This is by no means an exhaustive list but is a collection of many false beliefs I held when I was in my 20s that were proven wrong over the years.
I’ve also included some misconceptions I’ve seen other young men have now that I’m older and wiser and know better.
If you are a smart person who’s getting things done, life will eventually teach you all of these things (while dumb and unambitious people go through life learning very little).
It’s better to learn things the easy way (by reading this list) than by learning them the hard way (by experiencing setbacks).
That said, if you’re in your early to mid 20s, chances are that you will dismiss some of the items in here and then learn them the hard way. Immune to good advice as they say.
Myths Young Men Have About The World
1) Thinking you are important and worthy of respect and other people should believe in you. This is the #1 myth young people have about the world. They think that other people should think they are important and relevant.
Men and women are different. A young woman is a highly prized possession for her beauty, fertility, and her sexuality. On the other hand, a young man is like newly bottled wine. Not a high value item until it’s been aged.
You are not important and no one is lining up to get an appointment with you. The funny irony of life is that no one believes in you until you’ve already made it (you get lots of support once you make it).
2) Believing there is a “soulmate”. Truth is that you are compatible with tons of women and your special Stacey is not one in a million but more like one in fifty.
The more women you get experience with, the more you understand this fundamental truth.
3) Thinking your friends will last a lifetime. Very very few people will still be in touch with you in 10 years.
Many will fall off as life gets busier and the proximity factor is removed. Some are jealous of your success and become haters. Yet others die from things like suicide, bike accidents, and drug overdoses.
4) That you will live forever. When you are young, you think life is forever and you have a long time left. Death and accidents happen to others, not to you.
Life will show you many times how wrong you are. I’ve almost died many times. One time I got saved by a tour guide when I was standing under a bridge (the bridge collapsed and a truck fell where I was standing).
Life is finite and not guaranteed. You could die today if the universe wills it.
5) That “the way” works. “The way” is failing men at every step. For those unfamiliar with the term, “the way” means the standard life path that looks like this:
School -> College -> Job -> Marry -> Buy a house -> Raise children -> Travel -> Retire -> Die
This worked a long time ago and more and more men of today are waking up after being run down by the drunken taxicab of absolute reality.
Today the way leads to this:
School -> Massive student loans -> Dead end job or being phased out by AI and outsourcing -> Marry -> No kids or 1 kid (more are too hard to afford) -> Get divorced -> Bitter court battle where you lose half your assets and income -> Renter 4 Life (can’t buy a house anyway) -> Back to dating -> Don’t have the health and money to travel -> Fired 5-10 years before retirement and replaced with a young foreigner (or AI) -> Left in a senior citizen home by kids (if any)
There are always success stories and I’m not trying to be too cynical, but things have changed rapidly for the worse in the developed world (of course if you are smart and hardworking, you will always make it). In the developing world, the financial situation is improving but the marriage/family situation has deteriorated.
If you’re stuck in the way, read the Pookish Commandments in the Pook Manifesto.
6) That most women are worthy of marriage. Marriage is a useful concept but the percentage of women that deserve a husband are reducing every minute. In the west it is all but impossible to find a virgin wife, and in India things are not much better (regardless of whatever copium that delusional Indians like to take).
If you decide to marry, you have to be smart and do it with your eyes open. It has to be a calculated decision and cannot be made on fleeting emotions like “love”. You cannot afford to make mistakes in your choice of woman.
7) “It won’t happen to me”. The I am so special that problems that happen to other people won’t happen to me mindset.
So many guys ego lift in the gym thinking they are special and can’t get injured. Then boom – they tear something or fuck up a disc in their back. Usually it gets better, but sometimes it changes their life for the worse. You gotta be smart about how you train.
The same thing applies to other things in life. Rash driving, not adding a stop loss, sleeping with random dating app women without a condom, etc. You are not special.
That car accident can happen to you. The stock could crash along with your investments. That dumb whore could get pregnant and choose not to abort and milk you for child support money and then some (some get pregnant intentionally to entrap you).
8) That your tribe/race/religion does not matter. Because it does. You have to understand that you are living with tons of other groups of people, many of whom are extremely nepotistic towards their own, and they all covet what you have.
Some of them follow a book that says that you should be enslaved, be forced into paying an extra tax, and not allowed into positions of power because you don’t follow their religion. Not to mention that they view your wives, mothers, and daughters as religiously sanctioned rape material.
The idea of secularism is the wolf trying to convince the sheep that wolf and sheep are the same animal. Don’t be stupid enough to believe it.
9) That your job is important. Every time I see a young 21 year old intern being highly stressed about their “work” I can only laugh. Look, you aren’t paid enough to be stressed out for your boss’s work.
You are just a line in a spreadsheet and will be gone the moment new AI software shows up that can do your job better and cheaper than you. There is no “loyalty” and you are not in a “big family”. Keep your resume up to date because you never know when you need it.
