This article contains excerpts from my book, How To Be A Superior Man
Masculinity is a man’s greatest strength. His masculine traits are all he needs to get what he wants out of life.
A man’s innate masculine spirit compels him to want to aspire for higher, win, be proud, be looked up to, and feel needed. The more he remains true to his masculine spirit, the happier he will be.
Here are the top 10 traits of masculine men that all modern men need to rediscover:
1. Self-Reliance
There’s someone in this world who constantly thinks of you, cares about you, wants you to live a better life, gets frustrated when your needs are not met, and becomes happy when you get what you want out of life. That person is YOU. So, why not give that person full control of your life? He will take good care of you.
Self-reliance is the only way to take full control of your life, ensure your needs get met, get what you want out of life, and live your life on your own terms. The control of your life is too important to be trusted and outsourced to the government, society, your boss, your friends, your wife/girlfriend, or even your family. There’s no other viable way than to declare yourself the captain of your ship who is fully responsible for the trajectory of your life.
Too many people outsource the control of their lives to other people and waste their lives waiting for an imaginary savior which is a grave mistake since other people rarely have your best interests at heart, and those who do (such as your parents) are not only ill-equipped by nature to appreciate your needs but they too are governed by self-interest which means they’ll instinctively prioritize their own needs over those of yours.
This is doubly true for men because no one cares about a man and that’s fine because you possess the necessary inner resources (your innate masculine qualities) to achieve complete self-reliance which also is the ultimate power in life.
The truism that “no one is coming to save you” is a good start but it’s not enough. If it remained at “no one is coming to save you” then you’d have gotten off easy. Not only no one is coming to save you, but other people are actively trying to take away from you what you’ve got. The only person in the world who is truly capable of saving you and protecting you against predators is the person looking back at you in the mirror. The sooner you understand this the sooner you’ll take the necessary steps to take full control of your life.
As rewarding as it is, gaining self-reliance requires great effort. It starts with taking full responsibility for your problems, including the problems that are not your fault. You must at all times rely on yourself and your resources to solve your problems. There’s no such thing as a problem-free life. No matter your station in life you’ll have problems. What matters is your strength to preemptively prevent many of the problems from occurring and solve the inevitable ones life throws at you. Your life will improve directly proportional to your problem-solving skills. The only way to improve your problem-solving skills is to take full responsibility for your problems and solve them with your own resources.
If it sounds unfair to take responsibility for the problems that are not your fault, rest assured that it would be much worse to expect others to take responsibility for the problems they create for you because they won’t. They don’t care. Think of it like this: Would you solve your child’s problem even if it’s not his/her fault? Of course you would. A problem is a problem regardless. Other people will always create problems for you either out of malice or out of plain stupidity. That’s an inevitable fact of life. Regardless of the resource, if it’s your problem it’s your responsibility to solve it.
People who refuse to take responsibility for their problems are victims. Victims complain, make excuses, blame others for their problems, never try to improve themselves, and give up when the going gets tough. A victim mentality achieves the opposite of self-reliance. While victimhood can be comfortable in the short run, it never leads to greatness in the long run. Rather, it leads to personal ruin. A commitment to self-reliance protects you against being a victim. You can’t be a victim if you don’t surrender the control of your life to others.
Education is one of the most powerful problem-solving tools. Contrary to what the average man believes, school education is miserably insufficient to arm you with the knowledge to solve real-life problems. In fact, school education destroys your problem-solving skills by destroying your ability to think critically. There’s a reason why some of the dumbest people on earth are those with the highest educational credentials. Being responsible for solving your problems means that you are also responsible for educating yourself simply because you can’t figure out all solutions by yourself. The more you educate yourself the more proficient you’ll become at solving problems.
The next step is to prioritize your own needs over the needs of everyone else, including your family. Before you lose your mind that I said you should prioritize your needs over the needs of your family, hear me out. You’ll be ill-equipped to meet the needs of others if you can’t get your needs met. People who can’t get their needs met are needy and needy people are burdens on others, including their own families. For example, if you don’t prioritize your own financial needs, you can’t meet your family’s financial needs. You can’t give money to your family if you don’t make money first. If you don’t prioritize your health and fitness, you will get sick and you will not be able to take care of your loved ones. Examples can be extended indefinitely but you get the point. Help yourself first so that you become capable of helping others, including your loved ones. The typical modern man is taught to put the needs of others before his own needs, which is a trap to render him weak and impotent so that he doesn’t threaten the status quo. How in the world can you help others if you can’t even help yourself? You can’t. As a result, the average modern man isn’t even capable of getting his needs met, let alone meeting the needs of his loved ones. Don’t put the cart before the horse. You must be self-reliant first before your loved ones can rely on you.
