I was reluctant to write a “How to” guide on self improvement because I never wanted to be someone who gave others advice, but didn’t follow them myself. Helping others is something I always enjoy doing. I was never one for telling people how to live their lives or how to do certain things. Whenever someone did look up to me and ask for help or personal insight, I loved taking the time to share that knowledge in hopes that it could help the other person. I pride myself on being someone who strives to bring people up and to never knock anyone down, because I know how bad it feels to have people try and knock you down.

I decided to write this guide because I finally figured out a way to do so without breaking my personal rules which are — don’t be a fraud and don’t give advice that you don’t follow yourself. This guide is broken into 5 parts. Each section is an aspect of my own life that was suffering; through trial and error, I found ways to fix and turn what was once a weakness into a strong and stable area within my life. There are several things that I wish I could add, but in good heart, I cannot because that would be breaking my own personal rule — don’t be a fraud and don’t give advice that you don’t follow yourself.

I remember being lost and frustrated growing up because I seemed to not have anything going for myself. Elementary school all the way up until the first year of college I was just going through the motions in life and letting the waves of the universe take me wherever it felt like. Fortunately, I read a lot of books which helped me drastically. I took a lot of action and made right and wrong choices until I found what was effective which ultimately shaped how I live my life everyday. My currently lifestyle is something that I would consider to be a pretty decent foundation that many people can replicate and benefit from if they feel like they are living a sub-par life or they just think of themselves as a loser.

This guide is targeted for people who think their lives suck, never get picked to be on a team, afraid to take their shirts off at the beach, never been on a date, can’t run a mile in less than 8 minutes, easily become jealous of others, and everything else that’s pathetic and sad. If that sounds like you, then you are someone that I once used to be and in that case, this guide is definitely for you, if not, then read it anyways, maybe you’ll find some amusement in it.

2009 (13 year old me)

I was once fat and it sucked. A lot. I wore oversized sweaters to hide my man boobs and developed horrible posture to hide my gut. Whenever a girl tried to talk to me I thought it was a prank because I had serious self image issues. Shit was bad. Luckily, I discovered that losing weight wasn’t all that hard. I starting reading up on health and fitness, discovered a cool culture around it, found role models that I looked up to, and realized that a lot of girls dig aesthetics.

Anyways, I found that the best way to start improving yourself is to change your outer self first. For instance, when you put on some nice expensive clothes along with a fresh haircut, you immediately feel higher value and begin to see yourself in a better light. If you suffer from low self-esteem and you find that people don’t respect you as much as they should, don’t start trying to change something complex such as the way you carry yourself or how you interact with others, start changing your physical appearance by eating healthier foods and lifting some weights. It’s hard to measure progression and improvement when it’s an abstract idea such as personality or your social skills. It’s very easy, however, to measure your improvement through what you see in the mirror.

Once you start seeing how much weight you can lose and muscle you can gain in just a few months, you will realize how much control you actually have in your life. Because of this, you will begin to carry yourself in a more confident manner and you will realize that you will interact with others in a more confident way and people will treat you with more respect. It’s a snowball effect, you work on one thing and other parts of your life will follow. Life hack.

I started exercising when I was 15, but didn’t get serious until I was about 18. I mention this because I was broke during my teen years and I’m sure many teens reading this may relate to the fact that I could not afford a gym membership, supplements, or healthy foods in high school. That doesn’t mean that I had no other option but to eat whatever was in the kitchen and accept being overweight and unconfident.

Here, I will provide a simple fitness guide for broke people.

Fitness Guide For Broke People

The transformation from 17 year old me to 20 year old me was when I was broke, studying programming, and worked out mainly at home and Planet Fitness which cost $10/month. My Diet was cheap, but I tried my best.

First thing I have to mention is that if you don’t have much money to invest into your fitness, don’t set your fitness goals to looking like someone on a fitness magazine or hope to look like a physique competitor. Like it or not, there is only so much progress you can make on a budget. That being said, you can make drastic changes where you are now and you can be healthy for your current financial situation. Of course, your goal should be to make some money soon so that you can afford a healthier lifestyle, but for the time being, follow this guide to make the best of your current situation.

