Everyone wants to be of high value – employers, employees, husbands, boyfriends, fathers, brothers – the list keeps getting longer. Here are fifteen easy ways in which you can increase your value today.
1) Start Doing Things Slowly and Deliberately
What comes to mind when you see a flustered guy pacing up and down the aisle of a supermarket looking frantically for his favorite brand of instant mocha cappuccino. What a pear-faced loser. Contrast this to a man who walks slowly into a coffee shop, takes his time to peruse the menu, leans forward slowly towards the cute barista, looks her in the eye, pauses 3 seconds, and orders a double espresso. Which of these two characters is projecting a higher value? The answer is quite obvious. If you are a fast talker, slow down. If you are a fast walker, slow down. If you move your head and arms around a lot – don’t stop, but start slowing things down. This is not to say you should move at the speed of a three-toed Amazonian tree sloth. All that I want you to do is be more deliberate in your actions without becoming overly self-conscious – because there is nothing that screams out low value more than being obsessively self-conscious. Your slow deliberation needs to be deeply rooted in a strong sense of confidence.
2) Stop Being Scared
Fear makes you small, timid, and anxious. Not all fear is necessarily bad. Your brain is hardwired to fear things that will might kill you – like rattlesnakes, sharks, and overly friendly hot women. Being fearless does not mean the absence of fear – it means overcoming your fears and moving forward. Before the pandemic, I delivered 500 presentations a year. Like most people who are not sociopaths, I get extremely nervous before a presentation, but I do them anyway and have learned to conceal my nerves. Make a list of at least 10 things that terrify the living shit out of you – for example: strike up a conversation with a pretty stranger, leave your phone at home for the day, go to a movie or restaurant by yourself, post a video of yourself on social media doing some arbitrary activity, compliment someone who is not expecting it, ask a complete stranger for a favour, say no to a person to whom you often say yes. The objective is to put yourself out there and make yourself vulnerable to being rejected. There must be some personal risk to you. If not, then there is no reason to embark on the exercise – you might as well stay at home and cultivate your low value.
3) Avoid Pointless Fighting
I have some Irish blood coursing through my veins. This means that I love to argue – and will argue often just for the sake of doing it. I did this until I realized that it leads to pointless fighting. It is petty, vain, and inconsequential. The only thing it achieves is to waste time and piss someone off. There is a good reason why you have two ears and only one mouth – be quick to listen and slow to open your mouth.
4) Take Care of Yourself
If you want to feel high value, you need to feel good. Do you feel good when you don’t exercise, eat junk food and never take a bath? No! This is so fucking obvious, yet the vast majority of people choose not to take care of themselves. It makes no sense to me. How hard is it to put a pair of comfortable shoes on, leave the house and walk, run or jog 5km every other day? How difficult is it to stop buying processed shit food like potato chips and fizzy drinks, and buy fruit, vegetables and drink filtered water? No-one does these things – they would rather spend money on a belt that sucks in their fat gut and pull up to a Macdonald's drive-thru. It makes no sense to me – exercise fills your body with addictive endorphins. Eating healthy makes you feel agile, nimble, and fresh. Don’t think about it -just do it.
5) Never Assume You are Great at Sex
Assumptions are the mother of all fuck ups. Great sex is all about the chemistry between two people. If there is chemistry, the sex will be fantastic – if there is not chemistry, sex is like kissing your sister. You could be the greatest lover on the planet, but if your partner is not into you, she will be making a to-do list in her mind during sexual congress. So how do you make sure she is into you? Become a master of foreplay. Understand that her strongest sex organ is between her ears. You need to learn how to flirt, tease, arouse, and drive her crazy before the clothes come flying off.
6) Do Not Seek Out Numbness
Alcohol and binge-watching Netflix leads you into a position of comfort and stagnation. Being numb means you lose sensitivity to the real people and events around you. High-value men add value to other people's lives. They enhance and enrich, they lift other people up. They can bring out the best in others – how the hell are you going to do all these things if you are fully anesthetized?
7) Find Happiness in Purpose
Find your purpose and pursue it with every ounce in your body. Happiness comes through responsibility and being accountable to both yourself and others. Purpose comes through dedicating yourself to a cause beyond yourself. The most important thing about purpose is that it gives you direction. Human beings are happiest when they are working towards a goal – where there is movement and progress.
8) Volunteer Your Time
High-value men seek to better their societies. It is nobler to donate time than money. Donating money is too easy. It makes you a man of value, but not a man of high value. Volunteering your time is not a completely selfless act – not only does it bring happiness to the beneficiary, but you also feel pretty great about yourself in a non-egotistical, non-dickhead way.
9) Don’t Rely on Other People to Make you Happy
Find your own happiness – find happiness in the things you love. If you buy into the Disney fantasy bullshit that you will rescue the sexy damsel with the unnaturally long blonde hair that is being held captive in a tower, and she will make you happy for the rest of your life, then you are a romantic sucker. Your lover will let you down, your parents will disappoint you and your friends may forget your birthday. If these events are going to destroy your “happiness”, then you have to question whether you were truly happy in the first place. Relying on other people to make you happy means you are setting yourself up to become a victim. When you tell someone they make you so happy, you are abdicating your responsibility as a high-value man, and setting yourself up for a lonely and unhappy life.
10) Be Prepared for a Fight (...but do not seek one out)
Be prepared to stand your ground if someone starts to intimidate you. This does not mean you should be a bonehead and go out of your way to piss off the juiced-up bodybuilder standing at the bar in his tank top and fanny pack! But when he starts making a move on your girl, stand your ground and hit him where it hurts (which is typically located close to the aforementioned fanny pack!)
11) Pursue Your Dreams Without Embarrassment
It is better to pursue what makes you happy despite what other people say than to live a life in the narrow channel of their approval. I am amazed by the time we spend trying to impress people we do not even like. Who cares if you want to dedicate yourself to ballroom dancing -if it makes you happy, do so unapologetically and dedicate yourself to it 1000%.
12) Don’t be Afraid to Rest
Sleep is your secret weapon. Have you ever wondered why Red Bull sponsors the most expensive sport in the world? It makes so much fucking money because the entire human race is low on energy and will pay a ridiculous amount of money to keep sucking away on those blue and silver cans of overpriced caffeine. Instead of hurling cash into the coffers of Red Bull, why don’t you invest in a high-quality mattress, stop jerking off to online porn all night, and get some high-quality Zs?
13) Do Not Break Promises
High-value men are men of their word. When they say they will do something, that commitment forms a binding social contract in their brains. There is nothing more low value than insipid, wishy-washy, spineless, stick-figure men that are swayed from side to side by public opinion. Being a man of your word means you are assertive, and you are not a people pleaser. When the host makes a racist remark at a dinner party, call them out for being a narrow-minded bigot. That may be the last invitation you get, but who cares.
14) Lean into Discomfort
Our brains are hardwired to want calories, sexual gratification, and leisure. Muscle growth, education, and success all grow from the soil of pain. You do the maths. If you are not prepared to lean into discomfort, you are going to be an overweight, sad forty-year-old virgin living in the basement of your parent's house.
15) Lower Your Expectations in Others
High-value men have low expectations of others. Instead of expecting other people to do things for them, they concentrate all that responsibility on themselves and take ownership of their outcomes. Stop being a passenger, jump into the driver’s seat, and hit the gas. Stop being passive and be active – get shit done. Instead of sitting behind a screen and watching YouTube videos, and expecting that success will miraculously fall out of the fucking sky and into your lap, get out the front door and start executing on the plans.
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