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We all dream of a life of comfort and pleasure. But how healthy do you really think this life would be? A life free of responsibilities, challenges, problems to solve, goals, and of purpose. How boring would that be? Waking up every morning in your luxurious mansion, sitting next to your pool sipping champagne cocktails, admiring the gold Rolex watch hanging off your tanned wrist would be great for a couple of days or even a couple of weeks - but imagine doing that your entire life? Humans are excited by progress, movement, and advancement. We need some risk in our lives. Without risk, there can be no return, and the ultimate goal in life is to find a happy balance between pleasure and pain. The secret to a happy and fulfilling life is seeking out risk and discomfort and then calculating the expected return on this risk. If the return is greater than the risk, that is a green light. The system works through a risk/reward points system. You want to estimate the points of risk you are taking and then the expected points of return. I will run you through a few examples. Example 1: Dating a Las Vegas stripper. There are numerous returns. Uninhibited sex, being the envy of your poker buddies, and never having to stand in line at a nightclub. Let's assume this totals to 3 points of return - 2 points for the sex and half a point for the other two. Let's now consider the risks. If she is super hot and if you are a typical guy, you will want to shower her with expensive gifts, dinners, and vacations. If she is motivated, you will marry her and she will take half your money. Finally, every guy will drool over her and soon you will spend half your day worrying that she is cheating on you. That totals 9 points of risk - 3, 4, and 2 respectively. This is not a risk you want to take. Example 2: Remaining in your 9 to 5 job or busting out and starting your own business. You love your job because the people are great and the pay is good but you see little room for advancement. Your passion is to open a shop with vintage decor, a coffee bar, motorcycle gear, and the buying and selling of Harley Davidson bikes. Let's start with the risks. You are leaving a safe and controlled environment with dental, medical, and pension, and a reliable monthly paycheck. You will miss the work and the people. That is 4 points of risk - 2 for the loss of job security and one each for the people and the job. Now for the returns. You will be doing something you truly love and you will be your own boss. That, in my mind, is worth 6 points of return - 4 and 2 respectively. This is a green light scenario. This points system is not limited to life-changing decisions. It can also be used in smaller day-to-day decisions that pop up in our lives such as going out with your mates to a nightclub, the purchase of an expensive pair of Italian shoes, attending an expensive conference, or abstaining from alcohol for 30 days. Humans are not adapted for security. Sure, we like a degree of comfort because we are vulnerable, but we also want a foot in something dangerous. It.makes us feel alive, but we need to be careful. There is a difference between taking a smart risk - like starting your own hipster Harley shop, and a stupid risk - like marrying a Las Vegas stripper. #lifecoach#motivation#lifecoaching#coaching#love#mindset#coach#inspiration#selflove#life#success#selfcare#lifestyle#mentalhealth#mindfulness#personaldevelopment#entrepreneur#goals#happiness#meditation#loveyourself#healing#motivationalquotes#lifequotes#positivevibes#fitness#businesscoach#motivationalspeaker#business

In 1985, Rocky Mountain News published a groundbreaking article on how people attach themselves to others in romantic relationships. It was a simple questionnaire asking people to identify their attachment style from three options. Style 1: I find it relatively easy to get close to others and I am comfortable depending on them and them depending on me. I do not worry about being abandoned or someone getting too close to me. Style 2: I find others are reluctant to get as close as I would like. I often worry that my partner does not love me and will not want to stay with me. I want to get close to people but this sometimes scares them away. Style 3: I am somewhat uncomfortable being close to others. I find it difficult to trust them completely - to depend on them. I am nervous when anyone gets too close. Often people want me to be more intimate than I am comfortable doing. Person 1 is secure in love and trust comes easily. Person 2 is anxious - longs to be intimate but is scared of being let down. Person 3 is avoidant and prefers to be alone and withdrawn. Let's say you are a 3 and you hook up with a 2. When 2 starts to raise the ante and get closer to you, you will automatically withdraw emotionally as your self-preservation instincts kick in. You prefer to have sex with strangers. You do not like to cuddle after sex and you don't like the closeness associated with kissing. When the relationship gets serious, you will sabotage it. You will pick a fatal fight about an arbitrary event and use that to run for the exits. You need to go easy on yourself and don't beat yourself up. People have let you down in the past and this withdrawal is a natural defense mechanism. You are carrying some deep wounds. Your partner is upset and you think they do not love you, which is not necessarily the case. You are unable to express your emotions because you do not have the necessary self-awareness. The distance of your partner is not necessarily meanness on their part. It is their defense mechanism. Take comfort in the fact that almost half the population is like you - either insecurely attached or anxiously attached. Throughout life, our survival is based on our ability to adequately defend ourselves. This manifests in not showing our true emotions in society and in work. If you had to bring all your shit into work every day, it would be a fucking war zone. Emily from accounting is fighting with her boyfriend. When she gets to work, she lets rip and the ledgers start flying. Frank from sales discovers his wife is having an affair and he literally opens fire on every woman in the national sales meeting! In a relationship, however, the opposite is encouraged – honesty and truthfulness. Bridging the gap is not easy. You need to be Batman – regular Joe by day, but crime fighter by night. Most men battle to do this and this often leads to the building of distance in the relationship. You are avoidant because you think your girlfriend does not want you. You may even have an affair which is your ultimate face-saving attempt to be distant. At the end of the day, the most crucial element of a relationship, regardless of your attachment style, is good honest communication – something most men are incredibly shit at executing. #lifecoach #motivation #lifecoaching #coaching #love #mindset #coach #inspiration #selflove #life #success #selfcare #lifestyle #mentalhealth #mindfulness #personaldevelopment #entrepreneur #goals #happiness #meditation #loveyourself #healing #motivationalquotes #lifequotes #positivevibes #fitness #businesscoach #motivationalspeaker #business

If you think back to every meaningful relationship that has ended in your past, you will notice one common thread that lives at the heart of its failure - expectations. Regardless of how emotionally evolved you may be, it is almost impossible to be in a relationship in which you do not expect something from the other person. You expect them to answer your phone calls, be on time for engagements, be nice to you, and be relatively predictable. These are innocuous expectations and probably will not get you into trouble. The problem is when these expectations morph into monsters that will put you at risk. Here are five monsters that you need to be on the lookout for. 1) Expectation of Happiness There comes a point in most relationships when we relinquish control of our own happiness and attach it to the other person. It is never clear when this transition takes place, but it does, and you only realize it has happened when the relationship ends. When that person withdraws from your life, and you are thrown into the bottomless pit of misery, you come to the sober realization that much of your happiness prior to the rupture was linked to that person. Life becomes hard and dark - you no longer find joy in those walks on the beach, that first cup of coffee in the morning, jumping into the ocean for a cold water swim. This is bewildering - how is it possible that activities in which you previously found so much joy now leave you sad and hopeless? What is different between your current state of despair and the sense of joy you experienced before the breakup? It is that person. You expected that person to make you happy. You abdicated the responsibility to make yourself happy and transferred it onto your partner. Not only is that not fair to your partner, but it also is not kind to yourself. So how do you prevent such an abdication? You need to be prepared emotionally to lose that person every day. 2) Expectation of Affirmation Our need for affirmation is insatiable. Social media is built on this premise. Humans need to be seen - they need their true selves mirrored back to them. If it happens in their childhood, they can enter adulthood on a firm footing. They are better prepared to face the judgemental nature of modern society. What happens when this mirroring has not taken place at an early age? You will need the world to do it for you. You will jump onto social media, and when you are feeling down or insecure, you will post a photo, send a WhatsApp to 10 friends, and wait for the reply. If no one replies or likes your photo, your feeling of self-worthlessness increases. When you are lucky enough to get into a relationship - this in part removes the risk of being affirmed by strangers - you now have someone who can affirm you 24/7. Your self-esteem becomes linked to this one person and this works well until it doesn't. Your partner starts to sense this neediness and they can react in one of two ways - neither of them is good long-term for you. One is pity and the other is loathing and resentment. Your partner resents the responsibility of having to perform the job that had been unsuccessfully executed by your parents and ends the relationship. For you, this is the ultimate rejection and is an almost fatal body blow to your fragile self-esteem. This is a more complicated malady to cure. The solution is to have zero expectations of affirmation - and the only way you can get to this point is to know who you are and what you are worth. 3) Expectation of Love We expect to be loved unconditionally - in the same way that a parent loves a child. What is the chance of this happening in a romantic relationship? The probability is terrifyingly close to zero. So where does this expectation come from? Again, it comes from childhood. This is where our expectations of love evolve from. When we are lying helpless in our cots, it is our parents that feed us, change our diapers and speak words of encouragement over our lives. We are born with the need to be loved unconditionally for who we are. We look up at these giant superheroes that can lift us out of our cots, feed us, and lift furniture, and we desperately seek their attention. If we don't get it, nothing would be further from our minds than to blame them - we blame ourselves. There must be something woefully inadequate with ourselves for this to happen. This unrequited love makes us vulnerable adults. We go into the grown-up world, and attach ourselves to relationships in the hope our partners will supply us with something that our parents were incapable of doing. Your mother gave birth to you - your father provided the seed for this biological miracle. No one is better geared to provide you with this unconditional love. To expect the same from a romantic partner is delusional, yet many of us do. You need to resign yourself to the fact you will never be loved in the way you expect to be loved. In this department, you will always be disappointed, and the sooner you come to this realization, the less miserable your life will be. 4) Expectation of Honesty Conduct this quick social experiment - go onto any online dating app and count the number of times people stipulate honesty as being an important quality they look for in a romantic partner. I would venture so far as to say more than half express it explicitly, and the other half who don't mention it by name is also looking for it. No one likes to be deceived or lied to. The problem is that deceit is in our nature. This is a self-preservation mechanism that exists within all of us because our ancestors needed it to stay alive. We had to deliver feigned admiration to the leader of the tribe to ingratiate ourselves with them to ensure we were not expelled from it. This expediency has not left us as we have evolved into the modern world as we continue to protect our own interests in everything we do. In romantic relationships, this comes in numerous forms. We might enter a relationship, and express our desire to go all-in, but always hold back. We guard our feelings. We protect our hearts as we embark on an exercise of risk management, where we ask ourselves - what if my partner loses interest in me, what if my partner cheats on me, what if my partner does not love me? We will therefore say things we do not mean and we continue to execute our hidden agenda. Most of the time, this is not nefarious behaviour but simple self-preservation. You, therefore, need to temper your expectation of honesty from your partner. Instead of focusing on what they say, you need to focus on what they do and how they act. To use the old cliche, actions speak louder than words. 5) Expectations of Fidelity You need to ask yourself whether monogamy is natural for humans. Infidelity is part of nature, and in some ways is linked to the fourth point above. We have been led to believe that men cheat more than women, which is debatable. To understand this, you need to consider the asymmetry that exists between men and women when it comes to infidelity. Men who can boast about multiple partners are labeled as studs. Women are labeled sluts. This slut shaming has skewed the poll numbers to the extent that some experts would go so far as to say that women cheat as much if not more than men. The reason for this is simple - women are hypergamous. Hypergamy is the action of marrying or forming a sexual relationship with a person of a superior sociological, educational, or financial background. If you doubt this, consider a paper published in the American Economic Journal. The paper, which looked at the lives of heterosexual men and women working for private companies with 100 or more employees, found that married women were twice as likely to be divorced three years after their promotion to CEO level compared to their male counterparts. In the public sector, using three decades’ worth of records, women mayors and parliamentarians promoted after an election doubled their chances of splitting from their partners; 75% were still married eight years after the vote compared with 85% of those who didn’t get promoted, while there was no evidence of a similar effect for men. Female medical doctors, police officers, and priests who progressed in their careers also followed the trend. Men need to understand that their partner will remain with them only for as long as it serves their purpose. When it comes to women selecting partners, they wait at the finish line and pick the winners. Can men judge women for being hypergamous? Absolutely not - it is part of their biological evolution. They need to guarantee the future of themselves and their children. Women need to shoulder a disproportionate amount of the load when it comes to having children. They are responsible for childbirth, nourishing them, clothing them, and nurturing them through their vulnerable years. It would be unnatural for them not to select the mate that could best help her in this endeavor. She needs to select someone who is smart, reliable, capable, conscientious, and hard-working. So, this is what you need to do. You need to execute a mass transfer of expectations that you have placed in other people and invest them in yourself. Instead of expecting other people to do things for you, concentrate all that responsibility on yourself and take ownership of your outcomes. Stop being a passenger, jump into the driver’s seat, and hit the gas. #lifecoach #motivation #lifecoaching #coaching #love #mindset #coach #inspiration #selflove #life #success #selfcare #lifestyle #mentalhealth #mindfulness #personaldevelopment #entrepreneur #goals #happiness #meditation #loveyourself #healing #motivationalquotes #lifequotes #positivevibes #fitness #businesscoach #motivationalspeaker #business

If you think about life for a while, it is difficult not to come to the conclusion that it is hard. The world is big and we are small and vulnerable. Every time you leave the house, there are multiple disasters that could befall you. As you drive your car along a busy two-way highway, the separation between life and death is a few centimeters. If the oncoming driver had to lose concentration for a split second or be attacked by a bee and swerve into your lane, your life is potentially over. I lived in an active seismic region for 18 years - Mexico City. During that time there were thousands of small earthquakes and a handful of not-so-small quakes. When you swim in the ocean you could fall prey to a great white shark, when you are hiking in the mountains you could be bitten by a cobra. If you smoke too much you get lung cancer, if you stay too long in the sun you get skin cancer if you eat too much sugar you could get diabetes. You are reminded on a daily basis of your own mortality. On a personal level, society will always judge you to be inadequate. Social media will remind you constantly of how full and great the lives of others are, and how shit your life is. Your friends will forget your birthday, they will forget to ask you how you are doing after a loved one died. Your partner may cheat on you, or fall out of love with you and leave you. This could throw you into a deep hole of sadness where you will lose the will to get out of bed in the morning - and even when you do, it is impossible to find joy in anything you do. You find it difficult to make your bed in the morning. The emptiness and quietness of your apartment become deafening. Those walks on the beach you used to find so exhilarating become a boring chore. You find a gift your ex-partner gave you and burst into tears. You drive past their house and are filled with nostalgia and melancholy. Life is full of pain, rejection, and sadness. If that is the case, why is everyone so hell-bent on finding happiness? Should the goal not be a life with less pain, rejection, and sadness? How about a life with less loneliness and anxiety? Modern life is so not suited to mental health. In fact, modern life is doing everything possible to make us mentally ill. Before mass urbanization, we lived in villages and towns. We lived in close-knit communities where everyone looked out for each other. Your town may have been famous for making whisky. That helped to take some of the pressure off you as a person, because you were not only known as Bob, you were Bob from the town that made a shit hot single malt scotch. We now live in a world where anything is possible. Through the internet, we are connected to billions of people. A reality TV star can become president of the strongest country in the world, and a socially awkward South African space nerd can become the wealthiest person in the world. Against this backdrop, even the smallest failures are amplified into bitter disappointments, and with this, our sense of inadequacy