Body weight exercises

You can’t afford a gym membership so it’s probably safe to say that you can’t afford a bunch of weights and a nice olympic bench either. That’s alright because you have the awesome option of doing body weight exercises! Body weight exercises are workouts that utilize the weight of your own body.

The best body weight exercises that I continually use even in the gym are:

Pull-ups — pull-ups are great for building your upper back, biceps, shoulders, and lats all in one move.

Push-ups — Push-ups are amazing for building upper body strength and building muscle in your chest area. This is a great workout for getting rid of man boobs.

Squats — Squats are a great compound workout as it works your quads and your core at the same time. Great workout for burning calories and building muscle.

Upside down shoulder presses — This workout will bring out your shoulder blades. Use a wall to support your balance and move slowly.

Dips — Dips will workout your tricep.

Lunges — Lunges will workout your legs. This is a great workout to perform on hills or with weighted vests.

Do a variation of these exercises for at least 4–5 times a week and you’ll begin to make all kinds of gains with a total cost of about $0. I’ll go ahead and call this the “No Excuses” workout program.

Fasted Cardio

Running is free. Go outside and run for at least one mile twice a week. If you find that you have difficulty running, walk for 1 mile every morning until you can start running some of it. It’s also important to run no an empty stomach so that your body can efficiently burn body fat.

Low Sugar Diet

Diet can be difficult if you cannot afford food. I found that the best thing to do when broke is to cut out all sugar and unnecessary foods such as sweets, empty carbs, and stick to drinking about 1 gallon of water a day and no other liquids with the exception of un-sweetened tea and black coffee. Your diet will mostly likely still consists of some junk food since you are broke, but at least junk food contains your 3 primary macros which are protein, fats, and carbs. You can still make decent muscle gains and lose some weight eating junk food, just don’t expect to get shredded with a 6 pack on a dirty diet.

Consistent Sleep

Sleep is super important for losing weight, muscle recovery, mental health, testosterone production, and countless other things. Basically, sleep is very underrated and I’m surprised kids were never taught the importance of sleep in school. Consistent sleep may be hard for some, including myself. I still struggle sometimes to keep a consistent sleep schedule, many times because I begin to enter a flow state late at night and I become most productive when it’s close to bedtime and I end up not sleeping. Some tricks to sleeping consistently is to turn off all devices and decompress 1 hour before bedtime. There are also a few nootropics that I found useful for relaxing your mind and making it easier to fall asleep. Ashwagandha is found to be a great supplement for sleep, try mixing that in with some sleepy time tea or a glass of wine and you should be in a sleepy mood in no time…. hopefully.

Money

Money is as important as the things that you are sacrificing for it. It’s difficult to invest in yourself if you have no money to spend. How can you buy a gym membership, books to read, better clothes, go out and develop yourself, etc? Money is a necessity to live and you are going to have to find a job to start paying for things that allow you to live a decent life. You don’t need a million dollars or an engineering salary, heck, you don’t even need a steady income to become someone worth something, you can work at McDonald’s for all I care, if you have money to spend, you have the ability to invest in yourself. If you don’t have a job, go search for one. Dishwasher, retail, whatever you can find if you are still a student and don’t have an established career yet.

We can all agree that money is a necessity, but sometimes the things we sacrifice in order to obtain money is more valuable. I was someone who sacrificed a lot of things in my life to become a programmer because I thought that once I had a high paying job, my life would be golden. I had the idea that I could work on my life after work hours and do all the things I wanted to do around a full-time job. At 22 years old I was hired for my dream job which that came along with high pay. What I didn’t expect was that I would be working long after 6pm and many times putting in work on the weekends. Sure, theoretically I had the money to do the things I wanted to do and put money into things that would improve myself, however, money is useless when you don’t have the time to utilize it. I found that I didn’t have the time to work on myself due to my demanding engineering job. I realized that I took 4 steps forward in my career and an astounding 6 steps back in my life. It hit me when I realized that I was more miserable and unhealthy than I was before I was working my dream job. I realized that I was about 5x happier working my previous part-time job making less than half of what I was making at this point.

