The 10 things men do that destroy their lives

Today we're going to be Talking about the 10 things that men do that destroy their lives. Now, this is an amalgamation of what I have seen in men after working with guys for the last decade. Some of these, most of these are things that I've done in my own life and had to move through. So I'm going to give you some practical stories and ways to move through them. But let's just dive straight in, because I think what I've noticed is that there's a very real crisis of masculinity within our culture, and a lot of people are struggling to understand why so many men are in decline, why a lot of young men are struggling. And in our culture, it's not uncommon for men to feel like they don't have a place within society and culture. It's very easy to be distracted. It's very easy to buy into narratives that, you know, men aren't wanted or needed. It's very easy to buy into this notion that you have to live under a certain framework. Right? This is sort of what the red pill community sells is like if you just live into this frame as a man in this very specific way of being, that everything will sort of be solved in your life. And I don't necessarily know if it's that simple. Not that there's not merit in that. I think it can be very helpful for a lot of people. But, you know, I've worked with thousands of guys from around the world, and I have been working with men for a very long time. And there's some patterns that I have noticed that really damage our lives as men and they destroy our relationships, our purpose, all these pieces, and many of these, I've fallen into the trap of. So let's get started. The first one, and honestly, the biggest one that I've seen across the board, and to be honest with you, one of the biggest ones that I struggled with in my life is lacking impulse control. This is one of the biggest areas that I see a lot of men struggling is that they lack any kind of impulse control. And so they, you know, 10 o' clock at night, they want a chocolate bar, and so they go eat or ice cream or popcorn or whatever it is, they want another beer, and so they have a fifth one. I really struggled with this for a long time with pretty much everything, you know, women, alcohol, weed, drugs, food, you know, like porn. I really had problems just being able to sort of direct and control the impulses that would naturally come up. And I lacked discipline. And. And in a lot of Ways. This is something that I had to work on diligently. It didn't happen overnight. It was something that happened over the span of a few years, you know, where I really had to train myself as a man to set boundaries and create parameters with saying, like, no, I'm not gonna do that right now. So, number one, one of the biggest things that really I see damaging a lot of men's lives, a lot of their relationships, is lacking impulse control. You know, going on social media, falling into the thirst traps. You know, all of a sudden, even though you're in a relationship, you're texting some woman on Instagram or TikTok or, you know, whatever channel you're on, and your impulse to do something, your impulse to get immediate satisfaction or that immediate dopamine hit is just so strong. And you. And you have no ability or you believe that you have no ability to say no to yourself. So developing impulse control is just incredibly powerful. Powerful. And it takes time and it takes effort, but it is incredibly rewarding because a man who is able to temper some of those impulses is going to be a man who's able to stay on course. You know, a lot of guys that I've seen who are dissatisfied in the relationship or they feel like they're lacking a sense of purpose in life or direction, it's often because so much of their energy is just like a buckshot. You know, it's a shotgun shell where it's just going in so many different directions because man is just sort of following his impulse controls and moving anywhere that his impulse is sort of desiring. It's like, I should text this chick. I should watch that porn. I should watch this movie. I should eat that popcorn. I should eat this thing. And a man can feel very quickly out of control. So that's number one. Number two is I've put it sort of crass for a very specific reason. And it'll probably get, you know, bleeped out or edited out. But one of the biggest things that I've seen destroy a man's life is that we chase pussy over purpose, and we begin to. And when I say that word, I mean specifically just sexual interactions, sometimes meaningless hookups or pursuing relationships that we know don't serve us, and putting those relationships, putting women specifically ahead of any sense of mission or purpose in life. You know, and I did this for a very long time, especially in my late teens and early 20s, because I was just getting, like, validation from women. You know, it felt really good. I didn't feel like I had much worth or value. I hadn't worked on myself at all in any way, shape or form. I hadn't read any books. I hadn't done any self reflection. I hadn't done any self work in order to develop myself as a man. You know, I'd work out here and there, but I really didn't have a sense of internal worth and value. And I hadn't necessarily done anything out in the world. You know, I hadn't been built what I've built today, right? I've run this incredibly successful company now. I've written a book, I have a family. You know, I've like built the house and bought the car. Like, I've done some things in