Habits that made me get my life together in my 20s

 Today I want to talk about habits—specifically, the seven habits that helped me get my life together in my 20s. Now that I'm almost 30, reflecting back from age 15 to 25, I realize that I was mostly clueless and focused on all the wrong things.

 From ages 15 to 19, I was addicted to video games, and in my early 20s, I focused on partying, getting girls, and other unproductive behaviors. Although I don’t necessarily regret those days, I am grateful to have made significant improvements in my life over the second half of my 20s. 

I turned my passion into a thriving business, got my finances in order, entered a loving relationship, and I'm building a stronger body day by day. 

While I don’t have it all figured out, I feel a lot more confident about my life today than I did five years ago, largely thanks to implementing seemingly small but consistent habits. So here are the seven habits that helped me get my life together in my 20s, and hopefully, they can benefit you as well.

1. Abstain from Pornography and Masturbation I didn’t think I'd one day be talking about this on YouTube, but let’s get real for a moment without filters. While we all enjoy a little self-pleasure now and then, pornography is a silent killer, especially for men.

 It starts out as a harmless distraction but has a real neurochemical impact on your brain that progressively worsens over time. It desensitizes you to normal sex, rewiring your brain on how you get turned on, and drains your energy and motivation from within.

Watching porn releases dopamine, the pleasure hormone. The more you watch, the more dopamine gets released, reinforcing the behavior and creating a vicious cycle that becomes harder to escape. Like a drug, your tolerance for visual stimulation compounds over time, making it harder to get turned on by actual real sex.

 There’s a lot of interesting research and videos about the effects of pornography, and I’ll link a few in the description. I’ve seen cases where it can become extremely damaging to your life. 

Although it never snowballed to that point for me, I have gone through long stretches of complete abstinence from porn and always feel better when I’m not engaging in it. I feel more focused, clear-minded, less distracted, and it improves the dynamic in my sex life.

Moderation might not necessarily lead to the darkest outcomes, but because of its potential to snowball into a negative cycle, many people prefer to stay off it entirely. In fact, there are online communities like the NoFap movement where people support each other in overcoming porn addiction and other forms of compulsive sexual behavior. It’s something that a lot of men contend with, so definitely don’t feel ashamed if you can relate.

2. Setting Clear Goals For most of my life until my mid-20s, I was never intentional with my goals and aspirations. I hoped, wished, prayed, and had certain ambitions, but as the years went by, I wasn’t getting any closer to achieving my goals because a goal without a plan is just a dream, and I had no plan.

 I was cruising through life doing the usual things that parents and society push you to do: go to school, get good grades, go to a good university, get a stable job, assuming everything would fall into place and lead to a fulfilling life. But I was wrong.

After 23 years in the education system, once I actually got the marketing job I thought I wanted, I realized this path was not for me at all. I was following someone else’s dream, not my own. Since then, I’ve made it a point to live a very intentional life and set clear goals that I actively work towards.

 At the end of every year, I take a piece of A4 paper and review my goals, dividing them into long-term (10+ years), medium-term (2-3 years), and short-term (1 year) goals. I further split them into categories: health, relationships, career, and finances, and write them all down.

Writing things down on paper is an underrated habit. I believe in the power of visualization to create your own reality. Many successful athletes use visualization—Muhammad Ali famously said, “If my mind can conceive it and my heart can believe it, then I can achieve it.” You have to visualize your goal first, be clear about what you want, put it down on paper, and then align your behavior with your ambitions.

3. Taking Massive Action Visualizing and manifesting is only one half of the equation. The other half is actually moving towards your goals aggressively. Things didn’t start changing for me until I put my head down and took massive action every day, day after day. 

The word “hustle” has received a negative connotation lately—people talk about hustle porn, workaholism, and toxic hustle culture—but sometimes I think society has gone a little soft. If you want to make a big change in your life, you need to make big changes in your behavior. 

Whether it’s starting a business, mastering a new skill, or getting in shape, you’ll need some level of grinding, hard work, and just doing the thing.

From someone who went from being €40,000 in debt to building a six-figure business within a few years, hard work is a necessity. You don’t get there without late nights and pushing through when you don’t feel like working. It’s normal for it to be hard—it should be hard, otherwise, everybody would do it.

 A little imbalance in your work-life pendulum for a period of time is okay. The key is to pursue something you enjoy because if not, you will burn out. Money alone is not enough; personal fulfillment is much more important. In this day and age, you can monetize almost any skill set, so figure out what you love doing first, then figure out how to monetize it. Visualize and take massive action.

4. Working Out I’m going to be brief with this one because you know it. Anybody that consumes self-help content hears it first: go to the gym, get your body moving. It works.

 Not only does it have the obvious physical benefits of making you look better and be healthier, but it also greatly improves your mindset because it makes you do something uncomfortable regularly. Discomfort is a good thing—our brain is wired to chase comfort, but success and progress in any domain often come from getting out of your comfort zone.

Over time, building the consistent habit of working out has strengthened my motivation and discipline in all areas of my life. If it’s not already part of your lifestyle, I highly recommend taking on this habit. I’m no fitness expert, but there are many great fitness channels out there, like Jeff Nippard or Athlean-X, which I’ll link in the description.

5. Not Waking Up at 5 AM A lot of personal development advice tells you to wake up super early and have a meticulously optimized morning routine to be more productive. But after many times of trying early morning routines, I realized they don’t work for me. We all have different biological clocks—some feel energized and productive in the evening, while others naturally wake up early with peak energy levels. I am not a morning person. I feel groggy, tired, and not as efficient as I am in the evening. Many of you might relate, and that’s totally fine.

Don’t feel like you’re not getting ahead if you’re not waking up at 5 AM, doing a yoga session, a workout, and finishing all your emails before 9 AM. Everyone has the same 24 hours in a day.

 If you wake up at 5 AM, you need to be in bed by 9 or 10 PM to get at least seven hours of sleep. If I go to bed at 1 AM and wake up at 8 AM, I’m not getting any less time than someone who wakes up at 5 AM. Those 5 AM routines aren’t for everybody, and that’s okay. Being in tune with your biological clock’s natural sleep-wake cycle will allow you to feel and function your best every day.

6. Delaying Gratification Our brain is naturally inclined to move away from pain and towards pleasure, to seek what is easy and comfortable. But I learned that the more you can delay gratification, the better your life will be in the future. 

It feels better in the moment to eat that dessert, watch another Netflix episode, or skip the gym, but that’s not going to help future me. I heard of the concept of the rocking chair version of yourself—imagine the 80-year-old version of yourself who can’t move like you used to, who doesn’t have the time and energy to do what your younger self could. Make every decision based on what would make that rocking chair version of yourself proud.

Most of the time, the instantly gratifying option is not the right one. So, I try to suck it up and do the thing that will improve my future life. I still indulge occasionally, but 90% of the time, I choose delayed gratification.

7. Extreme Accountability Lastly, this is more of a mindset than a habit, but it’s arguably the thing that made the most difference in my life in this past decade. 

Once I switched from a victim mindset to an extreme accountability mindset, I saw the most growth. I used to think if only I was raised differently, looked differently, or lived in a different place, my life would be better. It kept me focused on externalities rather than looking inwards.

I remember the day I made the switch clearly. It was my first day at the corporate job I had been working towards, and reality hit me. It felt like a glass shattered, allowing me to see reality for what it was.