The lunch area for my high paying engineering job. I didn’t like it.

The point is that, don’t glorify a high paying job as something as a be all end all solution to your life. A job is something that you do to pay for your lifestyle. If your job begins to put a strain on your well-being and you begin gaining weight, become depressed, and no longer have the time to work on your other passions, then realize that you are literally sacrificing your life to buy stuff that doesn’t matter. Get a job that allows you to live, don’t live to allow yourself to work for some company.

Quick tip! If you are young with no previous work experience and living in a big city, there are plenty of minimum wage entry level jobs on Craigslist for positions like retail, dishwasher, or sign holder.

In conclusion… please, get a job, but not one that’s going to kill you. It’s all about work life balance.

Cleaning Up Your Social Circle

The people you associate yourself with dictates pretty much what sort of person you will most likely become. In my personal life, there was a certain point where I began to reflect on my social circle and I evaluated every person I was spending time with. I realize many of them were the toxic type — easily envious, thought my ambitions were silly, showed that they were happier when I failed rather than when I made accomplishments, negative energy, and everything beyond. I began to wonder why I kept these people in my life and soon discovered that it was a fear of thinking that I would not be able to make other friends because they were the only people I hung out with, it was a fear of being lonely. I now know that this is a ridiculous fear. Cutting out toxic negative people out of your life is as beneficial as cutting out junk from your diet. You are what you eat and you are who you spend time with; make sure that the people you spend time with are ones who bring out the best in you, they should be positive individuals who would bring you up when you are down, not knock you down harder when you fall. Cut out people who are toxic.

Personality

I was grown in a household where my parents were very aggressive in raising us. It wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows, especially growing up in a relatively bad neighborhood where you kept your head down if you didn’t want to get picked on by the local gangsters. Because of this upbringing, I developed the habit of being a very serious person that did not smile much or know how to have a light-hearted conversation. Humor was dark and social skills were bleak. Once I grew older, got into my career, started dating, setting up myself for a better life, I discovered the obvious benefits of learning how to be personable.

If you want a healthy life, social circle, and be able to maneuver in your career, it would be wise to put yourself out of your comfort zone and start working on your personality and ability so socialize with people. I don’t consider myself to be the most charismatic person, I’m actually far from it, but I’ve made lots of progress since I’ve made the realization of the importance of it.

If you’re in school, join clubs, attend study sessions, or join a sport. Be as social as possible and it will set you up to be someone that is more likely to succeed further in life.

Perspective

When I drove to Nevada in my dream car after quitting my dream job.

When I was a little fat sad kid in middle school, I thought my life was out of my control and that some kids just had it better. I went through the years eating the same junk food, not exercising, not reading, not studying, not trying to change myself. I was blaming the universe and being resentful of others that had the things that I wanted. This is a horrible mindset; it is the mindset of a textbook loser. If this sounds like you, please, realize that you can have the things and be the hero of your own movie, all it takes is a lot of effort, clear goals, and a guide to get there.

Everything starts in your mind. The world and everything in it is perceived through your mind. The world does not revolve around you, but your life is shaped through how you process the world. If you see that all your problems and reasons why you are not the person living the life that you want to live is because of whatever reason and that you have no control over it, then that will be your reality. However, if you take ownership of your life and realize that you are responsible for all the good and bad things in your life, then you will realize that your actions will dictate how life will turn out for you. Hopefully, this realization will lead you to make productive decisions that will shape you into becoming the best version of yourself.

One of the most prevalent pitfalls for someone during the early stages of their journey on self improvement is that they begin to compare themselves to others. Doing this will just make you feel demotivated, less than adequate, and begin to feel discouraged. The best mindset would be to only compare the person in the mirror. What matters most in your journey is not whether you are surpassing everyone around you, but rather the person you were yesterday.