Moreover, if you don’t prioritize your own needs over everyone else’s, other people will assume that your needs don’t matter, and rightfully so. Even if they want to help you with your needs, they can’t possibly know what exactly you need. You are the only person who can possibly know what you need. Those who prioritize the needs and wants of others with the expectation that their own needs and wants will be met in return usually end up resenting and blaming others. People-pleasers don’t make it far in life and they are miserable.
Last but not least, self-reliance doesn’t mean you don’t need other people. Many of your needs in life will be met by other people. Self-reliance means that you’re capable of finding these people and establishing relationships with them in order for a fair value exchange to occur between you and them. This is how adults should operate: By exchanging value for value; not in the form of receiving without giving.
2. Courage
Conventional wisdom and indoctrination discourage modern people from taking risks. However, an aversion to risk-taking is detrimental to the modern man because it’s difficult, if not impossible, to move forward in life without taking risks. Naturally, risk-taking takes courage.
The two most important types of courage that the modern man has to have are the courage to fail and the courage to get rejected.
Timidity destroys a man because it prohibits action. The average modern man is timid. He is terrified of both failure and rejection which in turn paralyzes him into inaction. He avoids going after what he wants lest he fails or gets rejected.
Conventional wisdom and school education teach the modern man that failure is a bad thing when in reality it’s a prerequisite to success. Success is always preceded by multiple failures. Each failure will teach you valuable lessons which can’t be taught at school or anywhere else. If you avoid failure, you avoid success.
Fear of rejection is embedded in our psyches partly because when we lived as hunter-gatherers rejection could mean ostracization from the tribe and death in the jungle and partly because when we were kids we relied on adults to feed us and rejection by adults could also mean death, at least potentially. If you don’t live in a primitive tribe and you are an adult, fear of rejection is irrational.
Rejection (or acceptance for that matter) is the world providing feedback about your personal value or the value of your work, although imperfectly. If you fear rejection, you’ll avoid exposing your work to the world or meeting new people lest you or your work get rejected. You’ll never receive objective feedback about your shortcomings so you’ll sabotage your personal growth. All successful people not only fail a lot but they also face and endure countless rejections on their way to success. It’s simply impossible to succeed in the modern world without enduring numerous failures and rejections.
Courage is a masculine quality. Men are natural-born risk-takers. You need nothing other than the innate masculine strengths that you already possess to move forward in life.
Keep in mind that courage doesn’t necessarily mean that you fear nothing. It means you are capable of acting in spite of your fear. While it’s normal to fear failure or rejection, you can still act in spite of your fear. Risk-taking is uncomfortable and it can even be terrifying depending on the magnitude of the risk. As the saying goes, greatness isn’t found in the comfort zone. Since you probably won’t starve because you took risks, it only makes sense to take intelligent risks with strong potential upsides and manageable downsides.
Never failing or never getting rejected might protect your ego but that protection is fake. If you are not failing or getting rejected, it doesn’t mean you are awesome. It means you’re playing it safe; that you are never taking risks. You are either not going after what you want or you are going after the low-hanging fruit.
Most men can’t handle rejection, so they never ask for what they want. If you don’t ask for or go after what you want, you will not get it. Nothing is given to a man on a silver platter. Rejection is an inevitable part of being a man. Don’t let it faze you. As the saying goes, fortune favors the bold. Humans instinctively expect men to be bold which is why timid men invoke visceral disgust in humans, especially women. Risking failure or rejection is taking intelligent risks because the upsides are unlimited whereas the downsides are tolerable. Success is not an event. It’s a process. Persistence is an absolute must to achieve success. A superior man pushes through failures and rejections, doesn’t give up easily, and persists until he succeeds.
Last but not least, risk-taking shouldn’t be confused with the pursuit of pleasure disguised as “risk-taking.” For example, gambling has nothing to do with risk-taking. Gamblers are after instant gratification. Always remember this rule of thumb: If it’s pleasurable or exciting, it’s not risk-taking. It’s impulsiveness. Risk-taking should arouse fear. To repeat, courage is not a lack of fear but acting in spite of it.
3. Productiveness
A fair value exchange between you and the people or institutions you interact with is a prerequisite to independence. Those who are incapable of bringing value to their interactions with other people can’t be independent.