my life right now that have developed a deeper sense of I know what my value is as a man. I know what my worth is as a man. I know what my skills and my competencies are because I've worked tirelessly to develop them. And I think that this is the real challenge that a lot of not even just young men, but it's just a lot of men that we fall into. Because the truth is that developing ourselves and building ourselves and working on ourselves is incredibly challenging. You know, it can be tiring, it can be exhausting. Whereas pursuing women can feel like this sort of fantastical and whimsical experience that is this wonderful distraction. You know, it's like anytime that I've heard people describe heroin, because I've never done heroin, but anytime that I've heard people describe what it feels like to do heroin, it's almost a very similar sensation of what I used to get from pursuing and chasing women and prioritizing chasing women and getting laid above any kind of purpose in my life. It felt like this wonderful escape from any type of meaning in my life and any type of hardship in my life. And when things got too hard, I could just go back to doing that. And so this is what I see, really destroying a lot of men's lives, because it's just what we move towards, right? It's like it feels good to get a woman's attention. And what can happen as a man is that we get stuck with needing a woman to verify or validate our value. And so if your worth as a man is dependent on a woman telling you that you have it one, do you really have that level of value? Right. If you need a woman to tell you that you have worth, to reinforce that you have value, it's not really yours to begin with. You don't really own it. Right. It's like having an asset. It's like how the banking system works, right? The way that the bank works is you, like, you give your deposit to the bank and then technically speaking, contractually, the bank owns your deposit to do with it whatever they want, right? They can invest it somewhere else, they can do whatever with it. So the money is not necessarily yours anymore. And this is very similar to how it works for us as men when we're chasing women, where we're, where we're sort of chasing pussy and we're chasing sex. And what we're really doing is saying, you possess my value, you possess my worth. You are at the very minimum of what it indicates is you possess the ability to verify that there is an asset that resides within me versus the internal confirmation that we as men can develop, right? To develop an internal framework of, yeah, actually, I do possess value. I do possess worth. I've built out some of this worth and this value and the skills that I've acquired, whether that's, you know, being handy around the house or self reflection or being able to stay grounded and regulate your nervous system, or to be able to, you know, speak a number of different languages or have financial fluency, whatever it is for you, that you're able to verify that you as a man possess that value and that worth. The next thing is that what a lot of us get into trouble with is that we haven't clarified our values or morals, or we continually make decisions that compromise those values and those morals. And sometimes we know exactly what our value, our values are. We know what our morals are, but we continue. Again, maybe this is because of the impulse control, but we continue to make decisions and choices that are compromising those values. And so this is a lack of integrity. And there's a number of reasons why this happens, but it sort of ties in to the next one, which is lack the ability to say no to yourself. Right? You lack the ability to just say, no, I'm not going to do that. And this is something that you need to develop. This is something that we all need to work on. The next one is arguably the most important one, and that's we pick the wrong partner. This is an interesting one to tackle, but I think it's really important because for a lot of guys, when we lack our values, when we lack a sense of our morals or our ethics, when we lack a sense of impulse control, when we are chasing women over our purpose, what ends up happening is that the partner that we attract doesn't align with our values. Doesn't align with our morals, doesn't align with the trajectory and the direction that we're trying to take our life, Right. They. They don't align with the man that we are trying to become or. Or the life that we are trying to build. They don't align with what's deeply important for us. Right? Peace, connection, intimacy, travel, adventure, exploration, whatever it is for you. However you sort of define freedom within your life, and however you define what's important for you in your life. And so when we attract the wrong partner, which I think men are sort of becoming more and more aware of, right. There's a of lot. A lot of men that I think are taking more time. I mean, I didn't. I'm 39 now. I didn't get married to my wife until I was 36. And I did that in sort of. Sort of intentionally, but sort of because I lacked impulse control. And all of these things, like the. The pieces that I'm telling you before, I really embodied all those things. I lacked impulse control. I chased women. You know, I didn't have really good morals or ethics or values. They weren't clearly defined. And even the ones that were, I was constantly compromising them. And so I was attracting all of these women that I didn't necessarily want to be with. You know, they didn't really fit