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The CURE To A Mediocre Life

We’re always told that you should “enjoy your life whilst you’re young", that these are “the best years of your life”.

Bullshit.

Most guys who listen to this advice end up trapped in a job they hate, obese, depressed and lonely. They peaked in high school, and then every year after that is a steady decline into mediocrity that they desperately try to escape by drowning themselves in drugs, alcohol, social media, trying to distract themselves from their grim reality that is only getting worse.

When you’re a teenager, all of this seems so far away that it’s so easy to just push it to the back of your mind and ignore it. But it’s coming. And you can’t stop it.

Unless you do something about it. There is a way to escape the gradual decline, this eventual prison of your own doing. And stick around till the end, because I’m going to give you the solution to escape, and no, it’s not going to be the typical “grindset, work through your teenage years, build a drop-shipping business” or whatever. What I’m going to tell you actually works.

So I’m 17 years old right now. I’m coming towards the end of my teenage years, but luckily I was able to see through the lie we’re always told pretty early. At the age of 15, I realised that it didn’t make any sense. Why would I want to enjoy myself now, cash out now, when I have no freedom to go anywhere or do anything, I still have no idea what I’m going to do with my life, with this idea looming in the back of my mind that “it gets worse”. Wtf man?

When we’re younger, we have so much time. I know schoolwork is time-consuming, but we still have so much more free time now than any of our parents. So everyone sees this, and they say shit like “when you’re younger you have no responsibilities, you have so much free time, enjoy it!” They waste it on instant gratification activities like video games, junk food, partying, drugs.

But this just doesn’t make any sense. So you know in a few years you're going to have no free time at all, you’re going to have to commit to some sort of job or career. You have no idea what you’re going to do, what you want to do. But instead of trying to solve this terrifying problem, you just distract yourself? Then when the time comes, when you finish school and you go out into the real world, you have to commit to something so you don’t have to sleep on the streets and hunt rats for food, but you have no skills and no real interests, wtf are you going to do? That’s how people end up trapped in jobs they hate for decades of their life.

You have to use this time wisely. We have so much free time, no real responsibilities and a safety net of family to fall back on in the worst case scenario. But always with that clock ticking down in the back of our minds that soon it won’t be like this. So use this time to find what you actually enjoy.To develop skills and build yourself up.

Pursue self-mastery.

Naval Ravikant, a super wealthy businessman and investor, has this quote“it’s not 10,000 hours that make an expert, it’s 10,000 iterations”. You’ve got to go out there and commit yourself to developing some sort of skill, studying some area for say, a month or two. Then reflect, analyse: what did I like about this? What was I good at? How can I apply this to my life? Then if you don't completely fall in love with it, move on. Iterate. Repeat. Test, test, test.

There’s a lot of talk online in this sort of self-improvement space about purpose. Guys complain about “what’s my purpose, I can’t find my purpose”– Bro, you’ve been on YouTube for the last 2 hours, how tf do you think you're going to find your purpose? Unplug, cut out all influences, all bullshit Redpill influencers, YT shorts, Instagram, all of it. Then go out into the real world and just do things. Iterate. Test, test, test. David Deida in The Way Of The Superior Man sums it up best – “If you don’t know your purpose, your purpose is finding your purpose.”

You have so much time and so little risk. When else in your life are you ever going to be able to commit yourself to pursuing a certain area with no risk in the back of your mind that if you don’t make money off it quickly, you won’t have enough to pay for rent this month? You are in a powerful position if, right now, you don’t need money, you don’t need to succeed. Because then you can focus more on the long-term. You can focus on developing yourself into the man you want to be instead of just chasing the quick and easycash.

So go. Read philosophy, stoicism. Study psychology. Throw yourself into optimising your health. Go learn and improve your social skills. Start the YouTube channel, the newsletter, the business. You won’t always be able to.

Another thing is to not let school put you off learning. What school did get right is that daily consistent learning is so crucial. But what it got wrong is to discourage curiosity. You just had irrelevant shit shoved down your throat for hours a day. Go research what you’re actually interested in, instead of what you think you “need” to learn.

When I was in school, I hated philosophy. Now I study stoicism because it’s interesting. I hated Religious Studies, now I read The Bible every night before bed. I hated English. Now I’m literally writing a 1000-word article in my spare time because it’s fun.

Use your teenage years to learn. To build something. All with the goal to develop yourself. Then in about 15 years, when everyone else has been waking up to work a job they hate for years whilst you have built your dream life, you will be so grateful to your past self.

Shift the focus inwards. Don’t do it for the money, the status, the girls yet, because you don’t need those things yet. Focus on developing yourself – self-mastery. Build up your character, your body, your skills, your spirit, and then in a few years all of the other stuff will follow. And right now in your teenage years is the best time to do it.

That’s it for this one brother,

Yvan

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