grows. You put yourself out there on dating apps and you set yourself up for wholesale rejection. If one guy walks up to one girl and asks her for her number, and is rejected, that is one rejection that most people can recover from. When you go onto a dating app, and set your radius at 100km, and you do not get a single match, that is rejection on a regional basis and is a lot harder to bounce back from. So what is the antidote to all this misery? You need to find meaning in your life. How do you do that? There are two extremes of being - order and chaos. Chaos is a total lack of organization. It is freedom of all responsibility and the freedom to pursue you own selfish pleasures in the endless pursuit of self-gratification. How long do you think the novelty of this would take to wear off? In the beginning, this life of hedonism sounds attractive, but the problem is that humans are not well suited to paradise. Dostoevsky predicts that even when we are sitting in a utopia, we will be eternally ungrateful for the things we have. It'll be so boring and predictable that, against all common sense and rationality, people will start breaking things just to see something else happen. The extreme of chaos is order - that is a life full of rules, regulations, restrictions and curtailment of personal freedoms. That is tyranny and that is not so cool either. So, you are looking for a balance between the two because it is in this balance that you will find meaning in your life. You need to have one foot in the known and one foot in the unknown. Your life cannot be so unpredictable that you have no idea where you are going to sleep tonight or where your next meal is going to come from. By the same token, it cannot be so structured and formal that there is no sense of personal freedom. How do you know you are living on the edge of chaos and order? You tend to lose track of time. You find yourself so enmgrossed in the activity that time flies. The activity absorbs you. Ok, so what kinds of things are we talking about? These activities tend to be meaningful to you. They can be objectively meaningful or you have convinced yourself they are meaningful. Humans need to have a goal, and they need to see themselves making progress towards reaching that goal, and the goal preferably needs to be noble. If your goal is to become the champion of your golf club, there are ways you can convince yourself of the nobility of this goal - it may raise your profile in the club and allow you tp raise money for charity. My point is that the easiest way to find a meaningful goal is to try and serve the needs of others. Goals that focus entirely on self-improvement, and there is no outward-looking element to the goal, tend to be less noble. This does not mean that everyone looking for meaning has to go out and volunteer at a charity - although that is a pretty good start. Many great businesses were started out of the desire to meet an important human need. Facebook was started to meet the need for people to connect with others. Uber out the need to find a safe and reliable taxi without having to stand in the middle of a busy city street. Amazon for the convenience of being able to source almost any product and have it delivered to your house. You need to find that noble aim, work towards it, take responsibility for it, and stand accountable for attaining the goal. That is how you find meaning and how you will make your life more tolerable. #lifecoach#motivation#lifecoaching#coaching#love#mindset#coach#inspiration#selflove#life#success#selfcare#lifestyle#mentalhealth#mindfulness#personaldevelopment#entrepreneur#goals#happiness#meditation#loveyourself#healing#motivationalquotes#lifequotes#positivevibes#fitness#businesscoach#motivationalspeaker#business

If you had to do a poll with a group of men on the street and asked them how many times they have had sex in the past 12 months, I would wager that the number is close to fifty percent. Male masculinity is in a state of crisis. Many men are feeling lost and are struggling. So let's start at the beginning and ask the question, what are masculine traits? Does the marauding Viking that fearlessly goes around the world raping, pillaging, and terrifying the local villagers stand out as the embodiment of masculinity, or is it more complex than that? Viking traits are a good place to start. They display bravery, strength, courage, and confidence but that is only part of the picture. Telling the truth and integrity are also masculine traits. The alignment between things you do and the things you say you do are also marks of a man. There is congruency between what you do in public and what you do in private. Finally, we need to consider the three p’s - protect, preserve, and provide. A big challenge faced by us men today is that our historical roles are no longer relevant. In traditional times, the two key roles of men were warfare and big game hunting - both these roles have been outsourced to the military and commercial supermarkets. This means we now need to find our own new meaning, path, and purpose in the world. There are two ways we can deal with this challenge - we can withdraw into porn and gaming, and become nihilistic, or we can turn our masculinity into a powerful tool to do good. Men are creatures of action - we were explorers. We need to find new frontiers, cross the widest oceans, and climb the highest mountains. We are designed to do hard things, so we need to find new things to conquer. Some of those things are external - running marathons, doing hard things, and pushing our bodies to the limit - but we also need to work on conquering ourselves. The first thing we need to do is get into shape. Why do you think women are attracted to men who are in shape? There is an obvious answer and then a not-so-obvious one. Men in shape are nicer to look at, are better in bed, and are generally healthier - these are the obvious benefits. The less obvious reason is the traits that get men into shape. To get into shape, you need discipline. You need to be prepared to wake up at 5 am to go to the gym. You need to avoid the temptation of pulling into a Mcdonald's drive-thru, and go to the supermarket, and learn how to cook. We need to be driven and goal-orientated. We need to be prepared to do hard things. All these traits take us back to their caveman past - they bring us one step closer to the original purpose of warfare and hunting. Men are not designed to be sat behind computer screens downloading porn and playing video games. Our bodies are designed to be outdoors being exposed to the elements and challenges of our cave-dwelling ancestors. A study in the US showed that the number of men in the US between the ages of 18 and 32 who had not had sex in the past 12 months tripled from 9% to 28% between 2008 and 2018. That is a scary number. What makes the number even scarier is that it does not factor in the alienating impact the pandemic had on men. This number is now likely to be closer to 50 percent. It has to be said that this number also went up for women, but not by nearly as much. More and more men are struggling to find women that are attracted to them and this rejection causes us to retreat into porn and video games. Porn gives us a small dose of reproductive status cues and video games give us a small dose of community and acceptance cues. There are two things that happen when men have children - their testosterone levels drop as does their risk appetite. Fathers don't want to be jumping off cliffs when they have four children at home who depend upon them. The corollary is also true - if there is a growing number of childless men, there should be a spike in testosterone and risk-taking. There should be an increase in incel violence and anti-social behaviour but we are not seeing this. Men are being sedated out of their status and reproductive-seeking drives through porn and video games. Would it be better to have huge groups of over-sexed aggressive men outside breaking shit and causing mayhem or huge groups of men sedated into ineffectiveness? You could argue that one is only marginally better than the other. As men continue down this road of uselessness, they become less and less attractive to the women they so desperately want to attract. So why are more and more men having less sex? Women are hypergamous which means they date across and above their socio-economic status. They will stay away from men that are less successful than they are with regards to socio-economic status, and the reason for this is because biologically they need someone that has the resources, stability, and conscientiousness to raise their children. It is important to differentiate between date and sleep with. By dating, I am talking about a medium to long-term relationship. As for sleeping partners, that is self-explanatory. Women will hook up with men who are below them socio-economically on the basis of pure physical attraction. For example, two married women are chatting about their sex lives. The one says the sex is good, but it is not the best sex of her life. The other replies that she needs to realize the best sex of her life is likely with a man in prison. Now that we have the pure raw physical attraction out of the way, let's return to dating and hypergamy. As more women choose their careers over having children, this has made them more successful socio-economically. Men, on the other hand, are facing the opposite scenario. As the global economy tilts away from muscle on account of robotics and AI, and more to mind, more men are left outside the workforce or working in jobs that are removed from their skill set. This means the pool of datable men is thinning as more men are deemed “undatable”. One also needs to go back to purpose. Traditional male purposes such as fighting wars, hunting game, being a breadwinner, and being the protector of the family are receding into the background. So what do men need to do to address this problem? They need to find a purpose, and in order to understand this, consider this crazy story. During the Second World War, London was being bombed in an episode known as The Blitz. Given that most of the able-bodied men were fighting in Europe, and the women were forced to work in the armament factories, there was no one left to drive the ambulances and fire trucks to collect casualties affected by the bombing and put out fires. Psychiatric male patients, many of whom had been catatonic for more than 10 years, rose to the challenge to drive these ambulances, showing if men are given a purpose and the tools to achieve it, they will do everything in their power to achieve it. So this ever-growing number of high-value women is chasing an ever-decreasing number of high-value men and this is not good for either sex. If men are losing, so to are the women. As the top men work through this large body of women, one common trait is that the men are not looking for commitment. The net result is that the women are left heartbroken because the majority of them are looking for something longer-term and more meaningful. The solution is not to force women to lower their standards - they have the right to be with men to whom they are truly attracted. It is the men that need to level up and improve their games and find their purposes. Men and women are made to be together - we are social beings. We need the intimacy of a partner. Research shows that married couples, or couples that love together, live longer, and have a lower incidence of mental disorders like Alzheimer's and dementia. The worst punishment is solitary confinement. Social isolation significantly increased a person's risk of premature death from all causes, a risk that may rival those of smoking, obesity, and physical inactivity. Social isolation was associated with about a 50% increased risk of dementia. The mating crisis is not good for society in general. Why is online dating so destructive? It makes relationships disposable. If a relationship doesn't work out, you jump back on Tinder and swipe until you find a better model. It is like a disposable razor. It cheapens relationships - it contributes to the decay in the dating marketplace. If you get into a relationship that started online, and after a couple of months you confront some problems, what is the probability that you are going to spend time and effort trying to resolve these issues when you can trade your partner in for a shinier and newer model? Men are being branded as pathological and oppressive. They are made to feel ashamed of their masculinity and this is creating some horrifying results. To understand the true impact of this, you need to understand the difference between rights and obligations. They are two sides of the same coin. One man's right is another man's obligation. I am a financial guy and I spent most of my career in the financial derivatives market - options, futures, forwards, and swaps. When I sell you an option to buy Amazon stock at 100, if Amazon shoots up to 200, it is my obligation to deliver that share at 100 even though it does not suit me. It is inherent in men to provide, protect and preserve. This is part of our caveman DNA. We want to meet a woman, get married, and start a family. The problem is that when we look at all these obligations, we are hard-pressed to find the rights that come with these obligations. What am I talking about? Family law does not favour the man. It very much favours the woman and seeks to demonize the man. If you have the time, and you should make the time, go to YouTube and watch the interview between Jordan Peterson and Greg Ellis. Greg Ellis is a British actor best known for his portrayal of Lieutenant Theodore Groves in Pirates of the Caribbean. His life was destroyed by his ex-wife. One day he was spending time with his two sons at their family home when the doorbell rang and police shackled and led him away based on a call from his then-wife that he planned to harm his children. Overnight he became homeless. Although he was later vindicated of the abuse allegations, he ultimately lost custody of his children and his wife became his sworn enemy. He then wrote a book entitled The Respondent: Exposing the Cartel of Family Law, in which he discusses how since the 1970s, the advancement of women's rights has, for all its virtues, authored a third and fourth wave feminism that is determined to emasculate men. He states that it places men in a position every bit as destructive and oppressive as the one faced by women faced in the 1950s. Take a quick look at these stats from the book. In 1960, 8 percent of children lived only with their biological mother - today more than 23 percent do. Women initiate the vast majority of divorce proceedings. Mothers wind up with custody most of the time. Are they the overwhelmingly worthier parent? Of course not. But the average father must fight within this gender-based construct. Most men lose before they even step foot in the courtroom and walk out as mere visitors in their children's lives. In addition, many men are taking their own lives when caught in the divorce system - it is believed they are eight times more likely to take their own lives. That means that for every child of divorce who loses their mother to suicide, eight lose a father. When faced with this reality, what is the natural reaction of men? The majority fall into the Peter Pan syndrome. They want to take on the responsibilities of adulthood but they are scared shitless. Peter Pan pushed back on sacrificing his youth and becoming an adult because the only adult he knew was Captain Hook who was bad-tempered and treated his crew like dogs. Also, he had a hook. So Pan looks at him and thinks, shit, I don't want to be like this guy, so he remains a child, becomes the leader of the Lost Boys, forgoes a meaningful relationship with Wendy, and fantasizes about Tinkerbell who in modern interpretation can be thought to represent porn. Men today are looking at the risks associated with being men, and are thinking the same things as Peter Pan. They are thinking: so you want me to take on all the obligations of being a man, a father, and a breadwinner but without the rights? Society is going to brand my masculinity as toxic, people will say my success can only be attributed to the male-dominated hierarchy, and women can use the legal system to accuse me of sexual harassment and deprive me of access to my kids. Fuck that shit. I would rather withdraw into a world of video gaming and porn which is a safer and "happier" option. The problem is that it may be safe, but it is far from happy. They are miserable, alone, and deeply unhappy - and this forces them into a horrible downward spiral. The more they withdraw, the less successful they become professionally, the more out of shape they get, the more their self-esteem drops, and the less likely they will be found attractive by the opposite sex. Women are drawn to successful, confident, driven, and hard-working men. They are not drawn to desperate, anxious, and out-of-shape men with low testosterone levels and high feelings of insecurity. Another problem is that this not only affects men, it affects many women. Women are not the enemy - they want and deserve high-value men. As this pool of high-value men gets shallower, so too are there fewer men to go around. Given that most super high-value men are more focused on their careers than building long-term relationships, many women who cross paths with them are left heartbroken and sad. So heartbroken and sad women, coupled with anxious and underperforming men are a lethal societal combination that is not good for humanity. So what is the solution? The first step is to join a tribe of like-minded men, and here is why. For 99% of human existence, we lived in communities. These were groups of twenty to thirty people who lived together, worked together, and died together. Then we started living in apartments, condominiums, and suburbs. We started working with people with whom we did not share the same values. We started eating alone. In 1954, Swanson invented the TV dinner. Millions of lonely people set up their folding tables in front of their TVs. Urbanization and urban densification officially put an end to our tribal existence, and we are now paying the psychological price. So what happens to life outside of this tightly-knit community? The first thing that happens is that we become acutely aware of being lonely, and therefore become very concerned about finding that special something/someone that will complete our lives and make us eternally happy. Our need for connection can morph into a strong desire for success, fame, and recognition when maybe all we need is some good friends. Million Man is a tribe – it is a place where we can regroup, lick our wounds, bitch and moan about the women in our lives, and then work on a collective plan to get ourselves out of this hole we are all in. The trick is to unteach ourselves from all the lies we have learned about being a man. Here are FOUR reasons you should join the Million Man tribe. 1) Being Part of a Group There is strength in numbers. When you are part of a tribe, you are accountable to other people. This sense of connection helps to build your sense of self-worth. You become recognized. Your contribution is valued. You feel supported. It takes the pressure off you because you realize you are part of something bigger than yourself. 2) Sense of Purpose Men today are battling to find purpose and meaning. They have no interest in religion and the traditional purpose of being the breadwinner in a family is fading as fewer young people are getting married. Million Man is founded on the purpose of building high-value men. It is this common purpose that will provide you with direction and a sense of purpose. 3) Support “Boys don’t cry”. “Take it like a man”. All these cliches have a place. We are men. We are strong and you can rely on us. But men also need support. We need people to talk to and we need a non-judgmental place to do this. We need a manly tribe. 4) Battling Loneliness The modern world is lonelier than the world that preceded it. We have never been more connected, yet we have never been so lonely. Loneliness is the disease of the 21st century. Million Man aims to put an end to that. Million Man is built on 4 uncompromising foundations: 1) Kindness – high-value men are friendly, generous, and considerate. 2) Shared vulnerability – a tribe is a place where we can be open about our worries and anxieties, and the problems that throw us off balance. 3) Understanding – everyone has their own quirks and idiosyncrasies. We embrace and learn from our differences. 4) Reassurance - we believe that everyone (man, woman, and child) has a special superpower. We have the ability to give something to other people that these people crave, and that is reassurance. We are all haunted by doubts about our value. We are all concerned about the future. We are haunted by things we have done – they cause guilt and embarrassment. Everyone you meet, regardless of who they are, is plagued by varying degrees of insecurity. Can you believe that even supermodels are insecure about their appearances? These people are desperately waiting for someone to say something to them. Million Man believes in the power of reassurance. Members need to hear they have a right to exist, and that we are on their side. Words like: “I think you are going to be fine”, “everyone goes through this”, and “there is nothing to be ashamed of”. #lifecoach #motivation #lifecoaching #coaching #love #mindset #coach #inspiration #selflove #life #success #selfcare #lifestyle #mentalhealth #mindfulness #personaldevelopment #entrepreneur #goals #happiness #meditation #loveyourself #healing #motivationalquotes #lifequotes #positivevibes #fitness #businesscoach #motivationalspeaker #business