Value doesn’t come out of thin air. Someone needs to create it. For example, in order to produce bread; farmers produce the grain, millers grind it into flour, bakers bake the bread, etc. Money is the medium of exchange that buys the bread. If you are productive and make money with what you produce, you buy the bread in the free market by paying for it and everyone is happy. No one is dependent on the other. If you aren’t productive and you don’t make money, you can only buy bread with the money someone else has given to you. You become indebted and you lose your independence. This is a simplified example but it’s basically how the world works. If you fail to be productive, you won’t make money and you will be dependent on others even for being able to afford the basic necessities (such as water, food, and shelter) for survival.
A superior man relies on his own productiveness instead of someone else’s financial support. Productiveness is the bare minimum. An unproductive superior man is an oxymoron. Prioritize your work so that you earn your place in the world. Everything else is secondary, including your family because if you are not productive, you’ll become a burden to your family or society in general. You already have the masculine urge to be productive. All you need is to channel it into a profitable endeavor.
While pride is an obvious trait of a superior man, I don’t list it as a separate item because it’s the by-product of the value you produce virtuously. Pride happens when you hold yourself up to high standards and meet those standards by producing enough value to become self-reliant.
4. Self-Control
Self-control is the ability to resist your impulses, delay gratification, regulate your emotions, and manage your actions. You can’t take control of your life without being able to control yourself.
The state of the world is such that the majority of your efforts on self-control will be spent on fighting against the allure of instant gratification in favor of delayed gratification. I’m saying “fight against” because human beings are hardwired to avoid pain, seek pleasure and take the path of least resistance, which leaves them vulnerable to prefer instant gratification over delayed gratification.
If you have poor self-control and you can’t resist instant gratification, long-term success becomes unlikely, if not impossible. For example, if you are a student and you play video games instead of studying for your exam you will not get good grades. If you are an entrepreneur and you waste the majority of your time on social media instead of working, you will go bankrupt. If you are overweight and you consume junk food and watch TV instead of working out and dieting, you’ll never get in shape. If you drink, smoke, or do drugs; not only your productivity will plummet but you will also put your health in grave danger. If you gamble, you will lose your hard-earned money. In short, you’d be hard-pressed to find any long-term benefits to instant gratification.
While self-control and resisting instant gratification have always been a must for the average man, it has become even more important for the modern man because of modern inventions that are built to exploit his innate penchant for instant gratification. The caveman or the medieval farmer didn’t need to resist their urge to watch porn, play video games, eat junk food, browse social media, or watch TV instead of working because back then these products didn’t even exist. I’m sure at least some of our ancestors had their own share of problems with gambling, alcohol, or drugs but as a modern man, you are surrounded by a much larger selection of products that promise instant gratification. If you want long-term success you have no other choice than to exercise a great deal of self-control and resist instant gratification in favor of delayed gratification.
Corporations study and exploit the human desire to avoid pain and seek pleasure by developing products that provide effortless pleasure and they are constantly on the lookout for tweaking their products to make them more addictive so that they can continue to profit from the same customers over and over again. Porn, social media, video games, TV, junk food, and similar products that humans don’t need but want are examples of such products.
Instant gratification results in unrealized potential and eventually leads to self-loathing. Not only you are worse off after engaging in instantly gratifying activities, but you also lose your only finite resource: time. Life is short. Impulsive people don’t get far in life. Your days are numbered so it’s crucial to make them count. Wasting your time means wasting your life.
A man must exert self-control and develop an ability to endure the boredom of working on long-term projects which have the potential to bring him delayed but permanent gratification rather than falling for the allure of instant but ephemeral gratification.
5. Health & Fitness
Health should at all times be your highest priority because without it nothing else matters.
As the great philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once said “Health outweighs all other blessings so much that one may really say that a healthy beggar is happier than a sick king.” While it doesn’t take a philosopher to appreciate the value of health, Schopenhauer probably felt it needed to be said, considering that modern people seem to neglect their health until they lose it.
The maintenance of good health necessitates a healthy lifestyle, which is neither hard nor complicated.
Physical fitness is how you maximize your odds of maintaining good health. A healthy diet accompanied by an efficient exercise routine is how you maintain physical fitness.
