We are living in an era where most men are weak.
Weak at making decisions. Weak at leading themselves. Weak at leading their own families. And because leading yourself is hard, a lot of men have found something easier to do instead, which is sitting online insulting the people who are actually building something.
That is the whole reason I recorded this. Self improvement for men is not a mysterious process. It is a list of ordinary things done consistently, and most of us are not doing any of them.
This is a raw video and this is a long article. I have broken it into 5 areas: your body, your mind, your skills and money, your people, and your appearance.
Watch the full video
Part 1: Your body
Everything else on this list gets harder when your body is not working. Start here.
1. Fix your sleep pattern
You cannot sit down and focus on a project when you have not slept.
You will open that graphic design gig and stare at it for 3 hours and finish nothing. I know this because I lived it. When I was getting into freelancing and picking up work on Upwork and Fiverr, I was permanently busy and permanently not sleeping. Then the bugs started. Not bugs in the code, bugs in my head. I was making mistakes I would never have made rested.
The work does not get faster when you steal hours from sleep. It gets slower, and then it takes 2 days to fix what you broke at 2am.
Pick a sleep window and defend it the way you would defend a client meeting.
2. Go to the gym
Who decided the gym is only for a certain type of guy?
There is a strange idea going around that if you train, you are showing off. I have been going since 2022 and I can tell you the main benefit is not the one people assume.
Yes, your body changes. But the bigger change is mental. You think more clearly. You feel better about yourself, and that feeling is not vanity, it is the ordinary result of doing something difficult on purpose and seeing it work.
The gym is also the cheapest hard thing available to you. The weight does not care about your excuses. Either you did the work or you did not.
3. Eat properly
Most of us are eating processed food for most meals and then wondering why we feel heavy and slow.
Fix the basics first. Cut the processed food down. Eat real food that was recently alive or grown. You do not need a complicated system to start.
If you want to go further, get an actual meal plan rather than guessing. I did this. I found a nutritionist and asked what it would cost to build me a 2 month plan, every meal, every day, around how I actually eat. I do not eat in the morning. My first meal is usually around midday. She built the menu around that rather than around a template.
It did not cost much, and it removed the daily decision, which is the part that usually breaks people.
If you want to learn about nutrition properly, follow qualified people rather than whoever is loudest on your timeline. Check that the person has real credentials before you take their advice as fact, because nutrition is full of confident people selling things.
4. Learn to cook at least 5 meals
A grown man should be able to feed himself.
Some of us cannot cook scrambled eggs. Cannot peel a potato. Do not know the difference between olive oil and vegetable oil or when to use either.
Learn 5 meals properly. Not 5 recipes you follow with a phone in your hand, 5 meals you can make without thinking. That is enough to eat well most of the week without depending on a restaurant or somebody else.
It also makes the eating-properly point above achievable. It is very difficult to control what you eat when somebody else cooks everything you consume.
5. Get a medical checkup every year
Men are dropping dead and a lot of it is detectable in advance.
A man consumes junk for 20 years, carries the weight, never checks anything, and then something happens that a scan would have flagged years earlier. Blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar, heart function, prostate. These are routine tests, not exotic ones.
Most hospitals in Nairobi run men’s health packages that bundle several of these together. Book one. Once a year, same month, so you do not have to remember.
And while you are at it, get a medical cover. This is the part men skip because nothing is wrong right now.
The logic of insurance is that you buy it before you need it. Once you are already sick, nobody will cover you, and then you are the man in a WhatsApp group asking 40 people for contributions. Paying for a cover while healthy is not an expense, it is the thing that stops one bad month from destroying everything you have built.
Compare a few providers, understand what is actually covered, and buy something appropriate to your income.
6. Try fasting
I try to fast at least 3 days a week. Not long fasts. 16 to 18 hours without food, which for me just means my first meal is at midday.
The benefit I notice is clarity. My head is quieter and I work better in the morning window.
This works for me. It is not a universal prescription, and if you have a health condition or take medication, ask a doctor before changing how you eat. Do your own reading on it rather than taking my word.
Part 2: Your mind
7. Read books
When was the last book you finished?
Not an article. Not a thread. A book. Go to a bookshop and buy one, and buy a physical copy rather than reading on the phone that also contains every distraction you own.