Emotional immaturity is simple to define but more complicated to identify. Emotionally immature people are ruled by their emotions, they have no control over them, and most of their decisions are based on how they are feeling. It is dangerous to be in a relationship with this kind of person. In this blog, we will look at different ways in which emotional immaturity can manifest in your girlfriend. 1) She cannot talk about Her Emotions She is unable to verbalize how she feels in any depth. She will say she is angry, upset, or confused but will not be able to explain why she is feeling these emotions. The way she expresses her emotions is through her actions. She may ignore your messages for a couple of days, or after you try to have a deep conversation, she will ask if you could have it some other time, in a different situation. 2) She is a Runner She does not know how to handle stress, and when a problem arises, she would rather break up than figure out how to fix the situation. She will say things like “I cannot see how we can fix this”. She has limited tools at her disposal to cope with stress. She’s not emotionally capable of handling the stressors in her life — although she could develop this capacity. She may be doing the best she can for her level of growth at that moment. 3) No Compromise She is inflexible. Plans need to be made around her, and if they are not done in this way, she is unhappy. This inability to put herself in the shoes of someone can be tiresome and will sap your energy. 4) She Feels Entitled If you’ve ever met a “Karen”, you likely recognize the signs of emotional immaturity. The set of behaviors our society has named “Karen” include weaponized privilege and a sense of entitlement. Her perception is that the world revolves around her, and when things don’t go her way, she assumes it’s unfair. 5) She Demands Attention Another common red flag a woman is emotionally immature is she demands attention rather than asks for it. She doesn’t want you to spend time with your friends or family. She expects her friends to drop everything to be there for her at any hour. She doesn’t ask for what she wants. She demands and expects it. 6) She Takes Everything Personally She takes other people’s behaviors personally. The emotionally immature woman assumes every action and reaction is in direct response to her presence. 7) She Gets Defensive When Confronted Emotional immaturity also comes out when she’s confronted about her behaviors. You’ll recognize her immediate defensiveness. Because she’s uncomfortable, she may try to direct the blame on you or find a way to shift the attention away from her feelings of humiliation, rejection, or disappointment. Because she hasn’t learned to articulate her feelings, it’s easier to react — badly — to any confrontation, no matter how gentle. 8) She Has a History of High Drama Relationships She has a history of high drama. It’s not just in her romantic relationships either. Her family relationships and friendships are equally filled with conflict. Every story she recounts of drama shows evidence of her lack of emotional maturity. She hasn’t learned to manage conflict, communicate calmly, or address her feelings. 9) She Cannot Admit to Mistakes and Will Not Apologize for her Behaviour She will not apologize for her behavior. In fact, if you get an apology at all, it will be the kind that avoids responsibility and actually makes her behavior someone else’s fault. 10) She Holds a Grudge It’s unsurprising that a woman who is emotionally immature is a champion grudge holder. She doesn’t yet see the value in forgiving, and she’s never seen the benefit of forgetting either. Instead, she is likely to bring up past conflicts in every single new one. So, there you have it guys. You want to stay away from these people like the plague. Life is hard enough as it is, but to find yourself in a relationship with an emotionally immature person will systematically suck all the enjoyment out of life and leave you stressed out and brokenhearted. #lifecoach#motivation#lifecoaching#coaching#love#mindset#coach#inspiration#selflove#life#success#selfcare#lifestyle#mentalhealth#mindfulness#personaldevelopment#entrepreneur#goals#happiness#meditation#loveyourself#healing#motivationalquotes#lifequotes#positivevibes#fitness#businesscoach#motivationalspeaker#business

Life is hard enough as it is, and sometimes we men make it harder than it should be. This was not an easy blog to write because it is written in a negative tone. I like to be constructive and positive in my language so bear with me while I work through the eight things that we as men do to fuck up our lives. In my defense, I do offer some positive guidance to assist in the process of course correction. 1) We Stumble into Toxic Relationships The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said you are the average of the five people with whom you spend the most time. If we hang around toxic, manipulative, entitled, and negative people we will soon start to adopt these traits. As we grow older, we start to spend less time with our friends and more time with our significant others - girlfriends and wives. They start to have a disproportionate influence over the way we act and behave. Our choice of romantic partner is one of the most important decisions we will make in our life. In a perfect world, we will make one great choice and we are done. Other people, myself included, need to make this choice a few times and hopefully, we eventually make the right one. What are we looking for in a partner? In my twenties, she had to be hot and available but as I have moved past my half-century, my priorities have changed. Sure physical attraction is important, but as you mature you realize that there are other key qualities such as intellectual, emotional, and lifestyle compatability. But let's get back to the red flags that toxic people exhibit. The first red flag is someone who looks to you for constant validation. We know the motivation of most women on social media. They are looking for validation. When you enter into a relationship with them you will become an additional source of validation. I would therefore recommend spending some time on the social media accounts of your prospective partner, and if they are super active in posting pouty selfies, you may want to steer clear. The second red flag is if she is always negative about current and past relationships. She may complain constantly about her parents, previous boyfriends, or current girlfriends/colleagues. A friend of mine once gave me some interesting advice. When your girl gets home from work and starts rattling off about her shit day, the winning strategy is the following: every 45 seconds say "that bitch is crazy!". Another strategy is to avoid these kinds of women. Sure, even the good ones need to rant a little, but when this becomes part of her daily afternoon routine, you want to run for the hills. The third red flag is when your partner competes with you. You want your partner to support you in your endeavors, your goals, and your ambitions. After all, she is your partner - you are supposed to complement one another and not work against one another. Competitive signs in a relationship include constantly trying to outdo your partner, feeling excited when your partner fails, and finding yourself secretly jealous when they succeed. Does your partner attempt to win every argument? Is there no excitement and pride from your partner when you tell her you just closed a big deal at work? Does she belittle what you have achieved? Does your partner make you feel guilty when you need to work late? Does your partner like to point out what is wrong with you? Does your partner scold you as if you were a child? If you answered yes to any of these questions, there is a high probability that she is competing with you and you need to try and fix this or get out. The fourth red flag is whether your partner is a single mother. This comes with a few caveats because not all single moms are like this, but the majority are. A single mother will always put the interests of her children above you, and that is perfectly natural. In fact, it would be another red flag if she did not. I am amazed by how highly single mothers value themselves in the sexual marketplace. I have seen profiles of single moms on dating sites where they have a long list of things they demand from a man. The reality is that their market value is not nearly as high as they think for the following reasons. They are experts in exit strategies. They have done it at least once before, and they will do it again. If you get involved with a single mom, you need to know this. The sex is going to be great, she will do everything she can to get you hooked on her, but when that attraction wanes or she comes into contact with a better option, she will drop you like a wet sack of potatoes. Trust me - I have experience in this area. Single moms stand by the finish line and pick the winners. In fact, all women do that but single moms are more viscous because they have their own and the children's interests far above your interests. You will be left scratching your head wondering what the fuck went wrong. If you get into a relationship with a single mom, you will observe how she tolerates bad behaviour from her kids against you. When the kids are well-behaved, they are her kids. When they don't, they are "our" kids and she will never take your side against them. Relationships are hard enough - taking on a single mom means taking on a new layer of complexity that will handicap the relationship from the offset. The fifth red flag is the woman's sexual history. Women are concerned about men's futures while men are concerned about women's past. Sex is not simply a physical act. There is a strong emotional aspect to it, and by sex, I am referring to physical penetrative sex between a man and a woman. I am not talking about only oral sex, phone sex, or tantric sex. A woman with a high notch count has given a bit of her soul to each man she has fucked, which means she has less soul to give to you. A woman with a high notch count is like a car with a couple of hundred km on the clock. It is loose, and rattles, things below the surface are broken and it is going to give you a handful of problems in the future. Red flag number six is the lack of shared values. This is a bit of a no-brainer but many men look past this flag, especially if the woman is hot and or is great in bed. Common values are loyalty, openness, prudence, resilience, responsibility, self-respect, and honesty. Out the gate, you can see why the failure to value honesty should be a deal breaker. The problem is that dishonesty is not something that women put on their business cards. Neither is a lack of transparency and impudence. You will need to test for these qualities, and the quicker you can get the blood back to your brain from your penis, the happier your life is going to be. You need to remember that deceptive and manipulative women are experts at what they do. They have been mastering these evil skills their entire lives and you will need to work hard to find the truth. Values also go hand in hand with lifestyle. Does she place a high value on staying in shape, having an active lifestyle, and eating healthily, or does she prefer to party all night, sleep all day and binge on junk food? This kind of relationship will in likelihood lead you to abandon your healthy lifestyle in favour of hers - especially if she is hot and or great in bed. Men are terrible when it comes to compromising their values and lifestyle for attractive women. Red flag number seven is when people you love do not like her. This is a great test because when men are in relationships their thinking and emotions tend to be impaired. There is an old joke that a man's IQ is cut in half when faced with female cleavage - a 50 percent decline per breast! Given this impaired judgment, you need to seek out independent and impartial arbiters, and no one is better suited to this job than people who love you - friends and family. If these arbiters have reservations about her, this is a monumental red flag and one that should be taken seriously. Another red flag linked to this is when your personality changes when around her - it means you are not yourself around her and feel the need to put up an act. Red flag number eight is a victim mentality. There are women in this world who believe the world is conspiring against them. They do not take ownership of their failures, they blame ex-boyfriends or husbands for breakups and do not own their mistakes. She will never admit when she is wrong, will never apologize and her victim mentality is her way of avoiding accountability. You will spend the entire relationship apologizing to these women for things you never did and trying to justify your actions - this is not a happy place to be in. Red flag number nine is that she loves drama. Women tend to be more dramatic than men - this is part of the reason why the majority of soap opera watchers are women (although a recent New York Times article indicated the number of male watchers is increasing!) Women who love drama always have something upsetting happening in their lives and this emotional upheaval is part of their daily routine. They are always fighting with someone, be it a work colleague, a sibling, a friend, or a parent. The final red flag is that she is a toxic feminist and this is where I am going to get into hot water. She will call your masculinity toxic, she will make you feel bad about traditional masculine qualities like confidence, courage, provision, and protection. She will be more than happy for you to pick up the bill at the restaurant, but then make you feel guilty when she washes the dishes, cooks for you, or does anything that falls within the typical female stereotype. Getting into relationships with toxic feminists is too much like hard work, and the sex is unlikely to be great because you will be wrestling each other over who needs to be on top. 2) We Cannot Verbalize Our Intentions and Feelings Men are both powerful and very ineffectual communicators. We are good at motivating other people, at communicating external elements like business plans, strategies, objectives, and goals, but we are terrible at communicating our personal goals, objectives, and strategies. We like tangible things that can be easily measured. We like sales targets, sports scores, and training plans. We can spend hours communicating on these and developing strategies to achieve them, but we are fucking useless looking internally and verbalizing what is happening in our heads and our hearts. We are unable to communicate this to ourselves and to those closest to us and this is exceedingly problematic. There are a number of reasons why we are so chronically bad at this communication. In the past, our roles were clearly defined. Our purpose was to go out and hunt, fight wars, or be fathers/providers/protectors for our families. No one really gave a fuck about how we felt. We didn't have time to deal with these issues because we had no option - we had to be brave, courageous, in control, and focused on the job at hand. These days, most of these roles have evaporated. We have supermarkets, and professional soldiers fighting the wars, and many of us are either single or divorced with limited access to our kids. This means we need to ask the questions - what is my purpose, how do I feel? The world does not care how men feel. We form part of the most privileged half of society. We are part of the male dominance hierarchy which means we are not afforded the luxury of having feelings. We have been taught that boys don't cry, that we should suck it up and grow a pair. Unless we learn how to communicate our intentions and feelings, we are going to be left behind crippled by our demons. So what is the way out of this? We need to find a safe space within which we can communicate. What does a safe space look like? We need to find a place where we can be completely vulnerable where there can be no fear of judgment and nothing that is said can be used against us at some future date. How vulnerable can we afford to be in front of our partner? This is where things in my opinion get a little tricky. Romantic partnerships are built on many of the same things as non-romantic relationships - trust, honesty, shared values, and vulnerability. There is however one element that is peculiar to romantic relationships and this is desire, and desire is one thing that cannot be negotiated. The desire that a woman has for a man is primal - it goes to the very core of her biological needs, and many men have trouble understanding this. Women will tell you what they are attracted to. If you ask ten women they will get back to you with similar responses. They like someone who is well groomed, confident, interesting, has a good sense of humour, and has a positive economic future. Ask them for the kind of men they desire, there will be an overlap but they typically will have someone like Ragnar from Vikings in mind. That raw physical and sexual appeal of a strong man that doesn't take any shit from anyone and gets things done. Women are often attracted to the bad boy. This has been distilled into the term the dark triad personality traits. The term was first coined in 2002 by Delroy L Paulus and Kevin M Williams. The traits are as follows: narcissism (characterized by grandiosity, pride, egotism, and lack of empathy), Machiavellianism (characterized by manipulation and exploitation of others, and a sense of morality, lack of emotion, and a higher level of self-interest) and psychopathy (characterized by continuous antisocial behaviour, impulsivity, callous and unemotional traits, and remorselessness). Studies have suggested that on average, those that exhibit dark triad personality traits have an accelerated mating strategy reporting more sexual partners, more favorable attitudes towards casual