Regular exercise is a must in order to maintain good health because our metabolic, cardiovascular, and cognitive systems don’t function optimally without adequate physical activity. Unfortunately, modern people treat exercise as something optional, something they can live without. It’s regarded as an afterthought, an “extra” activity to only be done if every other duck is in a row or in case of urgent, temporary need. They severely underestimate the importance of regular exercise for their health and well-being in general. Even among people who decide to start working out because they want to get in shape, exercise is seen as a temporary chore to be abandoned at the moment fitness goals are achieved.
Most people don’t exercise regularly but modern man’s problems don’t end there. Recent improvements in food production and distribution technologies led to an abundance of food (though of low quality) which made us the first generation of humans in the entire history of humanity who need to limit what we eat. The global obesity epidemic is not an accident. As it’s impossible to out-exercise a bad diet, an efficient exercise routine should be accompanied by a healthy diet so that we don’t gain weight.
Since it’s crucial to maintain exercise and diet discipline to remain healthy, your exercise routine and diet plan should be kept as simple as possible. Unfortunately, time-devouring, inefficient types of exercise routines (such as cardio) are the norm as well as complex diet programs, which is why they are abandoned prematurely. You have to take full control of your physical fitness by integrating simple yet effective diet and exercise habits into your life.
6. Physical And Mental Strength
Every man has 2 essential weapons to help him get what he wants out of life: His mind and his body. Since you are the only person in the world you can rely on, you have no other choice than to be mentally and physically strong.
Strength is imperative because it’s no secret that nature favors the strong over the weak. An iron law of nature is that weakness never pays while strength never fails to pay. Different species of living beings and their subsets have different sets of strengths and weaknesses. Physical and mental strength is what nature selects for in men. Nature endows a man with masculine qualities and expects him to grow physically and mentally strong by utilizing these qualities. A weak man is a failed man who is not only incapable of helping himself but he’s also a burden to his loved ones and society in general. While the advancements in medicine and technology made it possible for a physically weak and mentally soft man to be able to survive, he still pays the price for his weakness by leading a life of desperation because mother nature has no mercy for the weak and she is extremely creative at coming up with ways to punish weakness. Similarly, mother nature is also extremely creative at coming up with ways to reward strength. Civilization is great but mother nature still favors the strong and she always will. She has never been kind to the weak and she never will be. Instead of being weak and hoping to get away with it, a better strategy is to be strong and expect to be rewarded for it.
While modern technology is alleged to have made physical strength obsolete by replacing muscle power with machine power, make no mistake. No amount of technological progress is enough to reverse 300 million years of evolution. Nature still rewards physical strength in ways that are not always immediately obvious to the average man. Developing a lean and strong body improves your health, increases your confidence and self-esteem, makes you more attractive to women, helps you develop mental toughness, and improves your posture. A low level of body fat and a high level of muscular mass optimizes your testosterone levels1 which in turn improves your vitality, energy, memory, sex drive (libido), sleep, bone strength, mental sharpness, and overall sense of well-being. Moreover, muscularity projects strength, virility, and superiority. Physical strength is one of the most significant markers of masculinity. There’s a reason why all superheroes are lean and muscular. Deep inside our psyches, we associate manliness with muscularity. Nobody would step foot into a theatre to see a skinny-fat, unconvincing Superman.
A useful litmus test to gauge the desirability of something is to ask how many people who have it would prefer to lose it. The number of muscular men who want to be physically weak is zero. Consider this when someone tells you that muscular strength is obsolete. A masculine man appreciates the importance of physical strength and keeps his muscles strong. A strong, lean, and muscular body is a reliable indicator of a man’s disciplined attitude towards life which gets him respect from others and elevates his status in society. Regardless of how much technology reshapes life, men are still hardwired to respect physical strength and women are still hardwired to be attracted to muscular men.2 No amount of modernity suffices to change that.3
Unsurprisingly, scientific research also finds that the stronger you get physically, the more you’ll lean towards self-reliance.4 Building physical strength improves your confidence and changes your attitude toward life. You become likelier to rely on your own strength instead of everybody else’s compassion.
Mental strength is a must for maintaining self-discipline and persevering in the face of failure and adversity. It’s what makes you keep going when the going gets tough. Since the going is guaranteed to get tough, you simply won’t be a superior man unless you are mentally strong.
Not only do mental and physical strength both play crucial roles in a man’s life but they are also interdependent. You function as a whole unit. Mental strength helps you develop physical strength as well and vice versa.
