In this edition of the Peak Performance Newsletter, we will be discussing:

Table of Contents

• Chapter 1: How to practice self love as a young ma …

• Chapter 2: The Male Curse

• Chapter 3: How to Prioritize Delayed Gratification

Before we start,

And in this post, I’ll go over why you should prioritize delayed gratification, and why so many young men are experiencing symptoms of poor mental health due to instant gratification.

If this is your first time reading this newsletter, I talk about men issues and young men’s self improvement. So if that sounds interesting, then you might want to stick around.

Chapter 1: How to practice self love as a young man

Self love comes from how much comfort you’ve sacrificed for your future self.

And the main reason why many young men have poor mental health is because they’ve overindulged in too much instant gratification.

Instant gratification are the habits that steals happiness from your future self by prioritizing comfort right now.

So that would be junk food, social media, video games, Netflix etc. Basically every modern addiction.

Delayed gratification are the habits that seem uncomfortable right now, but grants happiness for your future self.

That would be exercising, reading, meditating, journaling, working on a business, socializing, etc.

And as uncomfortable as it sounds, men don’t grow from indulging in instant gratification, but rather prioritizing delayed gratification.

So the way that we build self respect comes from making progress towards meaningful goals.

“Self love” for men isn’t about having the cheat day or binging Netflix. it’s about doing the hard shit that we didn’t want to do.

Because which actions is going to lead to the most growth?

When you’re about to skip a workout but you do it anyways, waking up early and focusing on deep work, those are the actions that will ultimately propel you to a happier, more fulfilling life.

And if I’m being honest with you, I didn’t even feel like writing this email today. I know it sounds like I’m complaining on every single post, but this is often the truth.

There are many times where I want to skip my deep work sessions, there are many times where I wanted to push the deadline further because my brain felt too tired to write the email.

Sometimes I am motivated to write and managed to complete the email effortlessly, but other times the task felt too daunting because these emails are longer, more in depth, so they do take a lot of brain power to write out thoroughly.

But I do know is that when I’m finished with the deep work session, I have no regrets because the satisfaction that came from completing it was worth the discomfort that I had to experience initially.

So imagine you keep delaying gratification for your future self, and overtime your life trajectory will skyrocket. Visualize yourself achieving everything you want in life through practicing the delayed gratification habits.

So that could be leveling up in your fitness, building your business/career, and growing a vibrant social life alongside it. All of these are all extremely fulfiling goals to have.

You will feel extremely happy, and you will respect yourself infinitely a lot more than the version of you who didn’t prioritize delayed gratification and instead indulged in instant gratification.

That is how you build self love as a man, and hopefully you’ll be able to see the importance behind this movement of encouraging other young men to start working hard for their future selves.

Chapter 2: The Male Curse

I will be going over a controversial take in this section, so if you don’t want to read it then you can skip this chapter. If not, then feel free to debate me on this.

The reason why I’m discussing this topic here is because it does have to do with masculinity and how instant gratification is rapidly destroying men’s mental health.

I believe that as men, we can never fully love ourselves unconditionally, at least not in the same sense as women do.

Some women can still indulge in instant gratification but be relatively happy afterwards, while most masculine men will feel a deep sense of regret from it.

This can manifest in many ways, like gaining weight, wasting time, or feeling socially isolated.

And what I mean by unconditional is that we are truly motivated by making progress, achieving goals, and overall climbing higher in the 3 pillars of life (Health, wealth, relationships)

But since we don’t have this linear trajectory anymore, more men are now experiencing symptoms of anxiety, depression, hopelessness, etc.

I’ve covered this a bit in my beginner’s guide to purpose, but I really wanted to explore on this topic more in this chapter.

(You can check it out here if you're interested)

When we don’t make progress on our goals and instead indulge in instant gratification, we are supposed to feel bad about it.

Again I’m not a scientist, just a random retard writing emails online.

But biologically, it makes sense why we feel a deep sense of shame an regret whenever we don’t make progress, because it is such an important aspect on what makes up our masculine nature.

So instead of pushing that guilt and shame away, I feel like we should instead use as fuel to push towards working harder.

If you could imagine the life of our caveman ancestors 5 million years ago. It would be considered a genuine mental illness to not make progress towards anything, still be happy about it, and just lay around all day looking at rocks.

That would be the modern day equivalent of a young man who’s completely devoid of purpose and spends all day watching social media and playing video games.

Sure, there are exceptions to this rule. And I have seen many people who don’t do any of the self improvement habits, still indulge in instant gratification, and have happier lives than most of us.