sex, a tendency to steel mates from others, more risk-taking in the form of substance abuse, limited self-control, and a pragmatic and game-playing romance style. These are the men that most women lust and fantasize over. One also needs to understand rape fantasy. Studies have found rape fantasy is a common sexual fantasy among both men and women. The most frequently cited hypothesis for why women fantasize about being forced and coerced into some sexual activity is that the fantasy avoids societally induced guilt- the woman does not have to admit responsibility for her sexual desires and behaviours. So what does this have to do with men having to find a safe space to communicate honestly and showing vulnerability? When you are in a relationship, you want to maintain a healthy balance of attraction and desire. In other words, you want your woman to both be attracted to you and to desire you. I am not saying you need to adopt dark triad traits, but you need to be able to understand that these traits do create genuine primal desire. It also stands to reason that the opposite traits will detract from desire. This means being overly weak, vulnerable, and agreeable may force your woman to have less desire for you. What many men don't understand is that desire cannot be negotiated. Men know that women love men who are handy around the house - guys who can unclog the drain, repair the garbage disposal and fix the washing machine. Men also need to realize that these actions, although they may increase attraction because it shows you are capable and conscientious, they are not going to make her lust after you. My point is this, if you feel your woman's lust for you is waning, unblocking the gutters of the house is not going to get her desire up. Telling her how anxious and vulnerable you feel about the future will do the exact opposite. I am not advocating for extreme stoicism in your romantic relationships, but I don't think complete honesty about your deepest fears and insecurities is a winning strategy. You need a tribe. For 99% of human existence, we lived in communities. These were groups of twenty to thirty people who lived together, worked together, and died together. Then we started living in apartments, condominiums, and suburbs. We started working with people with whom we did not share the same values. We started eating alone. In 1954, Swanson invented the TV dinner. Millions of lonely people set up their folding tables in front of their TVs. Urbanization and urban densification officially put an end to our tribal existence, and we are now paying the psychological price. So what happens to life outside of this tightly-knit community? The first thing that happens is that we become acutely aware of being lonely, and therefore become very concerned about finding that special something/someone that will complete our lives and make us eternally happy. Our need for connection can morph into a strong desire for success, fame, and recognition when maybe all we need is some good friends. Million Man is a tribe – it is a place where we can regroup, lick our wounds, bitch and moan about the women in our lives, and then work on a collective plan to get ourselves out of this hole we are all in. The trick is to unteach ourselves from all the lies we have learned about being a man. Here are FOUR reasons you should join the Million Man tribe. 1) Being Part of a Group There is strength in numbers. When you are part of a tribe, you are accountable to other people. This sense of connection helps to build your sense of self-worth. You become recognized. Your contribution is valued. You feel supported. It takes the pressure off you because you realize you are part of something bigger than yourself. 2) Sense of Purpose Men today are battling to find purpose and meaning. They have no interest in religion and the traditional purpose of being the breadwinner in a family is fading as fewer young people are getting married. Million Man is founded on the purpose of building high-value men. It is this common purpose that will provide you with direction and a sense of purpose. 3) Support “Boys don’t cry”. “Take it like a man”. All these cliches have a place. We are men. We are strong and you can rely on us. But men also need support. We need people to talk to and we need a non-judgmental place to do this. We need a manly tribe. 4) Battling Loneliness The modern world is lonelier than the world that preceded it. We have never been more connected, yet we have never been so lonely. Loneliness is the disease of the 21st century. Million Man aims to put an end to that. 3) We Lack Discipline and Consistency A man can have the greatest skills in the world. He could be endowed with masterful powers of persuasion, ungodly charisma, and unlimited talent when it comes to closing business transactions, but if there is no discipline and consistency, he will always operate below his potential. This goes back to the age-old debate of talent over hard work. Talent can only get you so far if you are unable to couple this with discipline and hard work you will never be more than an also-ran. In the Bible, you will find the parable of the talents in the book of Matthew. The master of a household is about to leave on a business trip and he decides to entrust his property to three servants. According to the abilities of each man, one servant received 5 talents, the second received two, and the third received only one. In this parable, talent refers to an amount of money and not to a physical talent. We also know that at that time, eight talents represented a large amount of money. Upon returning home after a long absence, the master called his servants to account for their activities during his absence. The first two servants proudly announced that they had put the money to work and they both had doubled the money entrusted to them. Servant one returned 10 talents and the second servant returned four talents. The master congratulated them for their conscientiousness. The third servant however had merely hidden the talent. He was risk averse and did not want to incur the wrath of his master should something happen to the money. The master rebuked the servant, calling him lazy and slothful. The master then took one talent away from the last servant and gave it to the first servant. The third servant was then cast out of the household into the darkness where there was weeping and gnashing of teeth. This final reference is believed to be referring to hell. The takeaway from this parable is that it does not matter what talents you have been given, it is what you do with these talents that are important. We live in a world where talk is cheap. There is no shortage of talking heads on social media telling people what to do, and there is no shortage of people that spend most of their time talking about this information. They acquire the knowledge and skills but they seldom implement what they have learned. The self-help industry is built on this need for repeat business. The gurus are more interested in selling their next book, next course, or next training session than truly helping their customers go out into the world and execute the knowledge they have acquired. This is not unlike the healthcare industry. Pharmaceutical companies have limited interest in curing their customers. They have a stronger interest in treating the symptoms for as long as possible. After all, if the customer can find a way to treat the core of the problem, he will no longer need the drugs that the pharma companies manufacture and then lose a loyal paying customer. Someone with lots of time on their hands conducted an interesting study on LinkedIn profiles. They analyzed a large set of professional profiles and focused on two keywords - namely "strategize" and "execute". They noticed that the former verb appeared 100 times more frequently than the latter. This indicates that people spend more time thinking about what they are going to do than they actually spend executing what they need to do. There seems to be an abundance of talent and good intentions out there - but we seem to be a little light on the hard work of putting plans into action and executing them. Men fuck up their lives by failing to get things done. They are not prepared to put in the hard work. They are afraid of discipline and consistency, and there are two reasons for this - the lack of patience and the fear of the thought of hard work. So what can we do to address this? Firstly we need to change our relationship with time. We are impatient. In a world where you can order a taxi off your phone, stream any movie you want in seconds, and access all your favorite songs in one place we have become accustomed to instant gratification. It is a low-value man who is not able to delay his gratification until sometime in the future. It is a weak and ineffectual man who is unable to appreciate the need to make small changes in their life every day and wait for these changes to compound into wonderful transformations in years and decades. Bill Gates said that we overestimate what we can do in one year and underestimate what we can do in 20 years. If you hit the gym now after a sedentary life, will you get jacked in a week or a month? Of course not. It may take you six months before you feel comfortable looking at yourself naked in front of the mirror. Worthwhile things are hard. If they were easy, they would not be worthwhile. Hard things require discipline and consistency, and patience. Let me tell you something that many people fail to understand. The journey is more exciting than the destination. If your goal is to develop a body that could be thrown onto the cover of GQ magazine, how do you think you will feel when you achieve your goal? Sure, you will be stoked to see yourself on the cover, but now that you have reached your goal, the game is over. You now need to find a new game. The real fun was all the workouts, it was the progression, the first sight of developing a six-pack, it was the cute girl walking past you when you were doing leg extensions, it was someone coming up to you in the locker room asking for help on his routine, or a kid asking you to spot his technique on lateral pulldowns. You need to fall in love with the journey and never take your eye off the prize. You need to take delight in not pulling up to the Mcdonald's drive-thru and instead choosing to cook boiled chicken breast and veggies for dinner. The reason we procrastinate is not that we are afraid of hard work, it is because we are afraid of the thought of hard work. Our bodies are made to work long hours, pick up heavy weights, run long distances, and do the hard stuff. Our bodies and minds react well under stress. We need to consistently put ourselves under pressure because this is how we grow and evolve. Humans are not suited to paradise - we need to be moving towards a goal. This is when we feel most actualized and happy. You need to find your purpose and work consistently and diligently towards the goal. 4) We Talk Shit to Ourselves What is the quality of your internal dialogue - those little conversations you have with yourself in the quiet lonely hours of the morning? Do those voices say you are a worthless piece of shit, that nothing good will come of your life, and that you don't deserve to be loved? Or do they say that you rock as a human being? If you are honest with yourself, you have both. Even the most evolved, confident, successful, and fulfilled men in the world are faced with moments of self-doubt, anxiety, and uncertainty. The difference between winners and losers in this world is where you locate these inner selves in the car journey of your life. We all have two selves riding along with us - the one is your inner god and the other is your inner devil. The biggest challenge we face is that your inner devil loves to talk and he loves to talk shit about you, your loved ones, and the people you deal with daily. If he is riding shotgun with you, then you are fucked, because he will drown out your inner god. The good thing is that he is predictable, in that he seems to tell the same lies to everyone. These lies can be divided into two categories - major league and minor league lies. Let's start with the minors. These are those soft and self-deprecating whispers that seem to be innocuous. The most common is forgetting where you put your keys, or you leave your phone on the roof of your car, or you go away for a weekend, leave the milk out and when you get home it has left a rancid odor in your kitchen. That little voice says you are a bloody idiot. You may even verbalize these incidents to friends, or tell self-deprecating jokes and everyone laughs with you. These small harmless voices are the gateway to the major leagues. Pretty soon you start to build on these negative messages. You go back to events in your childhood. Maybe your maths teacher said you were stupid, or an ex-girlfriend said you were ugly, and then the mind starts to run wild. Your inner devil jumps out of the trunk and is riding shotgun with you. It tells you your mother never loved you, that you are lazy and stupid, and that no one will ever love you. These internal conversations are going to mold your self-esteem. Your job is to master those voices, and the way you do that is simple- make sure it's your inner god riding in front with you and your inner devil is gagged with duct tape and tied up in the trunk. Sure, there will be days when he weasels his way out of the trunk and gets back into the front seat, but you need to be a mercenary and get him back where he belongs. Your internal dialogue has to sound like this: I am awesome, I am the top dog, I am the master of my emotions, I am the master of my money, people want to be around me, I am an important member of my family and community, I can be counted on when things get tough, I stand up for what I believe in, I speak out against injustices, I am fiercely loyal to those that I love, I am not a victim of my past, I am writing my future. You will notice that not once did I use the word deserve. I hate to break this to you but you don't deserve anything. You are not entitled to anything- everything you have is the fruit of your hard work, dedication, discipline, and perseverance. The best way to take charge of your internal conversations is through getting out into the world and getting shit done. The worst way to control the internal dialogue is by being passive, procrastinating, and numbing yourself with comfort and pleasure. Put yourself in difficult situations - instead of scrolling mindlessly through TikTok, hit the deck and do 400 push-ups. Instead of binge-watching on Netflix, hit the gym or go for a run, or cut the grass in your yard. Make your bed, clean your house, walk the dog - fuck, do whatever it takes to be active, and productive, and make a dent in the universe. The Bible says you should despise not the day of small things - small actions repeated over time compound to extraordinary things over the medium to long term. 5) We are Spectators in Our Own Lives I love sports - any sports. As a kid, I used to watch for hours and it didn't matter what sport was on. I would watch five-day cricket games - for those unfamiliar with the colonial sport of cricket, it is like baseball but games can last for five days and it is still possible to end without a result. As I grew up, I watched less sports and started to execute my mission. Now, I hardly watch any sport - I might go to the odd live rugby game in Cape Town, or catch highlights of the Tour de France, or the Ironman World Champs, but now the algebra has changed. I want to be out there executing. I want to do more sports than I watch. There is no time to numb yourself out in front of a TV screen. One massive problem we have today is that there are too many distractions that lead us off the path to fulfillment and the execution of a full life. Sometimes, these distractions are obvious - binge-watching a series on Netflix is an obvious waste of time. Sometimes, the distraction is less obvious because we have convinced ourselves that what we are doing is helping us get closer to our goal, and I often fall into this trap. I am a type A personality. I need to be busy to be happy - I need to be moving forward toward a goal to feel satisfied. When I lay my head on the pillow at night, the only way I can feel satisfied is if I feel physically exhausted. The problem is that often I look back at my day, and I am mortified by the missed opportunities and time wasted watching self-help videos on YouTube. At times I find myself having substituted my love for watching sports, with a love for watching videos about self-development, self-realization, coaching, and motivation. Self-help videos are not necessarily bad things - there is some great content that can be extracted, but let me tell you when they can be bad - when they are used as a tool to distract and delay you from the task of executing your mission. If you want to start a coaching business, you will go online and start consuming content. The algorithm will pick up on this, and start pushing your content. Up until now, all is good. The problem arises when you convince yourself that consumption of this content is part of the strategy and you slip into the role of spectator. Being a spectator is a passive exercise. You will soon pick up that all the content is the same. It is all derivative - it is all based on a few sore principles packaged in a different wrapper. You are wasting your time, and the worst part of it is that you think your time is being productively spent. Strategizing is easy - anyone can sit down and write a business plan. The hard part is execution. Very few people can execute a business plan because that requires hard work, and humans are chronic procrastinators. We are not afraid of work, but we are afraid of the thought of work because our feeble brains will quickly invent ten reasons why we should remain spectators. This goes back to our caveman biology. We are risk averse - we all default to self-preservation mode when faced with a challenge. When our cave-dwelling ancestors were walking through the savannah and came across a pride of hungry lions, they would course correct and give the savage cats a wide berth and pray they would not find themselves on the dinner menu. Why is it that we found it so challenging to make those ten sales calls? Why is it that we are afraid to be more aggressive in answering the objections of a prospective customer? Why is it that we don't speak up when someone makes a racist comment? We are afraid of rejection. We are afraid of what people think about us - we are people pleasers and we will go to the ends of the earth to make sure we are liked. This means we don't like to rock the boat or challenge the status quo. That is why we prefer to be passengers on the outside watching life unfold. But at the end of the day, how does being a passenger make you feel? When you wake up at 10 am on a Sunday morning after binge-watching Netflix until 2 in the morning, do you feel like a winner, or do you feel your time would have been better served by hitting the sack at 10 pm, waking up at 6 am and going for a 10-mile run? There is nothing less satisfying than being a passive passenger in your own life, and not executing your mission. You know that you are destined for greater things. We all have a strong underlying belief that we were put on this earth to do great things - to serve others, to be pillars in our communities and families, and to enrich the lives of others. It has never been easier to be a spectator because, in the history of all mankind, we have never had so many distractions. Take a look at the breakdown of global Internet traffic - 14.9% is Netflix, 11.6% is YouTube, 4.5% is Disney, 3.9% is TikTok, 3% is Playstation downloads, 2.9% Xbox live, and 2.8% Prime Video and Facebook respectively. This