Don’t Waste Your 20s (How to Maximize Your Twenties) PART 5

Continued from part 4.

13) Avoid Debt

Debt is slavery. You are spending money you do not have and will have to pay it back from the income you will make in the future.

This means that you are forced to have income in the future otherwise you can’t make payments and the debt blows up.

In other words, if you have a job, you go from working voluntarily to working mandatorily. You can’t quit even if you are being mistreated.

In fact, stifling indebted employees is something that companies do to employees all the time.

This is how it works: You get promoted pretty fast in your 20s. The moment you buy a house and sign a mortgage, your employer goes “BINGO”. Increments and promotions slow down hard.

Why? Because they know you can’t leave easily. You have debt to pay. GOLDEN HANDCUFFS.

You end up being owned by your employer and your bank.

The only times you should take debt are:

1. It increases your income significantly. (e.g. debt for expanding your business)
2. You’re buying a house that you can pay off in 10 years or less

You should never ever take debt for consumer goods like buying cars or a vacation or whatever.

Use credit cards for points, offers, and cashbacks, not for credit. If you can’t pay in cash, you can’t afford it.

The more debt you have, the less free you are. Cut costs but don’t take debt to live.

If the living situation in your country is too expensive, you are far better off moving to Thailand for a year and building an online business.

14) Maximize Your Time in College

Covered in detail in a separate post here. The quick summary is:

• Pick a degree that pays well right out of college
• Get internships and work experience
• Don’t get a girlfriend (serious relationships suck up time and attention)
• Don’t start drinking and avoid developing a party habit
• Network and build connections with people who are likely to be successful (this means you don’t “network” with losers and dorks on the path to life failure)
• Study hard on the subjects that matter (for courses that are useless – do the bare minimum and nothing more)

15) Minimize Wasting Time

Your 20s are limited and I guarantee that when you are 30, you will look back and think they just flew by.

No matter what you do, you will end up wasting thousands of hours on things that don’t matter. It could be failed relationships, stressing about things that don’t matter, or whatever else.

No one is perfectly efficient with their time and that’s fine. However, you do want to minimize as much wastage as possible.

This does not mean that you are always hyper productive and never have fun. Fun is important and time you spent enjoying yourself is not wasted time.

HOWEVER, there is a huge difference between enjoying yourself and spending time on mindless junk because you’ve become addicted to them.

You want your entertainment to come from real world fun like playing sports or hanging out with real humans, not from watching a screen like a drug addict.

1) Video games: The only time you should be playing video games after you hit 20 is when you are sick and need to pass the time. Otherwise you’re getting pleasure from your achievements in a fantasy world instead of getting them from the real world.

You have to realize that the time you spend in a fantasy world is time you are taking away from being in the real world.

2) TV/Streaming/Movies etc.: You don’t want to consume these items at all. Total waste of time. At MOST watch one movie every 3 months.

Note: The exception is if you’re watching something solely for learning purposes. E.g. Watching math lectures on YouTube is fine. Watching entertainment videos is not.

If you want to watch something while you eat, I strongly recommend switching to documentaries. I’ve learned so much about different topics that I would otherwise never learn about just by watching documentaries on Curiosity Stream.

3) Social Media: Use it only if you’re making money from it or learning something from it or getting laid because of it. If all you’re doing is following gossip and celebrities, delete it.

4) Short form video: Under no circumstance do you want to get addicted to short form videos (reels or whatever they are called nowadays). This is crack cocaine for the brain because you get a dopamine hit every 20 seconds.

You can waste hours and hours watching reels and get NOTHING done. And to top it off, you will feel mentally and physically exhausted after wasting your time watching them.

I know how addictive they are because I used to own a SaaS that literally created reels 24/7/365 for our users. Short form video is CRACK COCAINE for your brain. DO NOT WATCH THEM.

The golden rule is that you want most of your dopamine/endorphins/pleasure to come from real world achievements and actual success. Not from fantasy worlds or from watching videos of other people do things.

16) Stop watching porn

This is an extension of the previous point but deserves a special mention. Porn is GARBAGE for your brain. It is actively shrinking your brain and killing your motivation to get things done.

You ever get the motivation to do something, but then do a “quickie” and then the motivation is gone and you feel sleepy and tired? Yep that’s so many people across the entirety of their 20s.

If this is you, you need to take the Live Intentionally: 90 Day Self-Improvement Program. It will change your life forever by ridding you of this evil addiction.

So many guys can’t get real girls for just one reason – porn. Porn gives them all the orgasms they need so why would they do the work necessary to get themselves a real woman?

I’ve written in detail about pornography before, so I won’t repeat myself here. Read here:

1. Why You Should Stop Watching Porn
2. How to Stop Watching Porn (Ultimate Guide)

17) Prioritize Getting Sleep

Poor sleep leads to decreased cognitive performance in all tasks. This is pretty well researched and undebatable at this point.

Research also shows something that you may not know: When you start sleeping fewer hours, you feel sleepy for the first few days but then your body gets used to it and you stop being aware of your sleep deprived state. *However the cognitive deficits still persist.*

To put it in simple words, if you sleep less, you will get used to it and your performance will suffer without you being aware of it.

Often time you will meet guys in their 20s who are inattentive, clumsy, can’t seem to gain any muscle, find it harder to eat correctly and manage cravings… for many of them, the root cause of the problems is poor sleep.

You fix this one thing and you can fix many things at the same time. It is one of those problems that shows up everywhere until you fix it.

Keeping a good sleep schedule can be really hard to do in your 20s. You will go out to party every once in a while, you will be busy with girls at night, or you’ll be working to build a business, or learning something, or whatever.

My recommendation is to make sure you get plenty of sleep for at least 5 out of the 7 days of the week.

Keep the partying and the all night sex sessions with hoes limited to 2 times a week otherwise it will adversely affect your performance and productivity.

Pro-tip: Consume caffeine no more than 2 times a week. This way it at least has an effect when you use it. If you drink coffee every day, you just develop tolerance and end up needing it to perform at baseline.

That’s all for today.

This article will be continued in part 6.

– Harsh Strongman