While his pursuit of building a strong body helps him improve his mental strength as well, a man should always keep working on improving his mental strength further by taking intelligent risks, enduring the drudgery of hard work, staying disciplined, and solving his problems one after the other. You won’t be successful unless you overcome the obstacles on your way and you won’t overcome obstacles if you lack mental strength and fold under the slightest pressure.
Neither mental nor physical strength appears out of nowhere without you doing anything. Physical strength happens when you put on muscle through resistance training. Mental strength happens when you commit to becoming the man you want to be.
7. Routine
Mastering a day of your life could also mean mastering your whole life because life is nothing but days strung together. Developing a productive daily routine is how you master your day. A productive daily routine makes a lifetime of success a possibility.
Discipline is a prerequisite to success and developing a simple routine that you can maintain makes it easier to stay disciplined.
Moreover, it’s your habits that make or break you. When you develop good habits, improvement happens on autopilot because habits are actions that you automatically perform without having to employ your willpower. Repetition is the foundation of habits. Developing a productive daily routine makes you put in your reps without having to think about them which makes it possible to develop productive habits and avoid developing bad habits. Developing productive habits helps you reach your true potential since repetition is not only the essence of developing habits but also the essence of building skills and eventually, mastery.
Treat routine as your system to achieve your goals. All successful people have routines. Routine removes the need to decide what to do every single day so it leads to efficiency: Routine gets things done. Simple as that.
The four fundamental areas which every man must develop their routines around are work, exercise, diet, and sleep. Unless you are born with a silver spoon in your mouth, work is essential for producing value. Regular work, day in and day out, is how you become productive. Since humans can’t function optimally without sufficient physical activity, you must also integrate exercise into your routine. Next is diet. Because of an abundance of food which made it necessary for everybody to watch what they eat, diet is a necessary and useful addition to your routine so that you can get and stay in shape. Sleep encompasses all other items in your routine. Sufficient sleep is essential to be able to work, exercise, and diet efficiently. It pays to go to sleep and wake up at the same time every day in order to maintain the highest sleep quality.
8. Self-Care
This should go without saying but it still needs to be said. It’s essential to take care of your body, hair, beard, skin, teeth, and nails; and it’s also essential to dress neat, clean, and sharp.
By taking care of yourself, not only you will maintain bodily cleanliness and improve your appearance but you will also send a clear message to other people as well as your subconscious mind that you are an important man who deserves to be taken care of which in turn will improve your confidence and self-esteem.
Moreover, a man’s status in society is crucial to his well-being and how he looks is one of the most important status markers of a man. No one takes a slovenly, unkempt man seriously, and rightfully so. If you fail to take good care of yourself, you might as well shout from the rooftops that you don’t respect yourself and no one should respect you either.
9. Mission
Self-actualization stands at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.5 A man is self-actualized when he becomes the man he wants to be. Therefore, a man’s mission in life is to become the man he wants to be.
A man without a mission is a man without direction. A man without direction will drift like a rudderless ship and settle for a desperate existence. If a man wants to be a superior man who lives a superior life; he must have a mission, set his goals accordingly, and accomplish them one by one by utilizing his masculine qualities to forge his own path to self-actualize.
10. Action
Setting goals is one thing and achieving them is another. You achieve your goals by taking action. Sitting back and waiting for good things to happen is for the masses who lead lives of desperation. Good things don’t come to those who wait. They come to those who take action. Superior men make good things happen by taking consistent action.
This article contains excerpts from Chapters 1 and 2 of my book How To Be A Superior Man: Master Yourself, Get Leaner And Stronger, Achieve Your Goals, Become The Man You Want To Be. Feel free to check it out in order to improve the traits above and further masculine traits that help you get what you want out of life. Read more here.
Footnotes
- Hormonal responses and adaptations to resistance exercise and training | https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15831061/
- Lift More Weights, Get More Mates: Research Shows Muscular Men Have More Flings, Partners, Affairs | https://medicalxpress.com/news/2007-07-weights-resesarch-muscular-men-partners.html
- Men With Muscles and Money Are More Attractive to Straight Women and Gay Men—Showing Gender Roles Aren’t Progressing | https://www.newsweek.com/men-muscles-and-money-are-more-attractive-straight-women-and-gay-men-showing-717053
- Is sociopolitical egalitarianism related to bodily and facial formidability in men?, Evolution and Human Behavior, Volume 38, Issue 5, 2017, Pages 626-634, Michael E. Price, Jennifer Sheehy-Skeffington, James Sidnaius, Nicholas Pound | https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1090513816303907
- Maslow’s hierarchy of needs | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs