Welcome to the first issue of More The Man

This week’s manly topics:

🧠 LEARN We start our journey together by taking a look at a virtue all men desire, few feel they possess but all need to succeed: Confidence.
🛠️ TAKE ACTION Jacked arms and swoll thighs are great but core conditioning separates the men from the boys.
📰 THIS JUST IN The latest men’s health discoveries and hacks from around the Web.
🔎 WHAT ABOUT YOU How much sleep are you getting?

PLUS, subscriber-only offers from our sponsors and partners. Let’s go!

LEARN
Confidence: The Limitless Pill

📽️🍿 In the 2011 movie “Limitless” Bradley Cooper plays deadbeat loser Eddie Morra whose life looks like a sad country music song: no job, no girl, no future. Through a chance encounter with an old friend, Eddie discovers a tiny, translucent pill. Eddie does what the pros do and swallows it.

Within a matter of seconds, Eddie’s senses sharpen and he finds he can recall anything he has ever read or heard and can acquire vast amounts of new information and skills with ease. Eddie’s confidence soars and we see him jet-setting, cliff diving and dominating in every setting.

The new knowledge and skills were a huge advantage but what really transformed Eddie from pitiful to powerful was his confidence in himself. His confidence gave him an almost supernatural ability to act. (🚨 SPOILER ALERT 🚨 The pill’s effects wore off and left Eddie worse than before 😱)

For the sake of this consideration, let’s define confidence as the trust you have in yourself. The trust informs that voice in your head that tells you either “go for it, champ!” or “go home, loser.”

Think about your life and all those times you stopped yourself from taking action. Your lack of trust in yourself prevented you from sticking up for yourself, from taking a risk, from putting yourself outside your comfort zone. The problem was not someone else. The problem was you but that is actually good news because you are the boss of you … and you can change you.

That brings us back to the reason we are considering confidence at the outset of your MTM journey. You need confidence because you are going to need to trust yourself enough to act on the knowledge you acquire along the way. You are going to need to act (the sooner, the better) on the advice and insights we share with you for anything of this to make a difference in your life.

Knowledge that isn’t put to use is worthless … actually, it's worse than useless because you will loathe yourself for knowing and not doing. You can find plenty of smart guys living on the streets and holding up cardboard signs at street corners. Action catalyzes the process of your becoming the stronger, smarter, wiser, more empathetic and more effective man you want to be.

Building confidence in yourself, like building anything, takes time and intention but, if you start making the effort now, you will feel the difference immediately.

Here are THREE actions you can take TODAY to immediately increase your self-confidence:

🫡 Be a person you can respect: Look at yourself as an outside observer. Think about the ways you have used your time and your money over the last 24 hours. Do you judge that guy to be a degenerate loser or an ambitious leader? For most of us, we can find behaviors aligned with both categories. The point is to do less of the things that make you lose respect for yourself and do more things that increase your respect for yourself. Both guys are in there. Feed one and starve the other.

⭐️ Do the best job you can at work: Expect excellence from yourself. Being hyper-casual or obnoxiously cynical might be cool among teens but no man should ever aspire to be a teenager (even teenagers hate being teenagers!) Men take pride in what they do and, in so doing, they earn self-respect and the respect of those around them.

💪 Do 50 push-ups each day: The more you embrace physical pain as a means to strengthen and discipline your body, the more you will respect yourself (and you should.) Your brain is connected to your body. The time and effort you invest in improving your physical condition will strengthen your mental condition. Push-ups are an example of something you can do without the need to join a gym or buy equipment. The point is to make a habit of regular, strenuous exercise that tests your physical and mental boundaries.

We are going to unpack and explore all of these (and many more) ideas and skills in the weeks to come. This is enough to get you moving towards building a durable limitless confidence.