the mold. And then I would go and cheat on them, and I would wonder why I was doing that. Right. So one of the things that was nice is that once I started to really work on my impulse control, really hone in what are my values, what is ethically important for me, what is morally important for me as a man. And once I started to pursue a deeper sense of purpose and make that my core mission, a better above women, I naturally started to attract women that were much more aligned with who I was and who I am and who I'm becoming. And that actually brought my wife into the equation, Right. It was very clear that this was a woman that I could develop alongside, who was going to be incredibly supportive of me, who added something meaningful to my life beyond just sexual connection. But none of that would have been clear unless I had done the work to close out some of those loops, to develop a sense of impulse control and et cetera, et cetera. Those are the first four. The next one, the big one, is that we settle for an okay career or job or business. And I see this happening to a lot of men who, in the effort of wanting to make money and wanting to gain status or, you know, Wanting to buy themselves some nice things and go traveling. They get themselves into a position where they're working for a company or a corporation that they don't like and they don't appreciate. They're selling shit that they don't care about. You know, maybe they've built a business that they feel trapped by, which is, you know, a lot of the men that I've worked with over the years have built up these very successful companies and then all of a sudden realize that they are in some ways a slave to their own business. They're miserable doing what they're doing. Like it's not actually giving them any joy or fulfillment. And I'm not saying that, you know, building your own company or that your career shouldn't be. It absolutely should be. You know, it's going to be challenging, but it should also be enjoyable. You know, you should also feel fulfilled by it. There's days where I wake up in the morning and I like, I cannot wait to go and attack my business. You know, to go and work with clients and run groups and build content and like everything that my business entails, you know, to be responsible for paying my employees, like the whole thing. There's also days where I wake up and I'm like, damn, this, this is hard. You know, being responsible for paying seven people, like, this is a really hard thing to, to take on. But it's worthwhile and I enjoy it. And the benefits outweigh the hardship. And so I think what I've noticed is that there's some men like, I kind of like this 80, 20 rule, right? You've probably heard of the 80, 80, 20 rule. And so I kind of like that there's, you know, in my business, 80% of the time I love what I'm doing. And if it starts to slip to like 70, 60, 50, 50, I really reassess my business. I really reassess what I'm doing on a day to day basis. Because this is an extension of who I am as a man. You know, your business, your career, your job is an extension of who you are. It's a statement out in the world of what matters to you, of what you're committed to, of what you're pursuing in life. And so I try and keep it at that like 70, 30, 80, 20 level where, you know, even though the work is hard, I enjoy the work that I'm doing. Now. I realize that not everybody's in that position. You know, if you're a guy that's, you know, going down into the Sewers maybe it's not realistic for it to be an 8020 equation. I understand that. You know, I used to work construction and I worked in gravel pits in northern Alberta. And when I first started, I was 18 years old and it was the middle of February and I was working night shifts and it was minus 50 because I was in northern Alberta, it was minus 50 degrees. And my immediate thought is, what in the actual fuck am I doing here? Like, what is going on? You know? And it's very hard to be wonderfully joyful when you are working outside for a 12 hour shift. I mean, I got to go inside every once in a while to warm up, otherwise I literally would have got frostbite. But it's very hard to find joy and fulfillment in shoveling at 2 o' clock in the morning gravel underneath this, you know, machine. And it's minus 40 or minus 50 out. So I realized that there's jobs that some of you guys are inhabiting where you're like, how the hell am I supposed to get an 8020 out of this? But the mission is to move more and more and more towards a deeper sense of fulfillment in what you do. To not settle in, you know, to not just become complicit in the compromise and to really recognize that you are not happy and to begin to do something about it. Right. Whether that's starting a side hustle or you know, developing a career path for yourself within the organization so that maybe there's a different job that you want to go and inhabit, or there's a different company that you want to go work for, that you actually start to explore the dissatisfaction that you have within your career or your job or your business to see what might come of that. Right. I think that's a very important part. Like what I do today might not be what I do in a decade. How my business and my company looks today might not be what it looks like in a decade. In fact, I would hope that it almost doesn't because it would show that I've sort of settled into this monotony that's carrying out. I hope that there's an evolution to what I do within my career and within my business. So