One thing on this. Buy genuine books from proper bookshops or authorised distributors. The cheap copies sold on the street are pirated. Somebody printed and bound them, and the author who did the actual work of writing gets nothing.
You would not want somebody photocopying your work and selling it. Do not do it to them.
8. Cut the social media addiction
I say this as somebody who makes a living from social media.
When you are scrolling, I benefit. You see my videos. But be honest with yourself about how many of the last 1,000 videos you watched you can actually remember.
Social media addiction costs you productivity first and then it costs you the ability to concentrate at all. It is very easy to open TikTok and lose an hour and learn nothing.
I struggled with this for about 3 years. There were times I was driving and scrolling. Then one day I decided to remove the apps, TikTok, Facebook and Instagram, for 2 weeks.
I had so much time I did not know what to do with it. Click2Skill was something I had been trying to build for 9 months. I finished it in a week.
That is not a motivational story. That is arithmetic. The 9 months were not a difficulty problem, they were an attention problem.
Uninstall the apps. You can reinstall them when the thing you are building is done.
9. Learn to be alone
If you cannot sit alone in your own house and be comfortable, you have no business entering a relationship.
Most of the time we bring people in to fill an emptiness, because there is too much happening in our heads to sit with quietly. So the moment a relationship ends, we immediately look for a placeholder rather than sitting down and asking what actually went wrong.
That is why the same man has the same relationship 4 times with 4 different people.
Learn to be alone. Not forever, just long enough that when you do choose somebody, you are choosing them rather than escaping yourself.
10. Challenge yourself with something new
There is a phrase written on the wall at ALX: do hard things.
Just because you got a degree does not mean your education is finished. Challenge yourself with something that makes you want to wake up and figure it out.
You have heard of web development but do not know where to start. So start. Open YouTube, find freeCodeCamp, begin.
The specialisation advice is overrated. Being good at one thing and nothing else makes you fragile. Adding something new every year or two makes you harder to replace.
Part 3: Your skills and money
11. Learn a skill that pays
The definition is simple. A skill that pays is one that solves a problem, which makes you valuable to people and to businesses.
Learn web design and you can build sites that convert, so a business makes money because of you. Learn videography and editing and you can shoot and cut content people will pay for.
That is the whole test. Does somebody have a problem this solves, and will they pay to have it solved. If yes, it is a skill worth learning. If no, it is a hobby, which is fine, but do not confuse the two.
12. Learn to speak in public
We have a generation of men who cannot speak in front of people, and it is costing them.
How do you expect to sell anything if you cannot speak? I meet brilliant developers constantly. They can build serious things. Then they stand up to explain what they built and it falls apart, and the contract goes to somebody with half the ability and twice the confidence.
Learn to speak. Learn to introduce yourself properly. Learn to explain your work in 2 sentences without apologising.
There are cheap courses for this, some as low as 25 dollars for a few days. There are also free options, like a local Toastmasters club, where you practise in front of real people, which is the only thing that actually works.
13. Know your numbers
You need to know where your money is going. Not approximately. Exactly.
Here is a simple way to do it. Open an AI tool and list every single expense you have. Rent. The person who helps with cleaning and laundry, and what you pay her monthly. Internet. Transport. Insurance. Subscriptions. If you run a business, its costs too.
Add it up.
Now you are no longer guessing that you probably need 100,000 a month. You know your number exactly, and you know what you need to earn to clear it with something left over.
You cannot work toward a target you have never calculated. Most men have never sat down and done this once.
14. Get off debt
The solution to a money problem is not another loan.
There are men whose first thought at every difficulty is a shylock or a loan app. Please stop. Those loans strangle you, and the strangling is slow enough that you do not notice until you cannot move.
I deal with people who have worked 25 years, borrowed the whole way through, and are now out of a job with nothing behind them. Debt was the only thing holding the life up, and it is not a foundation.
One of my own goals for 2027 is to clear my debts. I do not have many. There is a vehicle I am paying for, and I want to take at least half of it off.
Then put the money into things that generate cash. A personal brand. A business. Even a cow, which is a real asset that produces something. Cash generating assets, not things that only cost you.
Part 4: Your people and environment
15. Travel, and start by leaving your village
You have been in the same 3 kilometres for 15 years.
When I say travel, men immediately think America. It is not America. You have not seen what is happening in your own country yet.