means that almost half of the total internet traffic is dedicated to spectator or gaming, neither of which are useful activities. It is then estimated that 35% of internet downloads are pornographic in nature. These are terrifying numbers. The only conclusion is that never before in the history of the world have we been more passive and more distracted, and this is making us miserable and anxious. The best antidote to anxiety is action. If you want to feel small, insignificant, anxious, and depressed, the best thing to do is stay at home behind your laptop scrolling aimlessly through social media, YouTube, and TikTok watching other people run their lives. If you want to be fulfilled, realized, and happy, get out into the world and get shit done without any apologies and free of the fear of what other people think about you. Self-consciousness is your biggest waste of time. No one cares about you, about the car you drive, about the watch you wear, or how much money you have. The world is so wrapped up in its own shit that they have no interest in you. No one cares about that stupid comment you made last month in the sales meeting, no one cares that there was a large piece of spinach lodged between your front teeth when you greeted the boss in the elevator, no one cares about how long it took you to run the New York marathon. They only care about their own shit, and the sooner you realize this, the happier your life will be. 6) We are Not Financially Educated Modern education is a problem for men. The education system is controlled by women. The majority of teachers are women which has both positive and negatives. On the positive side, we learn much about empathy, emotional intelligence, and self-awareness. On the negative side, we learn nothing about traditional masculine traits like providing financially for your family and community. Financial education is never taught in school. Maybe governments, who control the education syllabus and narrative, have no real interest in empowering their citizens. It prefers to preside over a sea of weak, uneducated, and ineffectual idiots. What use is it for me to learn about the difference between igneous and sedimentary rocks when I could be learning about starting a business and the art of selling? Most men are clueless when it comes to money and it fucks up their lives. There are ten steps you need to take to be financially educated and exercise mastery over your money. You need to realize that almost everything you know about money is wrong. You were taught to buy a house, get a job to pay the mortgage, save for retirement, and live paycheck to paycheck. You were taught to work for money. As Robert Kiyosaki said in Rich Dad Poor Dad, you need to make money work for you. The way you do that is to get a career, maximize your earnings capacity, earn more than you spend and invest the surplus in high-quality assets that provide you with a reliable flow of income. So how do you do that? Step 1: Understand the difference between a job and a career. A job is something you get to fund your lifestyle. Let's say you want to live by the beach, drive a luxury German sedan, go away every second weekend, play golf every Wednesday, and build a collection of red wine. With that in mind, you will look for a job that will enable you to make your monthly mortgage payments, make auto loan payments, pay your rates and taxes, pay your country club membership fees and green fees, enable you to travel, and subscribe to Wine of the Month Club. You may earn a million bucks a year and you may spend a million bucks a year. Are you financially free? No, you are a slave to your employer who could fire you at any time, you are a slave to your bank who foreclose on you if you miss a few payments on the mortgage, you are at the mercy of the finance company that is leasing you the Mercedes Benz and you are beholden to the people that expect you to take them away every second weekend. Let's now look at the other side of the coin. After working a job for five or ten years in an area that aligns with your skillset, interest, and passion, you acquire enough skills and contacts to either rise to the C-suite of your company (CEO, CFO, CTO, COO, etc) or you start your own business. Sure, you can still get fired from the C suite, but you may have equity in the company and they will need to compensate you handsomely for the retrenchment. You have maximized your earning capacity. In the case of your own business, you are the top dog. You rent a house by the beach that is well within your budget, you drive a sensible car that gets you from A to B (and you don't look like a university student), you play golf at the local public course, and until the business is up and running you only go away once every quarter. You make half a million a year and you spend 300,000. The surplus 200,000 is either invested in the stock market or other financial assets, or back into your business as you scale and grow. Who is richer? Person 1 or person 2? I can happily accept that person 1 appears to have a better life. You could say that his life is more Instagrammable. On the surface, he has all the trappings of wealth, but his money is not buying him freedom. He has fallen into the wealth trap. The more money he makes, the more things he acquires and these things end up owning him. His scope of choices is made smaller. He is married to his job because his job funds his lifestyle. Let's assume he hates his job. Assume he comes from a long line of lawyers in his family. His great-grandfather was a lawyer, as were his grandfather and father. It was therefore expected he would follow up the family tradition. After his second divorce, he hits a midlife crisis and realizes that he hates being a lawyer. He still had a massive mortgage, three years left on the lease of his car and there is no way out. He has no option but to power through day in and day out in a profession he hates. Let's assume he has lived within his means. He has earned more than he spends, his car is paid off and he has no mortgage. He gets divorced, his kids have graduated from university and he now wants to follow his passion for restoring vintage motorcycles. He has been investing in the stock market religiously for 30 years and his account is worth a couple of million bucks. He has the freedom to follow his passion and live a fulfilled life. He has flipped his relationship with money - instead of focusing all his energy on working for money to fund his lifestyle, he has become a master investor and is now in a situation where money is working for him. He is the rich dad, not the poor dad. Step 2: You need to understand the power of compounding. Albert Einstein said that compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it. He who doesn't, pays it. What the hell is he talking about? Compound interest defies the laws of nature and the best way to understand this is through an example. Let's say you invest 1000 bucks in the stock market every month and the annual return is 10 percent per annum. After 10 years, you will have 204,845 bucks. If you double the term of your investment from 10 to 20 years, what would your return be? Most people would say if you double the term, you double the return. In other words approx 410,000 bucks. The correct answer is 759,368. What happens if you triple the term from 10 to 30 years? Again, simple laws of nature would say 205k x 3 or 615k. The correct answer is 2.2 million! That is crazy. What is happening here? Why are our feeble brains getting wrong? We are ignoring compound interest or compound returns. We are reinvesting our returns. When we earn that 10 percent return, we are throwing it back into the pot. This means that not only are we making money on our 1000-buck monthly contributions, but we are also making money on our profits. Think of this as a snowball that gets bigger and bigger with time. The reason why most people don't understand compound interests is that it needs time to work its magic, and most of us are impatient and we need instant gratification. We are unable to invest today and enjoy tomorrow. This explains why so few people are financially free. Step 3: You need to know the difference between an asset and a liability. This also comes out of the teachings of Robert Kiyosaki. The definition is simple - an asset outside money in your pocket while a liability takes money out of your pocket. Most people think the house you live in is an asset, but it takes money out of your pocket. You pay rates, taxes, insurance, lights, water, and utilities and you may also pay a mortgage. Sure, it gives you a place to stay but that is the only benefit. People may say that house prices always go up. Ask people who bought property in the US in 2007, in Tokyo in the 1980s, the list goes on. Property does not always appreciate in value. If that is your view, then you are speculating and history teaches us that not all bets pay off. Now, if you buy a house and rent it to a third person, then it becomes an asset. Using the same logic, your car is not an asset unless you put it to work in Uber. Step 4: You need to know how the banking system works. Banks do not want you to be financially free. How do banks make money? Through transactional fees and by lending money. The more lending transactions they enter into, the more they can charge in fees and interest. The biggest money maker for them is the mortgage bond - the loan sizes are large and the terms are longer. The compound interest they earn is mindblowing. If you buy a house for 5 million, and finance it over 30 years at 10 percent, you will pay more than 11 million in interest alone. You will pay more than twice the current value of the house in interest. That is a great business for the banks but a pretty shit deal for you the homeowner. The word mortgage comes from an old French term that meant death pledge - need I say more? Banks also facilitate the purchase of stupid shit through credit cards. This is not to say that debt is entirely bad - it does have its uses. If you can borrow money at 10 percent and invest that money at 15 percent, then you are golden. Very few, however, are savvy enough to find these sweet investments, and any investment yielding 15 percent has to be risky. Step 5: You need to understand the concept of risk and return. Risk is not necessarily bad. It depends on your age. The younger you are, the more risk you should take. If you are j your twenties, you are embarking on your financial journey. You have limited wealth and your objective must be to build as much as possible. You are looking for high-return investments which means you are looking to embrace risk. You want to invest in the stock market, cryptocurrencies, new businesses, and new technologies. You do not want to stash your money under the mattress. The reason why even the young are risk averse is that our caveman's brain is wired towards self-preservation. The fear of losing money is greater than our joy of making money. Not even gamblers like to lose money. If you stand outside a casino at 6 am and watch the high rollers leave, you will not find the losers delighting in their losses. Now that we have highlighted the importance of chasing high returns when you are young and being more conservative as you get older, we need to define what is a high return. Every country has a risk-free return. That is the interest rate at which you can invest and the risk is zero. The lowest-risk institution in any country is the government because they normally have the ability to print money. Any return above the risk-free rate requires risk to be taken. So, if the risk-free rate is 5 percent per annum, and the investment offers a return of 6 percent, there is some risk but not that much. An investment of 15 percent is three times the risk-free rate and therefore three times riskier than the government. You need to now be careful of people that guarantee high returns. If someone comes to you and guarantees an investment return above the risk-free rate, you need to know that there is risk in the investment. The best way to manage investment risk is through education. Investing in anything blindly is risky. It is believed that consumers do more research before buying a household appliance than they do research an investment in the stock market. Before you invest in any business, you need to understand basic accounting. Financial statements contain the most important financial information of the company. It shows solvency and earnings capacity - in other words, it will tell you how long they are going to be in business and how profitable they are. You also need to research the market in which the company is operating and the prospect for that market. Blockbuster, before they went bust, was operating in a dying market. Netflix was eating Blockbuster's lunch. People were no longer taking the time to drive to the video store. They were streaming content live. There was no way Blockbuster could compete against these winds of change. You want to avoid investing in a dying sector and you want to invest in sectors that will flourish. What are the sectors of the future - renewable energy, mental health and wellness, e-commerce, financial technology, supply chain and logistics, sustainable business, and disintermediation. Step 6: Do not trust anyone with your money. Humans trust other humans too easily. When they deposit money into their banks, they blindly believe these banks hold their money in a safe box on their behalf. Banks do not operate in this fashion. They operate on a system known as fractional reserve banking and it is perfectly legal. This gives them a license to lend out the money you deposit. So as soon as your money is deposited, it flies out in the form of a loan to another client or even used to buy risky assets like bonds and shares. As long as everything is normal and there is no panic, this system works well. Problems however arise when a rumour surfaces in which the health of your bank is called into question. In this digital age where everyone is so connected, rumours move at the speed of light. If someone influential believes your bank is having liquidity problems, and lots of people hear about this, what is everyone going to try and do? They are going to try to remove their money and this is where the shit starts. Your bank goes into a panic and tries to call back the loans it has made. This is easier said than done and the bank is forced into liquidation and goes bust. The financial system is based on trust. Even the currency issued by the government is based on trust. Do you trust banks and governments? Do you think they have your best interests in mind? Do they want you to be strong, independent, courageous, and questioning everything, or do you think that maybe they want to keep you in the dark, manipulate you, violate your human rights, and enslave you? Before the pandemic, I had my doubts. After the pandemic, I am pretty certain that governments cannot be trusted, and the more corrupt they are, the less they deserve your trust. How do governments control us? Through information and money. If they control your money, they control you. The scariest thing that is happening at the moment in the world of money and finance is the creation of central bank digital currencies and digital IDs. Let me explain to you the end game. Governments want everyone to have a digital ID. It is all your details - your name, age, ID number, tax number, photo, and address. In other words, everything that makes you you. It will be stored on your phone which means they will find a way to track your movements. If they can do that, they could give you a carbon score. Everyone is being made to feel guilty for being a human on this planet. If we travel a lot, we are destroying the planet. It is therefore conceivable that if we get around too much, suddenly we have difficulty buying airline tickets or filling our cars with petrol because all our spending will now be linked to our digital ID by way of digital currencies. Your ID will have a record of all your assets, liabilities, and bank accounts. If they see you are buying lots of red meat, they might cap the amount of money you can use to purchase ribeye steak every month. Or the amount of alcohol, cigarettes, or any other substance the government may be trying to clamp down on - or promote on the other end of the spectrum. This is scary shit, but if you want to get financially educated, you need to take control of your money and trust no one. 7) We Seek Comfort and Avoid Doing Hard Things Men look for comfort. They look for the easy route - the path of least resistance. This is natural. We live in a world that wants to kill us. Volcanos, earthquakes, poisonous snakes, lightning, psychotic drivers. We live in a world where cars pass us by a few inches - the space between life and death is narrow. It is perfectly natural to seek shelter and comfort. Companies know this and they seek to exploit this basic human condition. Food companies get us addicted to fast food, liquor companies get us addicted to booze, tobacco companies to nicotine, and pharmaceutical companies to opioids and sleeping pills. Whenever we have a headache, we pop a pill. When we feel stressed we crack open a can of beer. When we want to escape the world, we go for a movie or turn on Netflix. We spend our lives seeking out numbness and this is making us miserable because it leaves us feeling unfulfilled, guilty, self-hating, and anxious. What is the antidote to this? We need to do hard things. We need to seek discomfort, and we need to use this suffering to build our character so that we can be useful to ourselves and our loved ones when danger presents itself. One of the core functions of a man is to protect those that he loves. He needs to have the courage and the balls to stand up for those that he holds dear. If he has spent his life in comfort, avoiding tough situations, getting fat and out of shape, going with the flow, and numbing out his senses, what fucking good is going to be to himself and more importantly to those he loves? If a war breaks out in his country and he doesn't know how to react, what good is he? He needs to have skills. He needs to be able to contribute to defending his home, his neighbourhood, and his country. He needs to have the balls to lift his hand and say, yes, I am here to serve. I am scared out of my fucking mind, but I have what it takes to rise to the occasion and do my duty. Only men who have tested their limits, who know how to suffer physically and emotionally have the tools to be of service to others. So what does it mean to put yourself in difficult situations? I am not talking about standing in front of a freight train and playing a game of chicken. I am talking about exposing yourself to situations that will make you antifragile. This is a term coined by Nasseen Taleeb. He poses the question - what is the opposite of fragile? Most people argue that it is resilience - the ability to survive under harsh conditions. If fragile is the act of getting weaker under pressure, how can the mere act of surviving under pressure be the opposite? We are looking for something that gets stronger under pressure. Something that flourishes. There is a character in Greek mythology known as Hydra. It is this scary ocean-dwelling monster. Every time you cut its head off, it grew additional heads. It got stronger under pressure. When you put yourself in high-pressure situations, they either kill you or make you stronger. The most famous quote from German philosopher Frederich Nietzsche was that that which does not kill me makes me stronger. This does not refer to resilience, this refers to antifragility. You must find uncomfortable situations every day. If you are afraid of being rejected by women, go out and get rejected as often as possible - soon the sting of rejection will be removed and you will be able to approach anyone - women, prospective clients, prospective investors. If you feel vulnerable physically, hit the gym and learn how to fight mixed martial arts. This is going to be hard and pressurized, especially if you have hitherto lived a sedentary life playing video games and downloading porn. The physical form you create and the fighting skills you develop will make you antifragile. Once a month, do something hard. Walk or run for 42km, carry a backpack full of rocks up a mountain, or swim in the freezing ocean. At the time of doing these things, you are going to be tempted to quit. Power through and you will come out stronger on the other side. You will test your physical and mental limits. It will make other smaller challenges look like a piece of piss. You can start today - when faced with two options, choose the path of most resistance. Take the stairs to your apartment on the 8th floor, walk to the grocery store and back, stop to fix the puncture for the lady in the parking lot, volunteer your time at the homeless shelter, pay the maid for the day but clean your own house, learn how to change the oil in your car, learn to play the guitar. All these things are hard - if it was easy everyone would be playing the guitar like Slash from Guns n Roses. Everyone would have six-pack abs, everyone would be jacked. Find the result least likely and work towards that because in all likelihood that work will make you antifragile. Comfort will kill you. You should never seek it out in your life. There is a reason why immigrants thrive in the United States. They are forced into difficult situations - they have no choice. They need to learn the language, suffer xenophobia, work three jobs, and be creative in adapting to their new environment. Studies show how these immigrants enjoy a disproportionately higher level of financial freedom when compared to their local brethren who were born in the United States. These immigrants find themselves with their backs to the wall - they are thrown into a pressure cooker and what is interesting is that they don't just survive, they thrive and flourish. Look at the list: Albert Einstein, Sergey Brin, Arianna Huffington, Oscar de la Renta, Madeleine Albright, and Arnold Schwarzenegger to name a few. Arnold stands out as a great example- the can hardly speak English, became world-famous for lifting weights, then became a Hollywood movie star, married a Kennedy, and then became the governor of a state of the United States - but not just any state, the biggest state by GDP and the name of which he could not even pronounce. If Arnold is not like Hydra, then no human that has walked the face of this planet is like Hydra. 8) We Go with the Flow Humans are biologically designed to go with the flow. When we lived in villages it was not in our best interests to rock the boat - our long-term survival was predicated on our ability to ingratiate ourselves with the leaders and be team players. This worked well for us thousands of years ago, but everything changed. We no longer live in tribes and small communities - we are globalized, connected, and influenced. Our sovereignty is under threat, and this may sound like a conspiracy theory, but stay with me on this. Have you ever wondered why when you open a bag of cookies, it is difficult to have just one - you end up demolishing the entire packet? When you go to the doctor, he is quick to prescribe a pill to heal your symptoms. When you look at the label of foods, everything has sugar in it. When you wolf down a Big Mac burger, it gives you a hit of dopamine. Banks are throwing credit cards at you, your phone is listening to you, Google is pushing you to travel destinations, and YouTube knows exactly what videos you will find interesting. We live under the notion that we have free will, and that we are in control of our lives, yet we are being hacked every day. We are being told what to eat, what to think, what to believe, what pills to take, what to buy, what to sell - and let me clue you into something, the entities that are ramming this information down our throats do not give a shit about our well being. Think about this for a second - does Mcdonald's care about your cholesterol, does your bank want you to be financially free, does the pharmaceutical industry want you to be healthy, does your government want you to be prosperous? Hell no - they want you to be weak, addicted, enslaved, and controllable - it is good for business and it is good for politics. They are the enemy and nothing gives them greater pleasure than seeing you go with the flow they are carefully constructing. The devil must be looking at the current state of humanity with a huge grin on his face. He has done a masterful job in turning men into a bunch of distracted, feminized, passive, overweight, ineffectual pussies who are ashamed of their masculinity, afraid to go against the flow, and living lives of quiet desperation. They do not have the physical skills to protect their families, communities, or countries, Hollywood makes them out to be a bunch of bumbling idiots, and worst of all, they seem to be ok about it. What is the answer to all this? Men need to question everything. I am not saying we should always go against the consensus, but we need to question the consensus and if the consensus does not make sense, we need to go against it. It is so easy to be seated at a dinner party, and the host makes a racist joke for everyone to laugh at. That is the path of least resistance. The hard part is standing up against injustice. Racism is born out of fear and prejudice. It is born out of ignorance and weakness. Racists are small, scared, and pathetic - they are like the bullies in the playground. They need to be confronted and called out. If you stand up to the host at the dinner party, sure, an awkward moment is going to follow, but I can guarantee you that unless everyone is a card-carrying member of the KKK, the majority of people will applaud you (either audibly or loudly). That may be the last invitation you get from that host, but who gives a fuck. Edmund Burke is often attributed with saying “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing”. Sometimes the cost of standing up against injustice is low - as is this dinner party example, but sometimes it is higher. A prospective client, on the point of closing a lucrative deal with you, may also drop a racist slur, and by speaking out you may lose the deal. You need to ask the question, do I want to do business with a racist, or do I want to do business with people that share my values? On a macro level, are you not a little concerned by how easily you were prepared to let the government strip you of your basic human rights during the pandemic in 2020? I am by no means an anarchist, but forcing people into conditions of quasi-house arrest, and everyone complying without even a small bleat of protest sent a strong and terrifying message to governments all over the world. It told them what they may already have suspected - that they were ruling over billions of weak and insipid men who were not prepared to stand up for their basic human rights. What is the government going to do with this newly acquired knowledge? I suspect they are going to do a whole host of things, and none of these things are good. They are rolling out digital IDs and digital currencies. They are going to track your movements, your spending, your investing, and your saving. This opens the doors to social scoring, carbon scoring, and a dystopian future in which our personal freedoms are so curtailed that you will look back favorably to the time when you were a hamster on a wheel that still had the option of jumping off. High-value men question, and they push back against injustice that is not only perpetrated against them but also against others. #lifecoach#motivation#lifecoaching#coaching#love#mindset#coach#inspiration#selflove#life#success#selfcare#lifestyle#mentalhealth#mindfulness#personaldevelopment#entrepreneur#goals#happiness#meditation#loveyourself#healing#motivationalquotes#lifequotes#positivevibes#fitness#businesscoach#motivationalspeaker#business

More and more people are singing the praises of a carnivore diet. They say it helps them with weight loss, that it cures issues they have with their gut, cures problems with their skin and even more extreme health issues such as joint pain and rheumatoid arthritis have been cured. Some have also claimed it has cured autoimmune diseases. People have also reported improved moods, a dissipation in anxiety and depression. On the other end of the spectrum are people who say that a meat-only diet is the worst thing you could do. They say it causes inflammation, it contains too much saturated fat, it raises your level of triglycerides, it moves you closer to cardiovascular disease, cancer, and type 2 diabetes. Most regulatory agencies around the world suggest you should increase your intake of fruits and vegetables and reduce your consumption of fatty meat, and only eat meat that is lean. They also say to reduce saturated fats. In this blog, we will endeavor to answer the question of whether a meat-only diet is harmful, who it may help, and why. If it does work, the next question is whether it is the optimum diet and if so, for how long? The most common objection to the carnivore diet is that it will lead to a deficiency in vitamins and minerals because we all believe that fruits and vegetables are the best sources of these vitamins and minerals. The belief is that meat does not contain these things. The reality is that meat does have vitamins and minerals provided you eat enough. One kilogram of meat has 60 percent of your required thiamin, 150 to 920 percent of vitamin B, 120 percent of potassium, 200 percent of iron, and 30 percent of vitamin C. As far as vitamin C is concerned, if you add organ meat like liver into your diet, you get to 100 percent of your recommended daily requirement. You will notice that we are still below 100 percent in a few of the vitamins and minerals. What you need to consider is that when you reduce carbs and focus only on meat, your body becomes more efficient in using its vitamins and minerals because it is no longer competing with glucose. Another point is that we are not 100 percent sure how RDAs were calculated. What we do know is they were tested on mice. In addition, actual food was not used. Scientists made use of synthetic isolates. The bottom line is that we don't know if the same results would be seen in humans using real food. This is not to say that the RDA is useless but there are solid reasons to not follow these guidelines religiously. In reality, people who have tried this diet have not experienced scurvy, have not displayed adverse symptoms, and have found this as a life-saving diet after having tried almost every other diet. Another objection to the carnivore diet is the lack of fiber. We have been led to believe that fiber is the only thing that enables our bowels to move - it is the only thing that provides volume to your stool. New research is showing this to be false. While some notice problems initially, with time these issues of constipation go away, and by and large most people do well. Why may the carnivore diet help? Most people will only try this if they are really not feeling well and are open to anything. They have tried increasing their vegetable intake, they have cut out junk food, they have tried keto which is no carbs and high fat and protein, and they have tried intermittent fasting. Most people in this situation will start to feel better. But what happens if this doesn't help? Those with autoimmune issues then cut out foods with lectins and if even that fails, they go carnivore which is the ultimate elimination diet. You are literally cutting out everything except for meat. Meat is the neutral food there is. Very few people have meat allergies. The only people that will have problems with a meat-only diet are those that do not have enough stomach acid to digest the meat. The carnivore diet is a high-fat and low-carb diet. So who might benefit from this diet? If you experience chronic bloating, irritable bowel syndrome, inflammation, skin rashes, or any autoimmune disease, this diet could work for you. Maybe you are simply curious about how you will perform on this diet. If you do decide to take this route, the next question is for how long. Humans do tend to take the approach of all or nothing. Is a carnivore diet optimal forever? Maybe not, but try for a week, or a month or 6 months. Thereafter you can start to add a little variety. Start with some neutral plants - if they make you feel bad, then remove them. When it comes to vegetables, consider the following. Plants are living organisms and they want to continue living. The big disadvantage they face is that they are not very agile in getting away from predators because they are rooted in the ground. They have defenses in the form of poisons and this is why most plants in the world are inedible. There are thousands of toxins and defense chemicals that they use. The most common are lectins, cyanide, phytates, tannins, oxalates, hormone disruptors, and nutrient blockers. Plants and animals are in an evolutionary arms race. The plants are trying to be more and more poisonous so that fewer and fewer animals are able to eat them. Animals are also adapting so that they are able to stomach more plants. Brussels sprouts alone contain over 100 carcinogens. Have you ever wondered why they cause belly pain, gas, and either diarrhea or constipation? No wonder hate these things - on some subconscious level, they know they are going to kill them. This view believes that plants are trying to kill us. Let's dig a little deeper into this to see if there could be some truth in this. There are 340,000 different plant species in the world, yet the panda only eats one type of plant, grazing animals only eat one type of grass, giraffes know what they can and cannot eat, and they know that if they eat the incorrect plant, it will make them ill or even kill them. Another thing you need to take into account is pesticides. When you hear that word, the natural reaction is to think of industrial pesticides. It has now been found that plants generate their own natural pesticides and that they have 10,000 times more natural pesticides by weight than industrial-sprayed pesticides, and these natural pesticides are more likely to cause cancer in humans than industrial pesticides. Twenty of the forty-two toxins tested in rats were carcinogens and included apples, bananas, carrots, and mushrooms. Mushrooms are a good example. There are 10,000 kinds of mushrooms of which only five are edible - the rest will kill you or give you a hallucinogenic experience. Humans assume that those other five that do not kill us or get us high are not only edible but they are also good for us. That is quite a wild assumption to make. But don't take my word for it, you are more than welcome to look on the website of the World Health Organization. They say that natural toxins cause a wide range of adverse health effects and pose a serious threat to humans and livestock. Acute effects include diarrhea, allergic reactions, and even death. Long-term effects include immune and reproductive issues and even cancer. Lectins are proteins and antinutrients in plant foods. Antinutrients are compounds that can interfere with your body's ability to digest and absorb other nutrients. Legumes, like beans and lentils, have especially high amounts of lectins. Eating raw foods that contain lots of lectins can cause digestive problems. Other foods high in lectins include nightshade vegetables, such as tomatoes, potatoes, goji berries, peppers, peanuts, and peanut-based products, such as peanut butter and peanut oil. Consider now the cassava root - an important staple food for many people in tropical regions. It is the primary source of calories for half a billion people in the world. Consuming cassava in its raw form or improperly prepared can lead to cyanide poisoning. Symptoms of cyanide poisoning can include headache, dizziness, confusion, nausea, vomiting, and in severe cases, seizures, and coma. Another lethal vegetable is bitter almonds which also contain a very high level of cyanide and can be toxic if consumed in large amounts. Then we have oxalates. Oxalates are a type of organic acid found in many plant-based foods. They are naturally occurring compounds that are present in varying amounts in a wide variety of fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, and grains. Oxalates can form crystals in the body when they bind with calcium, which can lead to health issues such as kidney stones and other related conditions. Some foods that are high in oxalates include spinach, rhubarb, beets, nuts (such as almonds and cashews), chocolate, and tea. Excessive consumption of tannins, especially from certain sources such as unripe or undercooked fruits, can cause gastrointestinal distress, interfere with nutrient absorption and contribute to the formation of kidney stones. Tannins can also potentially bind to proteins and reduce their digestibility, which may affect the availability of certain essential amino acids. Foods and beverages that are high in tannins include red wine (especially those made from varieties such as Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, and Shiraz), tea (black tea, green tea, and oolong tea all contain tannins, with black tea having the highest tannin content), coffee (coffee beans also contain tannins, especially those that are roasted longer and have a darker color), grapes, nuts, dark chocolate and certain fruits and vegetables (apples, blackberries, blueberries, persimmons, and eggplant). Then we need to talk about seed oils. Some seed oils, such as soybean oil, corn oil, and sunflower oil, are high in omega-6 fatty acids, which in excess can promote inflammation and contribute to the development of chronic diseases such as heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and cancer. Additionally, some seed oils are extracted using chemical solvents, which can leave behind harmful residues in the oil. Therefore, it is important to choose high-quality seed oils that are cold-pressed or expeller-pressed and preferably organic to ensure that they are free of harmful chemicals and contaminants. Finally, there are chemicals that will mess with your reproductive system. These chemicals can be found in various products, including some foods. Here are some examples of foods that may contain hormone disruptors: Conventionally grown produce (non-organic fruits and vegetables can be exposed to pesticides and herbicides that may contain hormone disruptors) and soy products (soy contains isoflavones, which can have estrogen-like effects in the body. So, give the carnivore diet a go for a week and see how you feel! #lifecoach#motivation#lifecoaching#coaching#love#mindset#coach#inspiration#selflove#life#success#selfcare#lifestyle#mentalhealth#mindfulness#personaldevelopment#entrepreneur#goals#happiness#meditation#loveyourself#healing#motivationalquotes#lifequotes#positivevibes#fitness#businesscoach#motivationalspeaker#business