that's number five, number six. And I think this is really being shown in a lot of the data that's coming out today. Men really struggle with what really damages a man's life. I think is lacking like minded men that are willing to challenge you. You know, if you don't have men in your life who create a sense of aspiration for you. You know, like the men that I'm surrounded by, that I connect with, that I interview. You know, I just went to Austin, Texas and did a bunch of interviews there and met dozen guys that I've never met before who are incredibly inspiring, who are doing great work, who are living amazing lives, who I really respect and admire. But I also have a group of men that I'm surrounded by, that I talk to all the time, every day, who inspire me, who challenge me, who push me, you know, that I can confide in, that I trust, you know, that can say, hey, this isn't working in my business, in my relationship. Like, what are your thoughts? What am I missing? So having a group of like minded men is arguably one of the most important things that you can do because you're going to have guys that support you with the rest of this list. As you start to deepen your sense of impulse control, as you start to pursue purpose, as you question whether or not your business or your job is really rewarding and filling to you, fulfilling to you as you do all these things, as you try and find the right partner, the men that are in your life are going to be incredibly consequential to the outcomes because they are either going to be men who allow you to settle, who allow you to compromise, who allow you to just sort of ease into the mud bath of mediocrity, or they're going to be men who say, you know what, you might not want to hear this, but here's my take, here's my thoughts on what you're missing. I don't know if that's really the right woman for you, or have you thought about asking her this, or have you thought about this aspect of your business? There's immense value in that. Right? And we all sort of know the cliche saying iron sharpens iron. One of the challenging things that I see in today's world is that men are more and more isolated than ever before. Statistically speaking, men have less friends right now, or at least 15% of North American men can't identify one male friend, right? One close male friend that they can rely on. The number of men who have multiple best friends, multiple close friends, has decreased exponentially over the last four decades. And so I think prioritizing this, whether you, you know, you join a mentorship program, you join, I mean, you know, man talks. We have a program called the alliance where it's like minded men that are supporting one another, pushing one another, challenging one another, being in one another's lives, joining programs like that that are going to help. And it doesn't have to be mine. It's not even a plug. It's just an example of a program. Right? There's tons of them that you can find and source. So find like minded men because not having them will cause your marriage to suffer. Right? One of the first things that I do when I work with a couple because sometimes I'll work with a man for a little bit and then he, you know, he'll bring his wife in or his girlfriend and we'll sort of dig through some problems. One of the first things I'll ask a guy if he's coming to work on his relationship is do you have other men in your life? Do you have other good men that you can talk to about the problems that you're facing in your marriage? And I'm shocked at how often the answer is no. I would say probably 70 to 80% of the men that come to work with me, either in groups or one on one or whatever capacity is when they're asked that question, the answer is almost inevitably no. Or it's some version of yeah, I have great men in my life but I can't talk to them about any of this kind of stuff, you know, or they, we don't have that type of relationship where we challenge one another. We're not trying to help one another improve our lives. And I think that that's a real detriment. So find good men. Number seven is that one of the things that I see really destroying a man's life is that he hasn't prioritized seeing what his body is capable of physically to test his body. And you can do this in a number of ways. When I say this, I don't just mean go lift as many heavyweights as possible. I think that all that's good. But what I mean by this is have you gone and sat in a silent meditation for seven days? Like I just went and I just went and did a, a three day silent meditation at a Tibetan monastery and it was wonderful. I mean it was incredibly powerful to just be in silence. But it's also an immense test physically on the body, it's also immense test on the mind and you know, whatnot. But it's a physical test, right. Have you challenged yourself to see what your body is physically capable of when it comes to fasting, when it comes to lifting, when it comes to running, when it comes to being out in nature. Right. When it comes to cold exposure and heat exposure. Right. Being Able to test some of your edges in these realms is incredibly valuable. I remember when I started doing Wim Hof, one of the things that really helped me was, you know, I've been doing breath work for a very long time because of my previous career. But when I started to do Wim Hof, I started to push my edge. And I think at my peak, when I was really doing Wim Hof regularly, I could hold my breath on the exhale for like 3 minutes and 20 seconds, I