I am now closer to 40 than I am to 20. But I remember turning 20 like it was yesterday. More than a decade goes by in the blink of an eye.

I managed to cover a lot of ground in my 20s, so much so that I can now just coast if I choose to.

In my 20s, I:

• Built many online businesses (many of which failed)
• Became a multi-millionaire (many of my businesses succeeded too)
• I completed my formal degree and became a Chartered Accountant (although this happened at 21 and the bulk of the job was done in my late teens)
• I completed my informal degree in Computer Science (This took many years to finish. Most lack the ability to stick to a goal for 3 months, much less 6 years.)
• I maintained great health across my 20s except for two years where I did a dreamer bulk and had to cut it all back down (not fun)
• I fucked lots of girls and eventually I married a great one
• I had my first son born to me a few months ago
• I went on 100+ treks and explored a lot of my country.
• Even this hobby blog makes about $250k a year (advice for new writers)

This list is not to “brag” about “my success” (there was a lot of luck involved and I could have died at many points).

The point is that I want you to see that tons of progress can be made on all fronts in this decade (money, freedom, health, learning, family, etc.)

Your 20s are the MOST IMPORTANT DECADE of your life

What you do in your 20s will set the tone for the rest of your life.

If you waste your 20s, you will make your 30s, 40s, and 50s much harder than they need to be (high stress jobs, nagging wife, no free time, mid-life crisis, etc.).

If you make good use of your 20s, the rest of your life becomes much easier and more fun (you have more money, more free time, better health, better wife, more wisdom, etc.).

Your 20s are just that important.

Almost everyone I know who wasted their 20s regrets it deeply. Time flies fast and they are left with nothing tangible.

How many guys do I know who work dead end jobs because they wasted their 20s? I know so many of them.

How many men do I know who are married to fat nagging wives who don’t love them? This is the reality of most married men.

How many men are slaves to banks who lend them money to buy a house and a car? Most of them.

All of these are a result of not playing their 20s right.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. There is so much you can achieve in this decade if you put your mind to it.

There are many advantages you have in your 20s that you will never have again

1) You are smarter in your 20s.

You may not be as wise as you will be in later decades, but your raw processing power is without a doubt at its peak in your 20s. This is hard to describe but you’ll agree when you get older.

When you are 20, you can read 30 pages of a novel in an hour and retain the information. When you are older, you need to “pay more attention” otherwise you will not register what you read even after reading it twice.

Your ability to do quick arithmetic goes down. Some of it is due to our overreliance on calculators but the brain itself is not as sharp as it used to be.

Luckily, if you do your 20s right, you will have much more wisdom and life experience to compensate for a slower brain. But you will never have as much cognitive horsepower ever again.

2) Your ability to work long hours is at its peak.

Your early 20s are the only time when you can comfortably pull all-nighters and not notice it.

You can party till 4 am and then hit the gym at 5 am. You can work 16 hours a day and not feel like death.

You are not afraid of late night flights in economy class. You don’t “need a vacation” after a few days of hard work.

This is the perfect time to be building things – your business, your body, and your life.

You can work a 6 to 12 after your 9 to 5 when you are in your 20s. It is much harder to pull it off later. Your body simply can’t take it.

I’m not even that old and if I sleep less than 6 hours a night, I can “feel it”. I literally can’t get much done the next day. It’s like the brain is frozen, almost like someone hit you with a punch to the back of your head.

In my early 20s, there were so many times where I just worked with 1-2 hours of sleep. Now when I think back, I ask myself “how the fuck did I do it?”.

Today I pay extra to fly during daylight hours. I need my sleep and I am more than happy to sacrifice money to preserve my sleep time.

3) Your body is “always warm”.

You can just do things in your 20s without worrying about them too much. Friend invited you to play badminton? Let’s go.

The thought that you can twist your leg or something else doesn’t even enter your mind. You are young and young people rarely break.

You don’t need to warm up. You don’t need to “work yourself up to it”. You can just show up and start.

4) You have very few responsibilities.

Even if you don’t feel like it. Life will get busier as you get older.

You will get married, have children, and will need increasingly greater amounts of time for your family.

You will need time for your parents (who will not be in this world with you forever).

But you don’t need to think about any of that in your 20s.

In your 20s you are an individual who only needs to think about themselves.

You are as free as you will ever be.

At 25 I could just fly anywhere I wanted on a whim. Now I have an infant and family I need to think about before I leave the city.

Your responsibilities increase as you get older. Despite all your blessings, you will sometimes miss the freedom and wonder of these years when you are older.

5) You have the charms of youthfulness by your side.

Anyone who says it’s easier to date women when you are in your late 30s and 40s is lying to you.

The easiest years to date as a man are from 25 to 32 (your peak is 28).

After 35, you are officially an older man and younger women (18-25) don’t prefer you if they can help it. This doesn’t mean you can’t do it, but it does mean that it’s harder than it was when you were in your peak dating years.

Youth is a quality of its own that no amount of money can substitute. (This is 100x truer for women because men age like wine and women age like milk.)

How to Maximize Your 20s

There are a few things you can focus on to get the most out of your 20s. Yes, it all involves work and is not easy.

1) Read a lot and absorb information like a sponge

At this age, you should be reading a lot. I read 200+ books in my 20s.

