Most men today cannot lead themselves.

We like to complain, and we hate it when somebody tells us the truth. But the truth is the thing that sets you free. It set me free, and I think it should set you free too.

I am not a preacher and I am not here to motivate you. I am not even really a YouTube creator. I am just somebody who has lived a bit of life and is still living it, and I want to have an honest conversation about how a man learns to lead himself.

So let me give you my whole story, including the parts that are embarrassing.

I have been in the trenches

My name is Elvis.

Every mistake you are thinking about making at 21, I have already made. I am not going to pretend otherwise.

But did I sit there crying about those mistakes? No. You dust yourself off and you keep moving. That is most of it, honestly.

Here is the thing about men. We have enormous energy. We just refuse to put it into anything productive. We would rather spend it on nonsense, and then wonder at 30 where the years went.

Joining university at 18

I joined Dedan Kimathi University at 18.

Let me tell you what happens to a young man in that environment, because it happened to me and it is happening to somebody reading this right now.

You arrive as a fresher with nothing. No income, no skill, no direction, nothing built. And you immediately start trying to compete for attention you have nothing to compete with.

So you start simping. Sending messages all day. Spending the little money you have on people who were never going to see you as an option, because there is nothing there yet to see.

I want to be careful how I say this next part, because in the video I said it more harshly than I should have. The honest version is this. At 18 I had not built anything. I had nothing to offer anybody, including myself. I was trying to buy interest with money I did not have instead of becoming somebody worth being interested in.

That is not a complaint about women. That is a description of a young man with no value doing what young men with no value do.

And underneath all of it, if I am honest, the engine was uncontrolled sexual desire. I made a separate video about that one.

Peer pressure is real and it moves fast

The other thing that happens in university is that you become whoever is around you.

A man who never smoked in his life joins campus and within a year he smokes. Somebody who never drank now drinks every weekend. Not because he decided to, but because everybody around him does and saying no is uncomfortable.

That is the whole mechanism. Nobody chooses it. It just arrives, slowly, and then it is who you are.

The day I realised it was all futile

One day it just hit me. All my effort was going nowhere.

Everything I was chasing was futile. Nobody wanted anything to do with me, and the reason was not unfair, it was accurate. I had nothing.

So I made a decision. I left.

I stopped living on campus entirely. I moved into a single room away from the university premises, because I understood something important: a man has to have value, and I was not going to build any of it in that environment.

The laptop that changed everything

My father gave me a laptop, a Lenovo.

At first I mostly used it for Euro Truck Simulator, which I enjoyed enormously and still would if life had not arrived with its bills. That is the honest version. It was not a serious machine for a serious young man. It was a toy.

Then I started researching things online.

My first online writing gig was useless, so I moved on from it quickly. But then I found graphic design, and then web development, and something in my head switched on.

Back then a lot of us were coding websites in Notepad++. No frameworks, no drag and drop, nothing clever. Just typing HTML into a text editor and refreshing the browser to see what broke.

That is where my self improvement actually began. Not with a decision to become a better man. With a laptop, a single room, and enough curiosity to keep going.

2017: my first real clients

Then the 2017 election season arrived.

Suddenly everybody needed posters. And I was one of the few people around who could produce them, so I started getting contracted properly. That was the first time design stopped being something I was learning and became something people paid me for.

During the holidays I was in Nanyuki running a cyber cafe. That taught me a different set of skills entirely, the ones you only learn from operating a real business with a real door that opens every morning. Customers, cash, stock, staff, all of it.

A note about the mind of a 20 year old

I want to stop here and say something to anybody currently in their 20s.

The mind you have at 20 is not a mind you get back. There is nothing like it later.

That brain is craving information. It is going to consume something. The only question is what. If you do not deliberately feed it good material, it will feed itself on whatever is nearest, and what is nearest is usually rubbish.

The internet means there is no excuse. Everything is there.

So feed it deliberately, while it is still in that state. That window closes.

2018: the attachment I hated

In 2018 I went to Mombasa for my industrial attachment.

I hated it, and I will write about it properly one day.

My honest opinion, based on my own experience, is that attachments in their current form are close to useless. I watched something like 10 or 20 series in that period. I learned almost nothing. The people I was attached to were busy with their own work, and most of what I was shown had no application to anything real.

Somebody will tell me their attachment was excellent and I believe them. Mine was a waste of months, and I know I am not the only one.

Setting up my own cyber cafe, and meeting real failure

After the attachment I convinced my mother to help me set up my own cyber cafe.

And this is where I experienced real failure. Not disappointment. Failure.