From a young age we have been taught that fat is bad - that if you eat plenty of bacon and eggs, it is going to clog up your arteries and cause a heart attack. Then there are the people that have high cholesterol - a group that I belong to. Ever since being diagnosed with high cholesterol in my late 20s, I have been terrified of foods that are high in fat - such as the aforementioned bacon and eggs, butter, fatty fish, etc. I then discovered that there is good and bad cholesterol. The doctor gave me a choice - either take medication or do plenty of exercise. Given that I am an exercise nut, and I do eat healthily, I took the second option, but every time my cholesterol was checked, the bad cholesterol (LDL) always came out above the maximum level. So let's go into a little more depth on this. What is cholesterol? It is a lipid and is synthesized by every cell in our body. That means that every cell in our body makes cholesterol. Cholesterol is necessary to create cells. When you think of cells, you often think of these two-dimensional cutouts. In reality, they are three-dimensional and they are fluid, and what gives them their fluidity are their membranes, and it is the cholesterol within those membranes that provide this fluidity. Without any cholesterol, there would be no cells, and without cells, we would not exist. Cells are the basic building blocks of all living organisms, including the human body. They play a crucial role in carrying out all the necessary functions of the body. They provide the structural support needed for organs and tissues to maintain their shape and function properly. Cells generate energy through cellular respiration, which converts glucose into ATP (adenosine triphosphate), the primary source of energy for the body. They also transport molecules such as nutrients, oxygen, and waste products throughout the body to ensure that all cells receive the necessary nutrients and remove waste products. Cells also play an essential role in the body's immune system, fighting off pathogens that can cause disease and infection. Finally, cells communicate with one another through chemical signals, allowing the body to coordinate its various functions and respond to changes in the environment. Now that we know how important cells are for human life, it is also worthwhile looking at the other functions cholesterol plays in our bodies. Cholesterol is a precursor to several hormones, including estrogen, testosterone, and cortisol. These hormones play important roles in regulating a wide range of bodily functions, from sexual development to stress response. Cholesterol is also necessary for the production of vitamin D, which is essential for healthy bones, muscles, and immune function. It is a key component of bile, a substance produced by the liver that helps to digest fats in the small intestine. Not all the cells in the body have enough cholesterol which means it needs to be transported to where it is needed. There are certain cells that are net exporters of cholesterol such as the liver. As a general rule, the liver makes more cholesterol than it needs whereas there are parts that are net importers because they need additional cholesterol, especially during times of high stress. This creates a bit of a problem because the main channel we use to transport things back and forth is the circulatory system. It is not the only system (we also have the lymphatic system) but the circulatory system is what we tend to use the most. There are lots of things that we transport without much difficulty through the circulatory system such as glucose and electrolytes because they are water-soluble. The circulatory system is made up of plasma and proteins (your blood). Cholesterol is a lipid and it is not water-soluble. It is hydrophobic and it cannot move in water. For example, if you pour olive oil into a glass of water you will quickly see how they repel each other. So this creates a problem. We have this essential thing in our body. Transportation for this thing is essential for our life but the system we have repels it. The solution is to create a vehicle in which we can transport this cholesterol and that vehicle is called a lipoprotein. As the name suggests it is part lipid and part protein. It is engineered in a way that the lipid part is on the inside while the protein part is on the outside, and protein is water soluble. This is the perfect transporter because it can be stored inside and transported to where it needs to go. These lipoproteins are found in the blood and are classified based on their density which reflects the proportion of protein to lipid in the complex. There are four major classes of lipoproteins, but for the purpose of this blog, we will only focus on the two most famous- low-density lipoproteins (LDL) and high-density lipoproteins (HDL). LDL is often referred to as bad cholesterol because it was believed that high levels of LDL in the blood can contribute to the buildup of plaque in the arteries which could increase the risk of heart disease and stroke. HDL is referred to as good cholesterol. They are smaller and denser than LDLs, and they have antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties that may help against the development of heart disease. There is an assumption that cholesterol causes heart disease. Scientists are now discovering that the greatest cause of heart disease is inflammation, which can lead to insulin resistance and/or oxidative stress. There is a very strong correlation between cardiovascular disease and these three things. On the other hand, there is a very weak correlation between cardiovascular disease and cholesterol. There is no difference between the cholesterol in LDL and the cholesterol in HDL. This means there is no such thing as good and bad cholesterol - that is a myth. In conclusion, the narrative surrounding cholesterol and its role in heart disease is far more complex than the oversimplified "good versus bad" dichotomy that has dominated public discourse for decades. Cholesterol is not merely a villain lurking in our favorite foods but a crucial component of cellular function and overall health. It is integral in the formation of cell membranes, hormone production, and other vital physiological processes. The real issue lies not in cholesterol itself, but in how our bodies manage and transport it, particularly in the context of inflammation and other systemic health factors. As we move forward, it is essential to shift our focus from fearing cholesterol to understanding the nuanced role it plays in our health. This includes recognizing the importance of lifestyle factors such as diet, exercise, and stress management in maintaining a balanced and effective lipid metabolism. Rather than demonizing certain foods, we should strive for a well-rounded, nutritious diet that supports our body's natural processes, including cholesterol management. By embracing a more holistic view of health and disease prevention, we can better understand and manage cholesterol's impact on our bodies. This knowledge empowers us to make informed choices about our health and well-being, paving the way for a healthier relationship with the food we eat and the bodies we nurture. #CholesterolAwareness #HeartHealth #NutritionFacts #HealthyLiving #Biochemistry #CellularHealth #DietAndHealth #PreventHeartDisease #Lipids #HDLvsLDL #HealthyEating #HealthMyths #ScienceOfFood #WellnessJourney #ExerciseYourWay #NoMoreMyths #BodyScience #UnderstandCholesterol #HealthEducation #LifestyleMedicine

If you want to live longer, the single biggest thing you should do is exercise. To understand this consider the following. Smoking and diabetes will increase your risk of premature death by a factor of between 2 and 3 times. Elite-level cardiovascular fitness reduces their risk of all-cause mortality (the risk of dying from any disease) by a factor of 5. You can therefore loosely say that exercise is twice as important as any other factor when it comes to calculating longevity. There are no drugs in the world that will reduce the risk of mortality by a factor of 5. A simple improvement from "sedentary" to a state of "mildly fit" results in a three times reduction in all-cause mortality. Smoking increases your risk of all-cause mortality by 40 percent. That does not mean you will live 40 percent less, instead, it means your probability of dying from any disease is 40 percent higher than a non-smoker. High blood pressure is a 20 to 25 percent increase in all-cause mortality. Now we need to look at high and low-strength. Someone that is considered low-strength had a 250 percent increase in all-cause mortality. How do you define strength? Strength is defined with simple metrics like leg extensions (how long can you hold a weight on the leg extension machine relative to your body weight), squats (how long you squat with your back to the wall and your legs bent at a 90-degree angle as a measure of quad strength), grip strength and pull-ups are four examples. Basic exercises would be deadlifting your body weight for 10 reps, dead-hang for at least a minute, wall sitting for at least 2 minutes, and doing a simple VO2 max test on the treadmill to test your cardiovascular strength. Kenneth Cooper created what.is known as the Cooper Run Test in 1968 as a way to estimate the VO2 max for military personnel. He set up a 12-minute run test where soldiers ran as fast as possible for the length of the experiment and measured the distance traveled. After, the same runners measured their VO2 max in the lab. He found a strong correlation (0.897) between the distance run and the measurements taken after the treadmill test. So you can do this simple test. 1) find a flat area to run 2) use a fitness tracker or smartphone to set a timer and record the distance 3) run as fast as you possibly can for 12 minutes 4) try not to throw up 5) enter your results into an online calculator like this one (www.exrx.net/Calculators/MinuteRun) Make a note of your VO2 max reading. You want to be in the 75th percentile depending on your age. In other words, you want your reading to be above the following: 20-29 years of age: 55.2 30-39 years of age: 49.2 40-49 years of age: 45.0 50-59 years of age: 39.7 60-69 years of age: 34.5 70-79 years of age: 30.4 These tests serve two purposes. Firstly, they show you have a base level of strength which should at least result in a 2-3 times reduction in risk of all-cause mortality. Secondly, unless you are able to do these tests, you should not even be thinking of supplements because you will be wasting your money. So, if you want to work towards some goals in your quest for longevity, aim for the following: 1) VO2 max in the 75th percentile (see above) 2) Farmer carry your body weight for 2 minutes 3) Dead hang for 2 minutes 4) Deadlift your body weight for 10 reps 5) Wall sitting for 2 minutes Good luck #lifecoach#motivation#lifecoaching#coaching#love#mindset#coach#inspiration#selflove#life#success#selfcare#lifestyle#mentalhealth#mindfulness#personaldevelopment#entrepreneur#goals#happiness#meditation#loveyourself#healing#motivationalquotes#lifequotes#positivevibes#fitness#businesscoach#motivationalspeaker#business

Testosterone levels have been declining in men by one percent per annum since the 1980s which means that a 25-year-old man today has the same levels of testosterone (T levels) as a 50-year-old man had in the 1990s. There are numerous reasons for this, which is the topic of another blog. The subject of how to naturally boost these levels is the topic of this blog. 1) Sleep Patterns You want to follow your circadian rhythms. During the day, light exposure causes the master clock to send signals that generate alertness and help keep us awake and active. As night falls, the master clock initiates the production of melatonin, a hormone that promotes sleep, and then keeps transmitting signals that help us stay asleep through the night. Exposing yourself to the first and last sun of the day is a great way to get in sync with your circadian rhythm. The worst thing to do is expose yourself to too much light after nightfall. The blue light emitted by your cell phone screen restrains the production of melatonin, the hormone that controls your circadian rhythm. This makes it even more difficult to fall asleep and wake up the next day. Ideally, you want to halt the use of your phone a couple of hours before your bedtime or you can turn on the blue light filter on your phone as soon as the sun goes down. Men who sleep 5 hours per night have significantly smaller testicles than men who sleep 7-8 hours. Men who sleep 5 hours per night have the same testosterone levels as men 10 years their senior. Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, when asked who/what his biggest competitor was, replied "sleep". This is what happens when you choose to watch another episode of Breaking Bad instead of hitting the sack. 1) It Makes You Stupid A bunch of medical geeks ran an experiment. They created two groups – one that got a solid 8 hours of Zs, and another that was deprived of sleep. Everyone was then placed in an MRI scan while a list of new facts was communicated to see how the brains reacted. Both groups were then tested on their ability to retain these new facts. The deprived group performed 40% worse than the rested group. Million Men are masters of education and knowledge. To be a high-value man, you need to be continually learning – finding new ways to make money, solving complex problems, understanding client needs, interacting with a dynamic and vibrant world, and being exposed to new and potentially life-changing experiences. If your brain is not firing on all cylinders, you are missing opportunities and living below your potential. If that doesn’t scare the living shit out of you, consider sleep spindles. These are big powerful brainwaves that occur during the deepest phases of sleep. What the fuck does this mean? It is simple, it is your brain backing up your short-term memories/experiences and moving them into a more permanent file that can be called on in the medium to longer term. This file transfer does not take place as effectively if you are sleep-deprived because you are not benefitting from those deep phases of sleep. As you get older, you start to sleep less. This explains memory loss and dementia. If that doesn’t get you lunging for the remote control to turn off Netflix and into bed, then you are an idiot. 2) It Weakens Your Body What happens twice a year and confuses the living shit out of hundreds of millions of people? Daylight savings. It is the practice of setting clocks forward by one hour in the spring ("spring forward") and setting clocks back by one hour in autumn ("fall back"). In short, and I had to think about this, you get 1 hour less sleep in “spring forward” and 1 hour more in “fall back”. Here is the fact that will make your testicles shrink to the size of raisins: in the US, hospitals reported a 24% INCREASE in heart attacks the day after spring forward and 21% DECREASE in heart attacks the day after fall back! Coincidence? Not bloody likely. If a one-off 1-hour adjustment can have such a huge impact, imagine the impact of sustained multi-hour deviations. We all have immune systems. These systems have immune cells – cold-blooded snipers that are highly trained in the discipline of eliminating foreign attacks on the body. You want these fuckers to have a deadly aim and be ruthless killers 24/7. Studies have shown that sleeping only four hours per night, for one night, reduces the accuracy of these snipers by 70%. Your snipers become distracted - it is like taking them to a strip club and throwing 18 Jägermeisters down their throats. In June 2019, a working group convened by the International Agency for Research on Cancer [IARC] concluded that “night shift work” is probably carcinogenic to humans. Fuck! This is a fatal body blow to a phrase we often use “I will sleep when I am dead”. It is now becoming apparent that death will come sooner if you don’t sleep. So what does this have to do with becoming a high-value man? High-value men are masters instead of minions. What is a minion? A minion is a follower, a slave, a yes-man, a lackey, or a parasite. He has no backbone – he is controlled by others. Everyone walks over a minion. He is a passive victim – life happens to him, and he does not make life happen. A master is in control. He makes things happen. He takes charge and takes responsibility for his successes, and his failures. He takes control of his mind, his body, and his money. Good quality sleep allows masters to optimize their minds and bodies. Good quality sleep is the quick and easiest life hack to mastery in your life and become a high-value man. 2) Loose Weight If you are overweight and you have plans of someday fathering children, you need to be aware of the uphill challenge you will face unless you get started to lose weight. Obesity is known to be associated with impaired testicular function, potentially resulting in androgen deficiency and sub-fertility. Now it is clear that fast food meals consumed by obese or overweight men have an immediate negative impact on testicular performance and testosterone production. While many facts are involved in the underlying cause of obesity-related male hypogonadism, Flinders University, and UniSA researchers have found that a high fat intake from ‘fast food’ meals has a decisively negative effect on a man’s serum testosterone levels. Their investigation into the impact of dietary fat on testicular endocrine function showed some alarming results. They found that the ingestion of a high-fat Fast Food mixed meal, which is a common practice for obese men, produced a 25% fall in serum testosterone within an hour of eating, with levels remaining suppressed below the fasting baseline for up to 4 hours. These results – which only investigated the impact on overweight and obese men, and therefore may not apply to lean men – suggest that the passage of fat through the intestinal tract elicits a response that indirectly elicits a post-prandial fall in testosterone. One way to lose weight is to transform your diet. All food in its raw and natural state is filled with goodness. Over the decades man has processed all the goodness out of food. So the rule is simple - the more a food has been processed, the lower the quality of the fuel. So how do you know if food has been processed? It is simple, when you look at it, you haven't got a fucking clue where it came from. If the food comes in a box, it is probably processed. Take a big fat juicy doughnut. Do you think some farmers planted doughnut seeds and then harvested a crop of doughnuts? Of course not - doughnuts are full of processed shit - sugar, flour, fructose, glucose, colorants, preservatives, etc. Add to this list food like bread, cookies, chips, fruit loops, and other sugary cereals, sweets, etc. Let's now move across to high-quality foods. When you walk into a supermarket, what foods do you ordinarily find close to the walls? Fruit, vegetables, meat, chicken, fish, milk, cheese. When you look at these products, you have a pretty good idea of how they existed in their pre supermarket state. These foods have not been processed. This is high-quality fuel. This is a simplistic look at diet and serves as the first filter. The next step is to work out what foods work for you and what foods make you feel shit. Food is more than fuel. It also affects the way you feel. Your stomach is a second brain. What does that mean? Firstly, have you ever noticed how you can be eating and then all of a sudden you feel full. Your stomach brain is a little retarded. It takes 20 minutes for your stomach brain to tell your cerebral brain you are full. That is problematic. If you are eating dinner and you are stuffing your face, at 6 pm you are full, but you don't feel full so you keep shoveling calories into your face. By 6.19 pm you have offloaded another 500 calories into a full stomach. At 6.20 pm the signal arrives and you feel stuffed. You feel lethargic and you want to take a nap. You may also feel a little guilty as you move to the couch, loosen your belt, and collapse onto the soft cushioning like a big lump of lard. So this is what you want to do. 1) Eat slowly - you want to limit your calories per minute consumption. If you pack 500 calories in 20 minutes, that is 25 calories per minute. If you can cut that to 10 per minute, in the 20-minute delay between stomach and brain, you will only overload by 200 calories. 