At minimum, you should aim to finish at least 2 books a month (maybe 1 a month if you’re reading fat 500 page books). If you don’t know where to start, check out my book recommendations page.

Note: Reading blogs and websites also counts as reading. It doesn’t just have to be books. For example, one of the richest men I know reads Berkshire Hathaway’s shareholder letters the moment they come out every year.

There are very few successful people who also aren’t big into reading. They are always reading something or the other because they want to keep getting better.

You can buy books written by billionaires who will literally tell you their life’s learnings for something stupidly low like $20. If you get one or two things out of every book you read that you can implement, your ROI is already 1000x.

Sadly most guys would rather spend those $20 on a beer. Idiots.

You are not one of these idiots and the proof is in the fact that you read this website. It’s a wall of text with a few images.

Most people are too low IQ and lack the attention span to read an LMM article. Their brains have been turned to mush by social media.

Since this post is specifically about guys in their 20s, there are a few books that qualify as “must read at all costs”:

• The Book of Pook: This book will change how you approach women and relationships in general. You should take time out and read his first two books at minimum.
• The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (India, USA): You don’t have to be born rich to be successful and there is a lot you can accomplish by sheer determination and force of will.
• Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller (India, USA): More of the above.
• Plutarch’s Lives: Read the Penguin editions if you want to skip reading the background history.
• The Top 5 Regrets of the Dying (India, USA): A laundry list of regrettable life choices to avoid as you go through your life.

Note: What you read is more important than how much you read even though both are important. You do not want to consume nonsense and fill your head with junk ideas about life that do not hold good in reality.

If a book is woke, hyper-politically charged, feminist-biased, etc. you should discard it. Just because you started reading a book does not mean you are obligated to finish it. If a book sucks or is plain useless, trash it and read something else.

2) Maintain great health and take steps to prevent future health issues

Health is your most important asset bar none. Life will periodically remind you of this.

I spent the last week in bed because of a viral fever I developed seemingly out of nowhere. I had millions of dollars in my bank but what use were they when I didn’t have my health?

Now there’s nothing you can do about catching the occasional infection but you can make sure you keep your body as fit as possible.

The worst mistake you can make is to let your health decline over time. One by one things pile up.

First you become overweight. Then you become diabetic. Then you develop clogged arteries and die of a heart attack.

Not to mention that you literally feel like shit when you are unfit. Brain fog, sadness, low energy are all symptoms of poor health. Also when you look like shit, people treat you like trash.

This is why it’s extremely important to get enough protein and calories for your fitness goals.

Diet for young men is mostly about getting in protein and keeping calories in the right range.

You don’t need to be hypervigilant about your diet (you can have fun and eat pizza and garlic bread once in a while) but make sure your protein and weekly calories are on point. They’re the most impactful variables in the nutrition hierarchy.

There is no need to stress about every little thing or become that neurotic person who eats nothing at the table with his buddies… but you do need to watch your waistline otherwise things get out of control quickly.

The other half of the game is physical fitness/exercise.

I talk in great detail about maintaining physical fitness as you age in this post (if you do only one thing today – read that post) so I won’t repeat the full thing here, but the quick version is:

• Stay between 15-20% body fat by DEXA (12-15% if using older measures like calipers)
• Get 90 minutes of Zone 3-4 cardio each week with the last few minutes of each session in Zone 5 (it should feel extremely strenuous)
• Lift weights 2-3 times per week minimum
• Avoid low rep ranges because of injury risk
• Play a racket sport once a week (this helps you preserve your ability to do explosive movements like jumping, running, turning fast, and stopping from a sprint while keeping your eyes on a fast moving object)

Most guys don’t take care of their health at all, and even the ones who do just go to the gym and walk… which is not enough.

You WILL lose your ability to run if you don’t run. You WILL lose your ability to produce explosive random movements if you don’t do them. Just like how you lose strength and muscle over time if you don’t lift weights.

When was the last time you did a full speed sprint? Most people haven’t gone full speed since they were teenagers.

Note: If you haven’t done a sprint in years, don’t go and do it right away because you WILL hurt your ankles and knees (or worse, tear your Achilles tendon or a hamstring). You need to work your way up to it because your joints and tendons have become too weak to handle impact.

You should get a copy of Live Intentionally: 90 Day Self-Improvement Program and use the free bonus guide on regaining sprint speed to help you get started (this bonus is written by world class runner Mark Baker).

You should be on fish oil.

You should also try and minimize creating problems for yourself in the future. What do all older people complain about? Joint pain.

This is why you should be taking tons of high quality fish oil when you are young. I take 6 grams a day (6 pills) when I’m bulking and 10 grams a day when I’m cutting (10 pills).

Fish oil is anti-inflammatory and contains tons of EPA/DHA. Every man should be on it.

You should also take a multivitamin just in case your diet is missing something (nobody is eating a perfect diet all the time).

For supplements, I strongly recommend only consuming things that are approved by Trustified. This is a company that blind tests health supplements by buying them from the market and getting them lab tested… as you can expect, many popular products fail.

The guy who runs Trustified has been dealing with lots of court cases and even goons being sent to his house to scare him (forcing him to relocate), so you know how big of a business selling subpar supplements is (at least here in India).

At this point, I only consume supplements that pass Trustified’s blind testing simply because I don’t want to consume fake supplements (and to support the guy running Trustified because he’s doing god’s work).

This article will be continued in part 2.

– Harsh Strongman