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I get it.

I get why many people are jaded by the self-improvement industry. There are a ton of gurus out there who bombard you with this image of what a successful life looks like.

According to the laws of hyperbolic self-help, you’re not successful unless:

• You own a six-figure business (ideally, though, you should be a millionaire)
• You have a perfect body
• Your morning routine is optimized from start to finish, takes 4 hours, and includes meditating, journaling, yoga, a 10-mile run, daily donations to charity, 3 perfectly steeped cups of green tea, with every action or calorie tracked on your Apple watch
• You have at least one super-car. Be unique, though, because Lamborghinis are basic at this point
• You make passive income while only working 1-hour per week
• The kicker, you must do this all overnight or else you’re a failure

In general, the over-exaggerated version of self-improvement aims at perfection, a perfect “A+” grade in life that’s unattainable for most of us.

On the one hand, I do believe an intelligent person with drive, persistence, and marketing knowledge can become a millionaire. But I’ll never push the idea that you need to become one nor will I ever try to teach people “how to become a millionaire” even if I do it myself.

I know you’re much more capable than you think you are and I’m sure you’re living below your potential in some ways, but how does painting an unrealistic version of the future help you?

It doesn’t.

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Don’t Do This Either Though

You know what else doesn’t help?

While I’m not a fan of over-hyped promises, I’m also not a fan of this “C+” culture we live in either. I’m not a fan of the celebration of mediocrity. Lately, it has become cool to have no goals, cool to coast through life with an air of nonchalance, and cool to blame all of your problems on anyone else but yourself.

While you don’t need to achieve extreme outcomes to live a good life, you won’t understand certain lessons life has to teach you until you push yourself to be above average. Take ‘great’ off the table right now.

And when I say the average person in society, don’t get your knickers in a bunch, alright? I’ve said many times that the average person in society is a good person. They dowork hard. They do take care of their responsibilities. Also, their way of living isn’t entirely their fault. When you have to undergo a brainwashing campaign since age 5, I don’t necessarily blame you for trying to chase the illusion of the middle-class American dream.

But once you know the truth, you’re responsible for what happens next. And what is the truth? The truth is that being above average doesn’t require anything extraordinary. Nope. Just simple, gradual, persistent effort. There are a few things you can do to set yourself apart from the rest of society and put yourself in a position to get better outcomes in the future.

• Read books — But then actually do something with the information. Reading for sport is worthless. But if you apply the knowledge you learn from books, you have a cheat code to life. As much as people say they read, they don’t. If you do, you’ll know and be able to implement secrets people don’t have access to.
• Become a learning machine, period — The biggest lie average people tell themselves is that upward mobility doesn’t exist. It definitely does. And you create it by learning. There are so many educational resources to live a better life that I have no pity on middle-class people at all. They’re in their own way and won’t take the time to learn profitable skills.
• Start a side business — Look, do I think everyone in the world needs to start a side business? No. And it doesn’t matter because most people won’t do it anyway. But if you do it, you’ll realize that the path to extra income and a bridge to your freedom is available to you if you do the work.

I could go on, but these steps are simple to make. They’re not difficult. They are time-consuming.

And they can be a lot to ask of you on top of already having to take care of the responsibilities you already have.

It’s your life. I always come back to this. If you think everything I’m telling you is BS. Just don’t listen to me. Let time be the judge. My observations tell me that the tragedy “C+” lifestyle isn’t apparent. Most people don’t hate their lives. But the “C+” lifestyle creates slow-burning anxiety that mutates into a litany of other problems.

Come on. I’m not the only one who sees it, right? Don’t you? Can’t you see it happening in your own life right now or in the future if you don’t decide to change?

So if you shouldn’t aim for lofty success or be complacent with what you have, what should you do?

Men first find you attractive and then they stick around because of your other qualities.

I hate anything that posits that men and women are different. In books like Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, it comes across as misogynist and condescending.

It actually felt like the author was browbeating me for being so relational. MANY more chapters focus on making women understand men than vice-versa, and the advice for men centers on mostly learning how to “pretend” that they understand women and be more clear about when and how long they’ll be in their “caves.”

But I can’t ignore that there are some truths to gender differences regardless of how I feel about them.

When it comes to relationships, men and women are wired differently.

Men are visual. Women are emotional.