2) Pay attention to what foods affect your stomach. Lactose has become public enemy number one. I love dairy - milk, cheese, yogurt, and ice cream all make me excited, but lately, they have been upsetting my stomach and putting me into a shit mood. I feel less energetic and powerful so I try and stay away from them. 3) Beware of Certain Chemicals Every man has some estrogen and estrogen plays an essential role in male well-being. For optimal wellness men should have no less than 4 parts testosterone to 1 part estrogen. When the estrogen-to-testosterone ratio is balanced a man experiences well-being, mentally, sexually, and physically. In our modern world unfortunately men are being subjected to estrogen-mimicking substances called xenoestrogens which lower their testosterone. These chemicals are unfortunately becoming more and more common in our foods and environment. This has led to an epidemic of younger and younger men with low testosterone. Thanks to the chemical industry, you’re putting untold numbers of endocrine-disrupting chemicals called xenoestrogens into your blood every day that mimic the female hormone estrogen. Here are some of the worst offenders . . . Phthalates Used to soften plastic. Found in vinyl flooring, detergents, automotive plastics, soaps and shampoos, deodorants, perfumes, hair sprays, plastic bags, and food packaging Bisphenol A (BPA) Common in plastic products such as reusable water bottles, food cans, and dental sealants. According to the Environmental Working Group, which publishes its “Dirty Dozen of Endocrine Disruptors,” BPA is #1. Perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) Used in water- and grease-resistant food coatings and non-stick cookware. Bovine growth hormones are estrogen-mimicking and growth-promoting chemicals added to commercial dairy products. Metalloestrogens Metalloestrogens are a new class of estrogen-mimicking compounds. They include a number of metals, such as aluminum, copper, lead, mercury, barium, cadmium, tin cobalt, and others which are added to thousands of consumer products, including vaccines. When these estrogen mimickers get into your blood, they adhere to estrogen receptors in your cells. Since the receptors take in information for the cells, this allows the chemical estrogens to instruct your body to look and feel more like a woman. This triggers a series of physiological events. For one, a man’s testosterone levels drop and estrogen levels rise. When that happens, fat starts to accumulate in his breasts and belly. His muscles shrink, and he becomes soft. He also feels tired or moody and lacks sexual desire. It’s a vicious circle. When estrogen gets the upper hand, it’s downhill from there. Where Are These Chemicals Coming From? Unfortunately, xenoestrogens seem to be everywhere – in our foods, skincare, personal care, and household cleaning products. Their effect on our body and overall well-being can be quite alarming, yet there are things you can do to avoid or minimize their effect. Here are some key areas where these man-made “feminizing” chemicals can be found… Food They’re found in most non-organic fruits and vegetables treated with pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers. They’re also found in additives and preservatives in beverages and packaged processed foods of all kinds, including cookies, sodas, bread, muffins, cereal, chocolate, ice cream, and frozen foods. Receipts Bisphenol A (BPA) is used to make thermal paper for grocery store receipts, bus tickets, airplane tickets, and most everything that’s “instantly printed” after your purchase. Toilet Paper According to one study, toilet paper contains BPA. That’s because toilet paper is mostly recycled BPA-laden thermal paper mentioned above. Plastics Plastic products may be the #1 reason why male testosterone levels are plummeting globally. They’re filled with estrogen mimics and other testosterone-lowering chemicals such as BPA and phthalates. Think all BPA-free products are safe? Nope! According to one research report, many manufacturers simply replaced BPA with another less-known chemical called Bisphenol S (BPS). This is equally as toxic, but research suggests in some ways worse than BPA. And even if they don’t have BPS, they’re likely to contain other estrogen mimics. The list of plastic products is almost endless and is a part of our everyday life. They include such things as plastic bottles, Tupperware containers, plastic bags, plastic toys, inflatable toys, garden hoses, vinyl flooring, vinyl shower curtains, and much more. Canned Foods and Non-stick Cookware The epoxy lining in nearly all aluminum cans is made with BPA. Especially with acidic contents, like tomatoes or soda, then it breaks down the lining and you’re drinking BPA. Stainless steel cans are a safer alternative since they don’t use BPA linings as the case with aluminum cans. Non-stick cookware such as Teflon releases endocrine-disrupting perfluoroalkyl compounds when overheated. Cleaning & Personal Care Products Most major brands of cleaning & beauty products are loaded with chemical estrogen ingredients, such as laundry detergents, dryer sheets, artificial air fresheners, fabric softeners, shampoos, moisturizers, deodorants, hair sprays, perfumes & colognes, spray tanning solutions, makeup, toothpaste, and personal hygiene products. Old Water Pipes Not all, but some old water pipes were coated with BPA to extend their life. Numerous studies have found traces of BPA, phthalates, and other endocrine disruptors in the U.S. water supply. Highly recommended: Use a water filter! Pesticides, Herbicides & Fertilizers One of the worst offenders is glyphosate, a herbicide developed by GMO giant Monsanto. It goes by the name of Roundup and is used on “Roundup Ready” crops. This means Roundup can be used on those crops genetically modified to resist the herbicide. So What can we do? We can be empowered with the knowledge of how to limit our intake of these substances. Sadly however in our modern world, it can be nearly impossible to be unaffected by these everyday chemicals. Checking testosterone levels biannually with blood tests and being aware of the symptoms of low testosterone. Working with a well-informed healthcare professional who can help you correct hormone imbalances can help you be your best self for your family, for your self and for the world. #lifecoach#motivation#lifecoaching#coaching#love#mindset#coach#inspiration#selflove#life#success#selfcare#lifestyle#mentalhealth#mindfulness#personaldevelopment#entrepreneur#goals#happiness#meditation#loveyourself#healing#motivationalquotes#lifequotes#positivevibes#fitness#businesscoach#motivationalspeaker#business

Over the last 100 years, we have made phenomenal progress in the area of women's rights. The pill has given women control over their reproductive cycles, divorce has lost its stigma, forced marriage has been outlawed, and domestic violence and stalking - crimes overwhelmingly perpetrated against women - are finally taken seriously in both the law and media. Notwithstanding all these advances, one thing that has not changed is their biological DNA and their continued sense of physical and emotional vulnerability. If you filled a room with an equal number of men and women, and asked who felt their life had been in danger in the past month, a few men and all the women would raise their hands. If you shortened that to a week, most men would lower their hands and all the women would keep their hands raised. Women are physically more vulnerable than men. The act of a woman arriving early at the office, parking her car, and walking toward the elevator is one filled with anxiety. What happens if a sexual predator is lurking behind a pillar? Most men tend to be oblivious to the ever-present danger that women face on a daily basis, and part of the reason for this oblivion is that men are buying into the toxic feminist narrative that women do not need men. Portions of the narrative are true. Women now outnumber men in the U.S. college-educated labor force. Many women are postponing or canceling altogether, plans to have a family in favour of pursuing their careers. In the sexual marketplace, the phrase “I don't need a man, but would like a man” is becoming more mainstream. The problem with all these advancements in women's rights is that women's underlying biological DNA has not changed. The one thing about evolution that people fail to understand is that changes take place over millennia, not over decades and centuries. Women in the 21st century essentially have the same DNA as the hunter-gatherers that existed thousands of years ago, when women were exposed to greater physical risks than men. Sure, men would go out and hunt for food, and be exposed to wild animals that could rip their heads off, but women were subject to a more sustained and less sporadic portfolio of risks - finding the right seed for her offspring, seeing her pregnancy to term, running the risk of death in childbirth, and then the challenges of keeping her children alive and healthy until they could fend for themselves. She looks for a mate that could act as a risk mitigant to all these dangers. Women are hypergamous - they look for a mate on the same socioeconomic level or higher. They look for men who are physically attractive and healthy because this will lead to healthy offspring. They look for men that are tall and in shape because they provide physical protection. So what happens in romantic relationships? This need to feel safe still exists and is not affected by whether or not she has children. Her primal needs are intact, but this is where it gets tricky. Modern feminism has prohibited women from being vulnerable. They are led to believe they are entitled to everything - a fulfilling career, a happy relationship, and most importantly a life of empowerment and happiness that is the fruit of their hard labor and in spite of the evils of the male-dominated hierarchy. They are told that intersexual relationships are a zero-sum game - in order for women to advance, men need to lose. So what happens in the sexual marketplace? Man meets woman, the woman tells the man that she doesn't need him, but likes having him around. The man is not quite sure how to deal with this strong successful woman, so jumps onto YouTube and the algorithm starts pushing him videos about the manosphere, alpha male, how nice guys finish last, and how women like the bad boy. Pretty soon the man loses sight of her primal need to be kept safe and feel protected. The relationship lasts a few months, maybe even a few years. The man continues with his alpha bullshit, giving her the space he thinks she needs and manages his contribution in the relationship. All the while, the woman is leaving breadcrumbs for the man. She is dropping hints about how she misses him, and how she wants to spend more time with him. He is oblivious to these clues. The most important thing women look for in a relationship is trustworthiness. You can think of trustworthiness as an insurance policy against the fear she is constantly feeling. The way to build trust is to understand the fears, needs, desires and objectives of the other person. The way you do that is to watch them, listen to them, see them and understand them. If you do not understand a woman’s need to be kept safe, she will never be able to trust you to protect her from you, and from the outside world. If you go away every second weekend on a fishing trip with your friends, and leave her alone at home, she will quickly come to the conclusion that you are not attuned to her needs. This is where it gets ugly. If a man repeatedly fails to act in the best interests of his wife, girlfriend, or partner; trust will erode in the relationship. She will not feel safe, and she will start to take her safety into her own hands, and by safety, I am not only talking about physical safety, but also about emotional safety. The man not only is not able to provide physical safety, but by continuing the relationship, she is placing her emotional safety at risk. Her self-preservation instincts will kick in, and this is where the relationship passes the point of no return. The man, by not being attuned to his partner's needs, is under the misguided impression that everything is fine until they sit down and have the conversation: something has shifted and I do not know how to fix it. By this point, she has turned off all feelings for you. Her caveman DNA has completely overtaken her emotions, and she has moved on to hunt for the next mate. While this is happening, the man is dumbstruck. He thought everything was going fine. He was playing out his alpha male role of being slightly aloof and mysterious, not realizing this may work to enhance initial attraction, but is a disastrous long-term strategy because it leaves the women feeling vulnerable and unsafe. He runs through all the good times they had - the sex, the intimacy, the weekends away, the romantic dinners, and wonders what the fuck went wrong. She seemed fine. We never fought. She never complained. What the hell happened to our perfect relationship? Has she found another man? Did I not satisfy her in bed? All those extra sessions in the gym to work on my pecs, does she not realize what a fine specimen of a human being I am? The man then doubles down and decides to go all in on the relationship. He offers everything he thinks she wants - financial security, and emotional stability. He proposes they move in together, and maybe think about getting married. She asks him why he was not all in from the beginning. He holds onto the thought that maybe she will come around to his way of thinking and there could be a reconciliation, but he could not be more wrong. She has checked out emotionally, and physically. This relationship is dead and will never be resuscitated. So what is the lesson from all this? Men need to learn to differentiate between what women say and what women do. What they say tends to be guided by social norms, politeness, political correctness, and a general desire to avoid confrontation. Men are more inclined to approach problems head on while women are more inclined to avoid conflict. For a man that is lacking in self-awareness and empathy, this is problematic. It means that his partner may encounter problems in the relationship but choose to avoid mentioning them. The fact she does not verbalize them doesn't matter. She will manifest them non-verbally in the things she does. She may withdraw affection and sex. Men mistakenly believe they are using sex as a weapon to get what they want. This is not always the case. If the woman does not feel safe around you, trusts you, or attuned to you, that emotional connection they need in order to perform sex is lacking. The reaction of most men to this is: how the hell am I supposed to read her mind? The answer to this is simple: you don't need to be a mind reader, you only need to understand her biological DNA. There is a long-standing joke that men know nothing about women. In 1939, Winston Churchill defined Russia as "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma." Most men would argue that women are no different. This may have been a valid excuse before the Internet democratized information. Today we live in a world where there is so much information about women - their motivations, their needs, and their proclivities. We know more about their sexual fantasies, their sexual preferences, what they look for in a mate, and most importantly what they need to be happy in their romantic relationships. The only thing that men need to do is have the basic curiosity to do the research and find the answers for themselves. So what do men need to do in order to make their women feel safe? The answer is simple - be men! The challenge with this is that again we bump heads with the radical feminists who say that masculinity is toxic. There is no denying that toxic masculinity does exist on the fringes of society. I am talking about the man who returns from a long day at the factory, doesn't like what his wife prepared for dinner and starts swinging. I am not condoning that behaviour - it is reprehensible and those animals should be buried underneath the prison. The majority of men are not toxic, but they are starting to doubt that. Traditional masculine traits are strength, courage, independence, leadership, and assertiveness. If men want to maintain a long-term romantic relationship, they need to focus on strengthening these traits. Strength You need to have the confidence to walk into any room, and know you could kill everyone in that room (if you had to) or at least the speed to make a hasty exit. This requires physical strength - so get outdoors, or into the gym and work on your physical strength. No woman is going to feel safe next to a man with zero muscle tone who spends his life on a couch playing video games and jerking off to porn. Learn to use your hands to fix stuff. Know how to change a flat tire, start a fire, unblock a drain - there is a reason women fantasize about men with a toolbelt! Courage Bravery has nothing to do with being fearless - it is about acting in the face of fear. Courage is part of our caveman DNA. We are biologically designed to run into burning buildings and to storm the beaches in Normandy. This does not mean you shouild go out and look for a fight, but when you are in the movies, and the idiot behind you is conducting a running commentary, stand up, turn around, and politely ask him to shut the fuck up. Independence Many men get this one wrong, because it does require some finesse. There is no woman in the world that wants a needy man that demands constant affirmation or affection to get through the day. On the other end of the spectrum, most women are not going into a long term relationship with a man whom is emotionally detached. Men need to find a balance between the two. When your girl says she misses you, resist the urge to deliver the alpha male response of glossing over her vulnerability and telling her how he is busy ripping out the intestines of the deer her has just shot. She is being vulnerable, and it is your job to comfort her at this time of vulnerability. If you repeatedly choose to ignore this vulnerability, she will slowly lose trust in yoiur ability to look after her best interests and the relationship will slowly die. Leadership I am going to introduce you to the four most powerful words you can say to any woman: I’ve got this, babes. Women love men who take the lead. Let me give you a few examples of when you can use this magic phrase: when the bill arrives, when the headlight on her car needs replacing, when she comes home stressed from work and promised to cook you dinner, when her car needs to be taken for a service. Let me also explain what leadership is not. It is not your obligation to try and fix her problems. When she comes back from a girls weekend away, and wnats to vent about what one of her friends did, it is part of the male DNA to try and fix the problem. She is not looking for a solution. She needs someone to listen to her. So sit back, listen attentively, and every couple of minutes, use another powerful four word phrase: that bitch is crazy! Assertiveness Assertiveness is the ability to communicate what you want or need in a clear and powerful manner while at the same time respecting the needs of your partner. By being assertive, you build self confidence and leadership. It also leads to a decline in stress and anxiety becuase you are able to chart a clear path for the future. It makes you courageous and more equipped to meet the challenges and risks that lie ahead. It makes you a powerful communicator, which in turn leaves no doubt to those around you of your intentions. Assertiveness wil help you get what you need, because many of us make the incorrect assumption that other people know what we need. #bitcoinusa#cryptocurrencies#binary#bitcoinminning#forexlifestyle#investing#binaryoptions#bitcoincash#crypto#cryptotrading#bitcoin