And I mean, props to them. I’m not saying this to bash on anyone who plays video games or watches Netflix.

And although comfort is encouraged in the modern day and masculinity has been demonized in the west, you still feel an odd pull towards pursuing it.

That feeling is your restrained masculinity that has been manipulated by media to be deemed as toxic.

And while masculinity in the past has been used for violence and to commit heinous crimes amongst ourselves.

I have full conviction that we can be the new age of young men who can use our masculine energy in good, productive ways by learning about the self improvement topics that we discuss on this newsletter.

So I believe that it is in our best interests as masculine men that we do have something to work hard on (either our health, finances relationships).

Because most symptoms of poor mental health in young men generally go away once they start living more productive, heathy lives (going to the gym, eating clean, socializing, reading, etc.)

This isn’t to say that it’s impossible to be a young man on self improvement while consuming instant gratification.

But I’m going to assume that most of us who’ve signed up to this newsletter are currently dissatisfied with their lives, so we should strive to cut out instant gratification from our normal day to day schedules gradually.

Chapter 3: How to Prioritize Delayed Gratification

I’ve covered how to practice self love, why instant gratification destroys young men’s mental health, and I’m now going to share with you the exact steps that I’ve used to start prioritizing delayed gratification in my daily lifestyle.

I don’t want to waste your time, so here are the actionable steps that I’ve used to make this drastic change when I first started on self improvement.

1. Consistency > Intensity. Focus on making small achievable wins fast.

The worst thing you can do to your future self is to expect to become this disciplined character overnight.

And the truth is that you won’t. I certainly wasn’t when I first started my own self improvement journey, so don’t be hard on yourself to have it all figured out.

The main problem is your ego, and it’s trying to convince you that you’re capable of waking up and running straight in the morning every day.

You remain consistent for 2-3 days, then your too tired the next day and then you quit.

You don’t deserve to sustain that level of discipline because you’ve haven’t even mastered the smaller, less impressive tasks that still require discipline to complete.

Instead of focusing on the 5 AM morning run, focus on waking up and making your bed every morning.

Instead of focusing on doing 3 hour deep work sessions, focus on meditating for 3 minutes straight every single morning.

It’s not the big actions that yielded the most results, but rather the small wins that I could reasonably sustained over a long time period.

Delayed gratification is all about embracing discomfort now for your future self’s benefit. But that level of discomfort should be relative to what you are currently capable of.

2. Do the hard work for your future self’s benefit.

Not an actionable step, but an important mindset that you could think about.

The purpose of delayed gratification is not experiencing the rewards right now, but rather doing the hard work so that our future selves can experience the fruits of our labor later.

By prioritizing delayed gratification, you are purposefully putting your future self’s wellbeing over your own.

That piece of junk food you were going to eat? You delay gratification and eat the healthy meal you’ve prepped instead because you knew that your future self wanted a six pack.

The gym session that you were going to skip out on? You delay gratification and go anyways because you wanted your future self to be proud of the body that you’ve built.

And once you’re able to develop that type of healthy relationship with your future self, then your quality of life will significantly change.

You will begin to like and respect yourself more, because younger you stopped being an asshole towards your future self.

3. Find a delayed gratification habit that means a lot to you.

Delayed gratification should feel uncomfortable initially, but the premise is for you to gradually replace it over the instant gratification habits.

But if you don’t find much passion in the hard task, then you won’t felt yourself sticking to it for long.

Not the discomfort that comes from it, but from the lack of satisfaction and rewards that you experience.

My main 3 delayed gratification habits are weightlifting, working on my newsletter, and learning/reading about self improvement topics.

I’ve been able to stay fairly consistent in all 3 of these habits because I genuinely enjoyed the satisfaction that I was getting from them.

I liked going to the gym because it gave me a sense of progress and accomplishment.

I liked working on my newsletter because it gave me a sense of purpose and validation from the help that I provided to others.

And I liked learning about self improvement topics because I’m interested in improving all aspects of my life. (Fitness, wellbeing, social life, finance, masculinity, etc)

So if you can’t give a good reason on why you’re invested in it, then it’s probably not the right habit for you.

I make more posts similar to this on delayed vs. instant gratification and how to become more productive as an ambitious young man.

So scroll down to find my webpage where you’ll find everything I’ve discussed on self improvement, mental health, masculinity, etc

I hoped you’ve found this email helpful. And if you’ve did then I’d heavily appreciate it if you’ve left a comment on how it impacted you.

Until then, take care.