I have dated my share of fuglies because they sure could challenge me intellectually. They attracted my mind well before the rest of me.

This is socially acceptable. There are slews of men who date women who are far more physically attractive than them.

One of my friends asked me about a man I’d just started dating, “Is he handsome?”

“Not. At. All,” I told her.

“But he makes you laugh, right?”

“Ohhhh yeah,” I said. “He’s hilarious!”

“Sense of humor” is often the number one thing that cishet women look for in a potential mate. Women often overlook a lot of physical imperfections for personality assets, especially if we are in love.

But the number one thing men are often looking for is “attractiveness.”

You lean over the bar to order a drink, and a guy glances your way to see your girls looking great in that top. He’s drawn to you because a.) you’ve got tits he wants to look at up close, and b.) the rest of you is pretty fly too.

He is, in no way, thinking, “Man, I wanna bang that woman because she spent 40 of her non-working hours last week hassling politicians to change their views on reproductive rights!”

Once he comes over to get a closer look at your boobs and he finds out you’re a human rights attorney or can belch the tune to “America the beautiful,” he’s hooked. If he then falls in love with you, he’s in for good.

But the order for men is still

1. Looks
2. Personality

Men first find you attractive and then they stick around because of your other qualities.

How many men would honestly say something like, “My wife looks like a hobgoblin had sex with a fart, but she’s my favorite person to talk to?”

A man would never say that about a woman he loves.

When a man loves a woman, she is his Jennifer Aniston or Halle Berry or Selena Gomez. She is fucking flawless. Beautiful in every way. She is his day-and-night Beyoncé.

A man has to be attracted to you to stay with you, so the fact that he loves you and is still with you means he’s still attracted to you.

In many ways, this is actually assuring, a fact I didn’t really realize until I watched Iliza Shlesinger’s Netflix special Unveiled (It’s fudging wonderful. Go watch it immediately.).

I felt unattractive for nearly my entire life. My mother was cruel and mean, calling me “fat” when I was 5’2 and 110 pounds, telling me that my thighs shouldn’t touch, my stomach needed to be flat, that my breasts needed to be bigger, that she had been much more attractive on her wedding day than me on mine.

Her comments simply intensified all of the other mean comments I heard throughout my life.

When I was in college, a few men told me, “You’re prettier when I’m drunk.”

Friends told me, “If you’d just let me give you a makeover, some guy might want to date you.”

A boyfriend once told me, “Your calves are flabby, but I like them.”

The way women speak to and about other women often comes from their own sense of self-hatred and self-loathing.

The way men speak to and about other women comes from a system that focuses on objectifying women and having power over them. Some dating books geared toward men encourage and teach negative-complimenting (like the example above) called “negging.” You’ve got a little injured bird in love with you if you imply no one will ever want her other than you.

Women are expected to be beautiful, and we go to great and expensive lengths to be such. We diet and exercise. We pluck and wax and primp and lotion. We get breast implants. We get liposuction and botox. We tattoo our lips and eyelids with semipermanent color. We get microblading. We get electrolysis. We pay someone damn good money to sand our skin off. We try to obliterate our facial “flaws” with primer, concealer, foundation, photofinishing spray, etc. etc.

It took me decades to get over first my mother’s insults and the slew of later toxic comments to feel even moderately comfortable with myself.

Yet whenever I had a partner who loved me, he would say, “You don’t need to wear make-up. You’re naturally beautiful. You‘d look good in a garbage bag.”

And this is the rub after all of that exhausting work to look beautiful: if a man loves you, it doesn’t matter that you spent hours getting ready, that you don’t like your thick thighs, or fuck, you have another pimple — what is this, the second coming of puberty? —, that you now need to put cream on your “delicate eye area,” or that you just spent $400 on a cut, highlights, and lowlights.

It. Doesn’t. Matter.

He loves you. He thinks you’re beautiful. No matter what you do. No matter what you have or don’t have, have done or haven’t done.

You’re his archetype. His goddess.

Every time I look in the mirror and think, “Jesus, did someone take a dump on my face in the middle of the night?” my husband will look at me through his blind dumb glasses of love and say, “Honey, you’re so beautiful.”

I can wish all I want that men weren’t such visual creatures, but after nearly a lifetime of hating myself and how I look, I can enjoy the fact that, to the only man that matters, I’m perfect.

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton