Don’t Waste Your 20s (How to Maximize Your Twenties) PART 3

Continued from part 2.

6) Avoid isolation. Build and Maintain High Quality Friendships.

While you need some amount of privacy to research and build things, you should not turn yourself into a house hermit.

It has lots of downstream negative consequences simply because you get little to no feedback from actual humans (the internet is not the real world… yet).

You can learn a LOT from the internet about various topics and you can make a LOT of money from the internet. BUT there is still so much you can only learn from real life experiences with real humans.

The last thing you want to do is become that low social skills person who spends his entire day at home watching anime and pornography (or whatever else) because it is a negative feedback loop.

Being indoors all the time atrophies your social skills making your speech and mannerisms awkward thus making it harder for you to succeed with people and more likely that you prefer being home.

Now if you have an internet based business, this is harder than it seems because a lot of your work is done by yourself from a computer.

Here are a few easy ways to still meet high value people:

Pay for an expensive gym

The ROI on high end gyms is huge. Not because they have better equipment and facilities but because of the gentry that goes there.

Who are the people you will meet frequently in high end gyms?

1. They make enough money to pay for an expensive gym (higher than average income)
2. They care about their health enough to show up to the gym (higher than average discipline)

In other words, many of them are entrepreneurs and other winners.

Many of them are typically also there for the same reason as you (to make friends with other winners) because smart people think alike.

You won’t have a lot of trouble building relationships there because it is a *warm social environment*.

Even many women there pay for these gyms so they can meet richer affluent men so if you’re single and looking for an upper class woman, this can be a good investment of money.

Develop a social hobby

You should have 3 hobbies – one that keeps you fit, one that lets you be creative, and one that helps you network and socialize.

• Hiking groups
• Game clubs (like poker, etc.)
• Public Speaking (Try a Toastmasters club)

Figure out the type of people you want to meet and pick a hobby that attracts that type of person.

Personally I go hiking a lot as all regular readers know (simply because I enjoy it so much).

“Elitist” Sports

I play Squash. This is a game exclusive to upper class people because you need access to an expensive air conditioned court, money for coaching, and decent fitness levels to play it.

There are upfront costs, coaching commitment, and fitness requirements (Golf is a major exception) to elitist sports which makes them perfect to socialize with winners.

There are sports that are even more elitist than Squash and Golf like polo, fencing, and anything involving horses. Never tried those because they are outside my pay range, but if you can afford the expense of a game horse, they are worth learning.

You want to avoid “masses friendly” games because you will rarely (if ever) meet successful people on the courts.

An example of this is Pickleball because it is very easy to access (no coaching needed, just pick up a paddle and hit), cheap to play, and requires zero fitness.

Tennis fits somewhere in the middle. It’s somewhere between elitist and masses friendly as costs have come down, although the sport is heavily being cannibalized by Pickleball.

With elitist sports, you not only get to network with winners, but you also get all the health benefits that come with sports – longer life, trains explosive movements, etc. There is literally zero downside.

7) Do not develop a substance abuse problem.

One of the biggest mistakes you can make in your 20s is developing a substance abuse issue.

The idea that you can’t have fun without intoxicants is nonsensical. I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I’ve never touched weed and I can guarantee that I’ve had more fun in my life than most people and I’ve been with more girls than 99.999% of humanity.

And it’s not like I haven’t been offered weed and expensive alcohol. My brain is my most important asset – why would I dull it?

You NEVER want to smoke weed because weed makes you lazy. It kills your ambition and drive. It makes you a low IQ person.

Proponents of weed will point out the rare few people who perform well despite high weed usage (like Joe Rogan) but the vast majority of marijuana users are not benefitting from their addiction.

They simply use it as an excuse to cope with their shitty life.

Alcohol is shit for health and I don’t recommend drinking it at all. But if you must drink, only drink it socially (e.g. at dates and parties as a social lubricant). DO NOT make a habit out of drinking alcohol because you will regret it.

As you can tell, hard drugs are a no-go. Zero exceptions.

Nootropics

For legal reasons, I wish to remind you to read my general disclaimer and my medical disclaimer. All content provided on this blog is for entertainment purposes only.

This should perhaps be a different article of its own but the short version is that you want to avoid anything that has any addiction potential.

I’ve used and somewhat abused Modafinil (given that you can practically just get Modalert OTC in India but I got a prescription to be safe) in my very early business years. I haven’t used it at all in the last 8+ years simply out of caution. It wasn’t addictive and I didn’t find it hard to quit at all.

