconscious respect for people who could beat the shit out of us.
As you grow in physical strength, you’ll find that others will start to respect you more. Other men will naturally look up to you and respond to you differently on a subconscious level.
When you’re physically strong, women are more attracted to you.
They respond to the confidence that you have—and being able to overhead press twice your weight makes you very confident, believe me. Plus, having a lean, shredded physique doesn’t hurt.
For increasing strength and building muscle, check out the following articles:
- 4 Fundamental Supplements for Building Muscle
- Which Workout Routine is Right for You?
- How to Get a Six Pack (From Someone Who Actually Has One)
If you’re starting off trying to integrate good habits into your life, I highly recommend that you start with working out. The reason why is that a strong body means more energy and vitality, that you can direct towards other pursuits.
2. Meditate
A strong body is best complemented by a strong mind. What use is a strong and powerful body, if you’re too damn stupid to improve your life or have an interesting conversation?
As I said, building physical strength will naturally cultivate a strong mind—it will cultivate decisiveness, assertiveness, and confidence, which are crucial emotional characteristics if you want to succeed.
But having a strong mind isn’t as simple as being decisive, assertive, and having will power—it’s also about being serene and calm, without a trace of ego.
One of the best ways that you can cultivate this peace of mind is through meditation. Meditation is not just for Buddhist monks and hippies, contrary to popular belief—it’s for anyone who wants to improve their mind and emotional state.
In fact, some of the most powerful and influential people in the world meditate, from Richard Branson to Tony Robbins to multiple presidents and tons of CEO’s. Whenever this many successful people have a certain habit, it’s time for you to take note.
Why is meditation such a good habit, though? Well, meditation will dissolve your ego, making you far more open to improvement. It will give you a growth-oriented mindset over time, and will immediately start making you more calm and collected.
This is one of those good habits that you don’t want to miss out on.
3. Read Every Day
We literally have experts in their own fields spending years compiling evidence and theories into a single book. All of their knowledge, from years and years of experience, put into a little collection of papers for easy access.
And then, we have editors that take it a step further, and organize the books so that they’re free of spelling mistakes and errors. THEN, we have publishers, who help the authors set up the books in a way that is congruent and easy to read.
And after all of this, when years of knowledge and expertise are distilled and organized down into a single little collection of papers, what do most people say? “Fuck that, dog—I don’t like to read.”
Are you literally fucking kidding me? How stupid do you have to be to not take advantage of this amazing opportunity? YEARS, and sometimes even CENTURIES of knowledge, is condensed into a single little book, and you don’t want to take advantage of this?
When you read you expand your mind—you learn from others’ mistakes, and you gain access to knowledge that you would’ve never had before. Want to learn about psychology? You can literally find thousands of books written by world-class psychologists, and purchase them for like $10 on Amazon.
Want to learn about building a business? You can literally find thousands of books written by successful business owners, sharing all of their secrets. We live in a world of unprecedented information flow—take advantage of it.
Every single man who has accomplished something worthwhile reads on a regular basis. There are no exceptions to this rule.
Never has it been easier to read books. Peasants would’ve had to pay literally an entire year’s salary to get a single book 700 years ago, and now? We can get them for an hour of minimum wage and have it delivered right to our door in just a few days.
Take advantage of this, I’m serious. If you’re not reading every single day you are literally going to be a fucking train wreck. Don’t just read anything though, you have to read some of the best books for men that will improve your life.
4. Actively Improve Your Social Circle
Having a large social circle is an incredibly powerful asset. In fact, it may be one of the most powerful assets in existence—it can land you opportunities that money or skills couldn’t alone.
It means that you have more business opportunities, more friends, and more women to choose from, and it will ultimately make you a better person.
Having a large social circle of alpha males, for lack of a better term, will keep you on your toes. It’ll keep you constantly improving; being surrounded by hard-working, determined men tends to bring out the best in you.
The key is quality over quantity, however. It’s better to have a small social circle of really cool men and women, than a large one of losers. Weak men that buy into stupid truisms tend to slowly rub off on us and make us worse.
Don’t use this as an excuse to alienate your entire social circle if they’re losers, however—building a social circle is a process of slowly filtering through different people that you meet. When you first start off, you may only have a few friends. This is fine.
Slowly they will introduce you to other people, and those people will introduce you to other people, and so on – through this process you can can filter people in and out of your life.
Having a large social circle can be accomplished in several ways:
- Cold approach (meeting strangers in bars, clubs, etc.)
- Similar interest groups (join a yoga club, book club, charity event, etc.)
- Through an already existing social circle
I’ve left behind plenty of “friends,” because I didn’t feel like they were very valuable to my growth—I understand that it can be hard to do this. The initial break is tough, but, if you stick with it, you’ll be thankful you did.
Summary: Create Good Habits!
In reality, there’s plenty good habits for men to have—however these “fundamental four,” should be the basis of every man’s life.
By lifting weights, your health will grow. By meditating, you will develop a serenity in the face of adversity. By reading, your knowledge will accumulate. And by actively expanding your network of friends, your social life will flourish.
If you don’t have any of the good habits mentioned in this article, I recommend starting with one. If you take on too much, it’s easy to lose will power, give up, and relapse back into your old ways.
When you’re trying to integrate good habits into your life, it will be difficult at first—I think it’s best to start off by working out, and then slowly work some other good habits into your life.
Do whatever you want to do, though—massive change is possible if you have the will power to do so.
If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, let me know in the comments section below. I hope you guys enjoyed the article and I’ll see you next time around.
Thanks! I thought reading is for women only because they are more talented in languages!