Go to Westlands and walk around. Go to a mall. Go to Mombasa. Go and see where they are putting up new apartments, walk in, say you are interested, and look at what is being built and how.
And travelling is not about drinking and sleeping around. That is not exposure, that is the same evening you have at home in a different town. Exposure is seeing how other people live and work, and noticing what is possible.
The moment you see how things actually work somewhere else, your brain starts asking what you could do where you are. That question is the whole point.
16. Cut dead friendships
Friendships are seasonal. Very few of the people around you now will be there in your 60s, and that is normal rather than sad.
But a lot of men are still carrying friendships from 2015 that have nothing left in them, out of loyalty to a version of themselves that no longer exists.
You have moved into a new season. New work, new place, new direction. You need people who fit the life you are building now.
This does not mean being cold to people who were good to you. It means being honest that some relationships are memory rather than friendship, and you do not owe every one of them your Saturday.
17. Find somebody ahead of you
I actively avoid rooms where I am the one doing best. I want to be in environments where everybody there challenges me, because that is where the learning is.
Look for people who are doing better than you. But do not walk up and say be my mentor.
That is the thing everybody gets wrong now. Mentor me, mentor me, and almost nobody asks what they could offer in return.
When I wanted to learn the business side of social media, I provided free social media management to somebody who knew it. I gave value and I received teaching. That is the trade.
You have something. You might be excellent at video but bad at the business side. Somebody else is the reverse. Offer what you have. That is a relationship somebody will actually say yes to, and it lasts longer than a request.
18. Build your spiritual life
This one is not about attending church.
A lot of churches have become hypocritical, and you will hear that from missionaries as well as from ordinary members. There are places more interested in money than in anybody’s growth.
But your spiritual life was never the pastor’s responsibility. It begins with you. What you choose to do. Whether you pray. What material you let into your head. Whether you ever sit quietly and read something that steadies you, like the book of Proverbs, without any of it being performed for anybody.
A pastor can pray for you as much as he likes. If you do not personally decide to engage with your own spiritual development, nothing happens.
And be careful about the environments you put yourself in. You usually know when a place is doing something to you that is not good. Listen to that.
I am leaving the shape of this one to you. It is a personal decision and it should be.
Part 5: Your appearance
19. Fix how you dress and how you carry yourself
You cannot wear the same clothes for 25 years.
Change your wardrobe. And understand that premium does not mean expensive. You do not have to spend heavily to look good, and you should not buy cheap things purely to save money, because cheap clothes cost more over time and look it.
Think about it practically. Monday to Friday you are working. Get a few good shirts, the kind that run 2,500 to 6,000 shillings. With a budget of 20,000 to 50,000 you can put together a wardrobe that carries you for years.
A few specifics.
Own at least one suit. It does not have to be expensive. There will be occasions where nothing else works.
Get decent jeans and learn to wear jeans and a t-shirt properly, which is harder than it sounds.
Learn what shoes exist. Go to Pinterest and search men’s shoe types. You will learn more in 10 minutes than in the last 10 years.
Be careful about dressing purely for a trend. Something being everywhere does not make it right for a man trying to be taken seriously in a professional room.
Then the basics, which cost nothing. Cut your nails and file them. Shave properly, or keep the beard properly, but pick one. Learn to drive, because it is embarrassing to be 29 and untrusted with a vehicle.
And develop taste. Know what you like and why. I am a Volvo person, so if I am buying a car I already know where I am starting. I like leather jackets. I like Ray-Bans. It is a small thing, but a man who knows what he likes makes decisions faster and looks like himself rather than like whoever he last saw online.
One last thing on clothes. They sit on a body. If you have skipped everything in Part 1 and jumped to this section, you have it backwards. A fit man in second hand clothes looks better than an unfit man in expensive ones, which is why we started with the body.
Where to start
19 items is a lot, and you will not do all of them.
So pick 3. One from your body, one from your mind, one from your money. Do those for 90 days before adding anything.
The men who change are not the ones who try 19 things in January. They are the ones who did 3 things badly in March and were still doing them in September.
I am not writing this as somebody who has all of it figured out. I am working through this list myself, and some items on it I am worse at than you are.
But most of us as men are not getting this right, and almost none of it is complicated. It is just unglamorous, and it takes time.
Start with one.
Start your digital skills journey on Click2Skill
— Elvis W.