think. Was my record close to that. And now it's a little less today, right? I can kind of get to like two, two and a half minutes because I'm not. I'm not doing it as. As long as I used to. Like, I used to do a lot of Wim Hof breathwork every single day. But that was a form of me trying to push my body a little bit to see what I was capable of, you know. So can you push your body to see what you're capable of physically in the sense of how much weight you can lift, how much, you know, breath retention you can do, how much cold exposure you can take, you know, to test your body sexually as well, physically in that moment, I think is incredibly important, right? So this is another part of it. When a man doesn't challenge himself to see what he's capable of physically, there's always a question. There's always a question behind the scenes of, like, I really wonder what I could do if I applied myself. And that's part of my mission for this year. My mission is to be in the best shape of my life by 40. I turned 40 in November. And, I mean, I've been working out six days a week, sometimes seven days a week. I've been really loving it. I've been enjoying it. It's changed my. My routines, my patterns, my eating habits, all of it. To see, like, what is my body capable of? Because I've always lifted, I've always worked out, but I've actually never gone into the depths of what is my body really capable of. If I try and push, what might it be capable of? So that's number seven. Only got three more. I'm going to make these ones pretty quick. Number eight sometimes gets in the way, and this ties into everything else I've kind of touched on it a little bit, is that we as men choose domestication over discipline and pushing our edge, right? So we choose domestication. Sitting on the couch, watching Netflix, drinking more, smoking more weed, watching more porn, not being assertive, not Pursuing what we want instead of being disciplined. And I think one of the major things that I've had on this, and I've talked about this a little before, but I'll say it again here. One of the main things that plays into this is because a lot of us as mental view discipline as a form of punishment. And so we try and be disciplined by punishing ourselves. And we try and punish ourselves to work out. We try and punish ourselves to not watch porn. And. And we try and punish ourselves or force ourselves to do the things that we need to do. And then when we don't do them, we beat the crap out of ourselves, right? We verbally berate ourselves. Oh, I'm such a piece of garbage. Like, what the hell's wrong with me? And so we try and we try and discipline, become disciplined by beating the crap out of ourselves versus knowing that discipline is something that we have to practice, that discipline is something that brings us in to the. The sort of lifelong, quote, unquote practice, right? Like if you wanted to be a very gifted basketball player or hockey player, you would need to practice, you know, and you would need to practice a lot. And so discipline in our everyday lives of waking up and going to the gym, doing the cold plunge, taking the cold shower, doing breathwork, doing meditation, this is your practice. This is your, your ritual, right? Your ritual within life. And we all need rituals. So maybe I should have called this one we lack rituals. Next, number nine is what destroys a man life is that he doesn't take money seriously. Doesn't take money seriously, you know, hates it. Hates the capitalistic system sort of rebels against the entire structure of money. Views money as purely evil or as the enemy or doesn't think that it matters or is important or some version of that. And, you know, I've kind of cycled through these over the course of my life. When I was a young man, I thought debt was a part of life. I thought making money was incredibly hard. I didn't like it. I didn't want to worry about it. I just wanted to pursue my passions, you know, I just wanted to be happy in life. I didn't take those things seriously. And it wasn't until probably I was like, honestly about 30 when I started to take money seriously. And I started to question what might it be like for me to enjoy the process of earning, making, saving and investing money and to do it on my own terms, you know? And that has opened up so many doors where year over year I have made more and more money. I have Enjoyed making money, I've enjoyed saving money. I've enjoyed investing money, I've enjoyed spending money. You know, I've enjoyed buying dinners for my friends and supporting employees and building what I've built. But it wasn't until I started to decide, I'm going to take money seriously, and I'm going to just challenge some of those stories about money being evil and bad and, you know, money corrupting people. And I'm going to challenge all these stories that. That I had held for a very long time. And when I started to do that, what I. What I really started to realize was that all of those things were stemming from an insecurity in me, that I was afraid to take money seriously because it would have meant that I would need to be more disciplined, that I would need to admit my shortcomings, you know, that I wasn't good at some things, that I needed to be able to compensate for that I need to learn in certain areas, you know, that I needed to admit my faults, but I also would need to admit my strengths and what I was really good at as a man, because that's what I would need to leverage, you know, in the process of being able to earn more money. So if you're out there and you're like, you know, I wish I had more money in life, or money's evil or money's that, how can you begin to take money more seriously? Not in the sense that, you know, you need to become a billionaire and, you know, solve the world's problems, but how can you take money seriously in the sense that you make it enjoyable, you make it something that you enjoy learning? Like, one of the things that I've been really surprised by is how much I've enjoyed learning about stocks, which, you know, a decade ago or 20 years ago, I thought I would have thought was so boring, but now I'm really interested in it to the point where, you know, people in my life have been.