The business was not producing. Some days it could not give me 20 shillings to take home, and I still had to open it every morning and keep it running.

So I went to a microfinance for a loan. Then the collection people started coming for me, so I took a loan from somebody else to pay the microfinance. Then I used money from the microfinance to pay that person back.

You are just moving the same shortage in circles and calling it management.

That is what a debt spiral actually looks like from inside. It does not feel reckless while it is happening. It feels like you are handling things.

I got into a relationship during that same period, which was another mistake, and I learned from it too.

Graduating in 2019 into nothing

I graduated in 2019 with no job waiting.

Look around at what happens to graduates. People with degrees selling mishikaki. People selling sweaters. Not because anything is wrong with that work, but because 4 years and a lot of family money produced a paper and no plan.

Then COVID closed everything

The cyber cafe depended on people physically walking in. COVID ended that overnight.

That was a tough period, and the only useful thing I had at that moment was resilience. Nobody was coming to my cafe, so I had to find something I could do that would still make money.

OLX and the pivot that worked

I went to OLX, the classifieds platform, and started listing my services. Logo design. Posters. Company profiles.

And it worked.

A cyber cafe on a good day might give me 1,000 shillings, sometimes 500. The design work was doing considerably better than that, and it did not need anybody to walk through a door.

Then I bought a laptop. Until then I had been working on a desktop inside the cyber, which meant I could only work when the cyber was open. With a laptop I could work from home, at any hour, on any job.

My revenue almost tripled.

That is not a dramatic story. A change of equipment removed a constraint I had stopped noticing. Most breakthroughs are that ordinary.

Failure is the best thing that can happen to a man

Here is what all of that taught me.

If you have never failed, do not look at successful people and copy what you see. You are looking at the glamour. Ask them how they failed. That is where the actual information is.

Failure teaches better than success ever will, and the reason is simple. When you have been in the furnace, you do not want to go back. You will recognise the heat from a long way off.

So make the mistakes. Dig the hole. Get into the wrong relationship, learn what it costs you, and get out. Start the business that fails.

I am not going to sit here listing red flags for you to memorise, because it will not work. Warnings do not transfer. You have to walk through it.

Dig your trenches as a man, and come out of them wiser.

Now the advice, since I paid for it

You have energy and you have very few responsibilities. No child. No baby mama. Nobody depending on your decisions. That combination is the most valuable thing you will ever own and you will not notice until it is gone.

So here is what I would tell my younger self.

Buy a desk and a chair before you buy a TV. When you move into a new house, the instinct is a television. Do not. Get a desk. Get a chair. Put them where you will actually sit.

That desk is where your life changes. Not in a seminar and not in a comment section.

Learn a skill that pays. Sit at that desk and learn social media management, or web design, or digital marketing, or content creation. Learn sales, which almost nobody bothers with and which improves everything else you do.

Think about how many businesses in Nairobi are looking for a competent social media manager right now. That is a real market with real money in it, today.

Read. Start with Atomic Habits by James Clear. It is the right first book because it is about the machinery of doing things consistently, which is the thing most of us are missing.

Use the free material properly. YouTube. Podcasts. People like Alex Hormozi on business and Codie Sanchez on acquisitions and sales. Follow African creators who make relatable content for our context too, because some of the American advice does not transfer.

Spend less time on nonsense. Less time chasing women. Less time drinking. Less time in clubs collecting company that adds nothing to your life.

You do not need any of it at this stage. And if you are going to be sexually active anyway, use protection, because an unplanned pregnancy at 22 rewrites the next 20 years of your life and there is no undo.

Give it 3 to 5 years of real focus. Not a weekend of motivation. Years.

Take a photograph of where you are living right now. Where you sleep, how it looks, all of it.

Keep that photo. One day you will be somewhere better and tempted to make a stupid decision, and looking at that picture will remind you exactly what you climbed out of and what it cost.

You can rebuild at 30. You can rebuild at 40.

I believe society gets better when men get better. That is the whole reason I talk about this.

I am not trying to motivate you and I am not asking you to subscribe to anything. If this is useful, use it.

But understand that you have the energy to improve your life and the ability to make better decisions, and that window is wider than people tell you. 18 to 25 is the easiest time to build. 30 is still fine. 40 is still fine. The starting point is worse but the direction is the same.

I have made every mistake in this life and I will make more, because nobody is perfect and I am not pretending to be finished.

But the one thing I have come to believe about being a man is this.

Choices have consequences.

So which choice are you making for yourself?

Start your digital skills journey on Click2Skill

— Elvis W.