On the other hand, I knew many other people who tried things like Adderall and those are much more addictive and hard to quit.

To put it in simple terms, I don’t recommend using any pharmacy unless you have a very good reason to (yes I was a reckless person when I was younger).

The vast majority of you should never go beyond coffee and L-Theanine.

If you must use something, make sure you research their dependency potential beforehand so you can avoid anything with an addiction risk.

Again: As someone who used and abused nootropics, I am not recommending them one bit. I’m lucky to not have any permanent brain damage. Stick to the caffeine and L-theanine stack.

A friend of mine abused the fuck out of stimulants and ended up killing himself. Did he kill himself because of stimulants? I don’t know. Did they play a big role? I would be shocked if they didn’t.

8) Avoid being around cynics, mindless consumers, whiners, and apathetic people.

You will be the average of the 5 people you spend most of your time with.

In life, and especially in your 20s, you want to avoid polluting your immediate circle with people who have no hope of making it.

There are 3 types of people you never want to get close with:

Cynics

These are people who have an inherent distrust of the world and think everything is a lie and that everyone is out there to scam them.

Many of them are otherwise intelligent people but they never get anywhere in life because of their loser mindset and attitude.

You can spot them easily when they reject every suggestion with some insinuation of how they will end up getting defrauded.

“All online courses are scams.”

“Why are the reviews for this course so good then?”

“The reviews are also fake”

“These reviews are from verified customers who can only leave reviews after they made their purchase. If the course didn’t work, it would be full of 1 star reviews.”

“The author purchased his own course from multiple cards and left himself 300 fake reviews.”

“There are video reviews from real people on the page.”

“He paid them to leave the video reviews.”

“Okay bro.” (Don’t waste time arguing with cynics)

In the meantime this person continues to stagnate while people who learn from experts and take action surpass him 100x over the years.

You will meet him 10 years later and he’ll tell you that you’re successful because you’re privileged and that “he could have done it too” if only he had “the same opportunities as you”.

Mindless Consumers

These are people who lack either of the two things necessary for being successful:

1. Brains
2. Balls

Some people are just too low IQ to be successful while others lack the balls it takes to take a risk.

The people without brains never get anywhere in the world and people without the balls never get above the path of least resistance.

You want neither their stupidity nor their risk aversion rubbing off on you.

These people never produce anything. They are consumers through and through.

For example, they will watch 1000 reels a day and make the reel creators money, but will never produce one themselves even though there is no barrier to entry.

You want to be a producer, not a consumer because wealth flows from consumers to producers.

The easy way to spot these people is to see their electronics. If they own iPads/Tablets and large TVs at home, they are consumers (these are devices primarily meant for many hours of regular mindless consumption).

Whiners

These people are fairly obvious to spot. Everything sucks, the government sucks, the economy sucks, and they are overweight and poor because of someone else.

Even though no one else forces food through their mouth or stops them from building a business.

All they do is complain without taking zero action.

You can lose 2-3 kg of fat per month so if you are fat, it is 100% your fault. You can build your business to $3-5k in a year of hard effort (and then scale it up), so if you are broke, it is 100% your fault.

Whining and excuses have zero meaning. Only results matter.

It does not matter where you live (first, second, or third world), what race you are, what the color of your skin is, how tall you are, what gender you are, whether you are normal or LGBT, etc.

• If you eat less, you will lose weight
• If you build an online business, you will make internet money

Apathetic people

These are people who just have nothing going on in their lives.

They are abject losers and simply don’t care. There is ZERO ambition inside them.

They will spend their entire life working a job, going home, watching anime or TV or something else for 4 hours a day, and grow old with nothing to show for it.

There are so many people who spend their entire 20s:

• Becoming experts in anime
• Becoming experts in movies (the media calls them movie buffs but they are actually movie dorks)
• Becoming experts in sitcoms (they’ve watched every episode 2-3 times)
• Becoming experts in celebrities and their life (they know what every dingleberry in the film industry is up to)

They have zero concrete results over time with the things that actually matter (land, money, power, influence, etc.).

You must always have something going on in your life. You should always be building something.

Let me put it bluntly: You can waste your entire 20s hanging around these sorts of losers. You will become exactly like them if you spend too much time around them.

You will become cynical, you will whine, you will spend your time watching anime, and you will have nothing going on in your life.

IF YOU HAVE FRIENDS LIKE THESE, DROP THEM IMMEDIATELY.

This article will be continued in part 4.

– Harsh Strongman

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