A friend of mine just told me this the other day. Have been taking the stocks that I've been talking about and investing in them, right? Because my excitement about money, about earning money, about saving money, about investing, about supporting other people's hopes and dreams and et cetera, has really become infectious that people have seen that my life has changed as I've started to take money more seriously. So my challenge for you is to just ask that question. What would it look like for me to take money more seriously? Now, this doesn't mean that you cheat people or go out of integrity or anything. Like that, but that you begin to find your own path of taking money more seriously, that maybe that means paying off your credit card or putting money aside every single month into a for a 401k or whatever it is. In Canada we had TFSAs, tax free savings accounts. I think in the, in the States you have Roth IRAs or something like that. What would it look like for you to take money more seriously and begin to engage in that game? Last but not least, and thank you for sticking with me if you're still here, is we disconnect from a sense of wonder and awe. And I would have loved to have put this one up front, but I, I, you know, I never know how some of these things are going to land and so before I go any further, if you enjoyed this video, comment below if you're watching this on YouTube and let me know what you loved from this section, what really stood out to you and which one you are working on. Here's the last one. What I see really, really, really damaging and destroying a lot of men's lives, their relationships, their fulfillment, their careers, their sense of purpose, their sense of belonging, their sense of satisfaction in life is that they've disconnected from wonder and awe. They have over indexed on trying to rationally figure everything out in their life and they have stopped allowing themselves to kind of just look up at the stars and think holy shit and feel beget present to as a man become aware of the, the awe and the wonder that exists everywhere around us in nature, in a relationship, in a smile, in an interaction with somebody at a coffee shop, you know, in the, in the taste of a good steak, you know, in an interaction with a family member, whatever it is, but being able to allow ourselves to stay connected to awe and wonder. And I think that this is where a lot of men, they can start taking themselves too seriously and then everything becomes serious, everything becomes rational and everything becomes logical and they kind of begin to become cold, you know, as men and they slowly start to drift away from the connection that they deeply crave in their marriage and their relationship and their friendships. And it becomes very challenging to plug in to the things that matter most. Because one of the things that I've felt in my own life, and I don't know if you felt this, I don't know if this even resonates with anybody or if this even makes sense, is that in order to feel and know unequivocally that I'm connected to my purpose, I have to allow myself to also experience awe and wonder. Because there is something wondrous about purpose. There's something awe inspiring about purpose. It's why we all want it. It's why we talk about it. It's why there's 300,000 fricking books that have been written about it. It's why everybody's Google searching, searching it and trying to find videos about it. It's because when we are connected with purpose and we're moving in that direction and we're living with a sense of purpose, we feel wonder in us. Not just wonderful, we feel a sense of awe. We're connected to a kind of spiritual je ne sais quoi, like something that we can't quite describe. And that's incredible. And so as a man, I would really say if this is resonating with you, if this is hitting home, take some time to go and pursue wonder and to put yourself in situations where you can connect with awe, with the largeness of life, so that your relationship and your career and existence doesn't become so bland and so banal and so monotone. Because that crushes us. You know, a man who's disconnected from awe and wonder is going to bring that into every other area of his life. And I think it's why so many of us are pursuing the Netflix, the lacking, the impulse control, needing to turn towards potato chips or ice cream or whatever it is, the alcohol, the weed, etc. We're doing that because we're disconnected. This larger than us experience. Right. So go and pursue some wonder this week. I know this was a long video. Thank you so much for tuning in. As always. Hit me up. Man talks on Instagram Comment below. Share this with somebody that you know will enjoy it. Man it forward. And until next week, this is Con Arbeaton signing off.