The sooner you realize this, the better off you will be. Unless you own equity in the company, don’t overstress the job and use that extra energy to build a side business for yourself.
10) That the system cares about you. The system does not give a shit about you. Even if you are the most dutiful beta male who kisses the ground a woman walks on, the court system will still side with her and destroy your life.
Even if you stand on the street and protest for women’s rights and “believe all women”, you will still get arrested and have your life ruined the moment some chick decides to falsely accuse you of rape.
The way the old guys running the system think can be summarized in 1 line: “Men have been on the top long enough. Now it’s women’s turn”. They do not care about men. They are aware of false rape cases, divorce scams, and men being exploited, and they are not naive. They just do not care.
Understand the game and play it so that you win even if the rules are rigged.
11) That women care about you. The only woman who can truly love you unconditionally is your mother. And some mothers don’t even do that. All other relationships with women are conditional.
Become a broke drunk bum and see how long your wife or girlfriend sticks with you. She’ll be gone sooner than you think.
The reality is that most women view men as a way to get something – be it money, status, marriage, or just company and excitement. Once you understand this, you can pull the strings and make women obsessed with you (instead of being obsessed with women like a beta male).
12) That health can be taken for granted. This is true for many people until the age of 25. After 25 things start to change quickly. By the age of 30, the guys who took care of their health and those who didn’t are visibly different.
The ones who don’t eat right and lift regularly become fat, their faces look chubby, they lose muscle mass, they get “joint pain”, have no energy, become sleepy after lunch (insulin resistant to pre-diabetic), and have weird posture.
For women who don’t train or eat right, everything is tight until 25 and then starts to become loose and sag.
They are “too busy” to train but have time to watch internet pornography and entertainment videos on the net. Even though a good Push Pull Legs program only takes an hour to do 3-4 times a week.
13) That everyone is thinking about you. Fun fact – No one gives a fuck about you. No one is thinking about you and constantly observing and assessing what you’re up to.
You are not in high school where everyone sees you if you stand up. You could get turned into red guacamole by a drunk bus driver tomorrow and hardly anyone will notice it in their lives. Most who do will move on in a month.
Just do what you need to do to achieve your goals in life. Don’t worry about other people’s thoughts and get the fear of embarrassment out of yourself. You will not regret living a life true to yourself.
14) That other people work hard. If you are a hard working young man, your first assumption is that everyone works as hard as you do. And that everyone is as ambitious as you are.
The reality is that most people are lazy losers who do not work hard at all. They waste thousands of hours each year on nonsense like video games, pornography, funny videos on YouTube, getting drunk on the weekend, etc.
Time you enjoyed wasting is not wasted time BUT simply chasing dopamine because you’re addicted to something is not true enjoyment. It is you being milked by algorithms and companies for money.
Most guys can change their entire life by following Live Intentionally: 90 Day Self-Improvement Program and ridding themselves of all these junk addictions for good.
15) That hard work is enough to succeed. Coal miners work much harder than me and make $150 a month max. Brick making slaves in India work even harder and make even less money. My work is mostly clicking buttons on a keyboard and a mouse and I make thousands of times more than them.
Hard work is not enough. What you work on matters, and the most important factor is how much equity you own.
If you don’t own the equity in the thing you’re working on (most jobs), you’re not going to see most of the fruits of your labor.
16) That everyone else is having more fun than you. This is a big myth that tons of young people hold because they scroll Instagram and see all their friends partying and travelling and having fun.
There’s even a term for it: FOMO or Fear of missing out. Most of it is a show and people are trying to make it seem like their lives are far more exciting than they actually are.
The general reality is that the more someone shows off their life on social media, the worse their actual life is (the exception being men who make money from it or do it to attract more women/use it as a dating app). Most happy couples are not publicizing their relationship on the internet 24/7.
Most people’s lives are boring and sluggish. They work jobs and have slowly deteriorating health. They are frustrated with their day to day routine and wait for the weekend so they can party and escape their shitty lives. Nothing to write home about.
17) That there is plenty of time. Not true at all. Responsibilities pile up as time goes on (marriage, kids, bills, health issues, etc.), and energy levels go down. Expectations increase.
It is 100x easier to start an online business at 21 than it is at 35. You have more time and can actually sustain working 6 more hours after your day job to build the biz. If you make $1000 a month from it after a year, you are happy with your progress because the number is meaningful to you.
At 35, you need the time to spend with your family and to get more sleep. The job fatigues you and you need rest after work. $1000 a month after a year of building feels like chicken shit.
Much respect to anyone who makes it happen and earns their freedom anyway because I know it is 100x harder.
As always, I recommend picking something easy and low risk like building an X account, copywriting, or web design. Get your first $5-10k per month income stream set up before you worry about making millions.
18) That opportunities last forever. Nope, things change. Dating in your 20s is far different from dating in your 30s.
If you’re a woman in your 20s, it is not too hard to find a good man with a good future ahead of him. Get to 30 and things are very different. The pool is smaller and the cream doesn’t want you anymore – they want the younger girls. You have become a wine aunt.
I own a tax/law consulting firm and clients will send me biodatas of their daughters – they want me to use my network to help them find a match for her. I tell them that they need to lower their expectations because their demands for the groom are too high while their own daughter brings very little to the table. And I have this conversation more often than you think.
19) That older people are smart and know what they are doing. For some things yes. You ask an old man what time flying by feels like over the years and he can tell you.
But for most things, they don’t know what they are doing. Most people just grow older with time and not much wiser. They did not have their eyes open in their lives and learned very little from it.
Most people refuse to learn new things as they grow older and cling to pre-held knowledge. You can see this in a very concrete way by how many people today are quickly becoming out of touch with technology. They do manually what they can do with AI and software.
Don’t take what older people tell you as gospel unless they have proof of experience and success to back it up.
20) That they are good investors. Most people are shit investors. They lack the emotional control factor and check prices every 20 minutes.
If you do not know how to read a financial statement (P&L, Balance Sheet, Cash flow statement), you are not a “good investor” no matter what you tell yourself (and yes, emotional control is more important than knowing how to read a FS).
If this is you, stick to buying mutual funds, dividend paying equities, and BTC/ETH unless you have access to insider information. Short term trading is a waste of time anyway.
If you’re investing meaningful amounts of money, get my No-BS Guide to Crypto investing. It gives you a working investing strategy and pays for itself.
21) That you need to have many friends. As the old guys at WSP used to say, most people have watched too many episodes of FRIENDS and think they need 5 friends they are constantly hanging out with. Or that they need 25 friends they are always texting.
No one except a loser has time to hang out with the same people every day and talk about life. Winners are too busy for this shit and have soft touch relationships they meet with once a month (at most) to once a year (becomes the norm as you get older).
If you have many friends, most of them are fake friends not real friends.
22) That you know what you are good at. You don’t but you will learn your talents as you try new things and see what you are naturally good at (and naturally bad at).
Go to a Toastmasters club and see if you are a natural at speaking. If yes, you should consider building a YouTube account.
If you are tall and have small wrists and ankles (narrow bone structure), you are probably not going to make a good powerlifter. But you will be good at endurance stuff. And vice versa. Just train for hypertrophy and play racket sports (narrow bone structure and long limbs mean you’ll do better here).
If you are good at observing and analyzing things and understanding the world, become a philosopher or a marketer. Or both. Meta: I’m a writer and a successful affiliate marketer.
You just gotta do things and figure out what you’re good at. Fix your weaknesses and build your strengths. The last thing you want to do is pick a career in something you are naturally weak at (won’t be able to compete with the talented no matter how hard you work).
23) That sex is success. It is NOT. You are not successful just because you’re having sex with women. However, if you can’t get laid (say at least once a week) and get yourself a new girl when you want a change, you probably are a loser beta male and need to work on your game.
Also, career success is not success with women. They are two entirely different skillsets. Do not turn yourself into a money making nerd with zero game because no skills with women will ruin your quality of life (unless you castrate yourself like the modern day trans eunuchs).
My recommended resource to fix your game is The Seduction Bible. Being able to get a girl in your bed whenever you want is a skill worth investing in.
24) Thinking that you can save people. You will eventually understand that most people don’t want your advice. In fact, if you give them helpful advice, 90% of them find it annoying and think negatively about you.
People just want you to listen to their problems. Do not provide advice unless specifically asked (and even then only give it to those whom you think deserve the time and energy).
You cannot “save” anyone unless they themselves want to be saved (and usually people like that don’t need your help). Don’t waste time giving random people your help and advice.
If you think you have something to say, start up your own blog and publish your words. Smart people who are looking for solutions and actionable advice will find you if you learn a bit of marketing.
25) That things will come to you. Seen more often in women because they’re used to being sought after by men (at least when they’re young). Other than dudes, nothing else is specifically looking for you.
If you want opportunities in life, you have to create them by putting in the work and taking risks. If you are not promoting yourself, you will not get anywhere because no one will notice you. Success does not come on a platter.
You gotta build your distribution (eg. building your own social media accounts) or pay for distribution (paid ads and promotions). Without distribution, even the best product in the world is doomed to fail.
The Action Step
Don’t just read this list and forget about it. Read it twice and think strongly about each point and how it applies to your life.
Which of these myths do you believe in? What are you doing wrong? What should you change?
Do not go through life like a lemon and learn it all the hard way. For many things, you really do not want to learn them the hard way.
Like marrying the wrong woman and getting divorced and losing half your money and many years of your life – this is a mistake you are better off not making. Learn it the easy way.
Each item in this list can save you thousands of lost hours. Some of them can save you tens of thousands of lost hours.
One or two big fixes can change the trajectory of your life.
That’s all for today.
Until next time.
Your man,
Harsh Strongman
