Find a photo of me from early 2001. Standing next to my now-wife Olena in Kyiv, big grin. I thought I was doing well — decent shape, some money in my pocket, a commission in the Marine Corps behind me.
What I didn't have was a single one of the habits on this list. No structure. No discipline around what I ate or drank. No real reading practice. No clear priorities. Just momentum and youth doing the work that habits are supposed to do.
The habits came later. Some of them came hard. Here are 17 habits of a high value man — the ones I believe separate men who become high value — genuinely, over time — from men who stay stuck at the same level year after year.
- Give Up Your Addictions
- Pay Your Dues
- Surround Yourself With Like-Minded People
- Ignore The Haters
- Swallow Your Pride
- Reinvent Yourself
- Leverage What Makes You Unique
- Be So Good You Can't Be Ignored
- Try New Things And Experiment
- Lead By Example
- Continuously Learn
- Be Grateful For Every Moment
- Get Up Early And Win The Day
- Understand That 80% Is Good Enough
- Listen Before You Speak
- Keep A Diary And Stick To A Calendar
- Pay With Cash And Avoid Credit
#1 Give Up Your Addictions
An addiction doesn't have to be drugs or alcohol to cost you. Television, sugar, social media, gambling, even compulsive news-checking — all of it pulls from the same pool of time, energy, and willpower that you need for everything else. The question to ask yourself is simple: is this something I can go without for a week? If the honest answer is no, you already know what it is.
The path out is practical: identify it, understand what's driving it (usually an unmet emotional need or a habit of avoidance), replace it with something that builds rather than drains, and get professional help if the pull is too strong to manage alone. High value men aren't immune to addiction. They just don't ignore it when they find it.
#2 Paying Your Dues
MrBeast — Jimmy Donaldson — started his YouTube channel at 13. He wasn't an overnight success. He was an obsessive, grinding, studying, experimenting creator for years before the numbers made sense. Six to eight hours a day into a channel nobody was watching. That's how a high value man is made: not by waiting for the right moment, but by doing the work long before the work pays off.
#3 Surrounding Yourself With Like-Minded People
My friend Aaron Marino is a better judge of people than almost anyone I know. The team he assembled around Tiege Hanley — Rob, Kelly, and the chemist behind the formulas — is proof that who you choose to work and live beside shapes your ceiling. Aaron's wife stood by him through the hard years. That choice compounds too.
Put yourself in rooms where you're not the most successful person there. Be the least accomplished man in the group, consistently. It's uncomfortable. It's also the fastest learning environment that exists. I've spent fifteen years doing exactly this — placing myself alongside men who are better at specific things than I am — and I can trace much of what I've built to those conversations.
“If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.” – Isaac Newton
#4 Ignore the Haters
Jeremy Fragrance built a massive following in the fragrance space while the gatekeepers tried to dismiss him at every turn. He doesn't follow the community's unspoken rules. He doesn't apologize for his style. He partnered with one of the world's top perfumers and built his own fragrance. The people who criticized it loudest were the most active promoters of it — even if unintentionally. Build what you believe in. The haters amplify you whether they intend to or not.
#5 Swallow Your Pride
There's a reason humility is a leadership virtue in the Marine Corps. It's not about self-deprecation. It's about accurate self-assessment — knowing what you don't know and being willing to learn from whoever has that knowledge, even if they're younger, less credentialed, or in a different category than you. Jeff Morgan of The Style OG channel was a practicing physician who decided to learn YouTube from a man half his age. That decision accelerated his growth more than any credential he already held. Black men in style had fewer examples to follow then — Jeff built one by getting out of his own way.
#6 Reinvent Yourself
I've reinvented myself more than once. I was a Marine officer — infantry adjutant, Iraq veteran. Then I moved to Wittenberg, Wisconsin, population 1,113, to run a company. Got fired within two months. Built a custom clothier. Turned that into a media company. Each pivot required starting over in areas where I had no credibility and learning from people who knew the territory better than I did. Ryan Masters did the same thing — walked away from Sparta Strength and became the top country western dancing authority in North America. The willingness to be a beginner again, on purpose, is a high-value habit most men never develop.
#7 Leverage What Makes You Unique
My edge at RMRS has always been the combination: military background, bespoke tailoring training, science-driven explanation, and genuine credibility with men who want straight talk rather than fashion coverage. No single one of those things is unique on its own. The combination is mine alone. Find yours. Not theoretically — practically. What do you bring together that nobody else in your space brings the same way? Build there. Compete where the category is empty.
#8 Be So Good You Can't Be Ignored
Mastery is the strategy. Not charisma. Not marketing. Not a compelling origin story. Deep, demonstrated mastery in your field creates authority that everything else is trying to simulate. Find a mentor or role model who's further along the path you're on — not to copy them, but to compress your learning curve. Reach out. The worst outcome is silence. The best is a conversation that changes your trajectory. As a high value man, always be the one reaching up, not just down.
#9 Try New Things and Experiment
Thomas Frank published a video where he spends one hour studying. No commentary. No cuts. Just studying. It performed incredibly well because it turned out people wanted a virtual study companion. Nobody predicted that outcome. The experiment produced the discovery. If you're only doing things you can predict will work, you're playing a game where the ceiling is already visible. Experiment constantly. Some experiments fail. One in ten reveals something nobody else knows.
#10 Lead by Example
Eric Bandholz of Beardbrand doesn't just promote the bearded lifestyle. He lives it, visibly, every day. When your brand and your actual life are the same thing — not a performance but a genuine expression of what you believe — people trust you in a way that no marketing campaign can manufacture. A high value man's actions match his words consistently, not just when it's convenient. That consistency is the foundation of real authority.
#11 Continuously Learn
Two books a month, minimum — that's the reading pace of 85% of self-made millionaires. Not novels for relaxation (those are fine). Books that build skills, develop judgment, or expand your understanding of your field. Mani Vaya built a business teaching men to extract the most from their reading time. Whether you use his method or your own, the point is the same: the learning never stops. The men who plateau are the ones who decided they knew enough.
#12 Be Grateful for Every Moment
When hard times hit — a bad business quarter, a difficult family situation, a deal that fell through — I pull up memory of how bad it's actually been at other points in my life. The comparison resets my perspective fast. Today's problems almost never match yesterday's worst moments. Gratitude is a practiced skill, not a feeling that arrives on its own. Start with a daily list of three specific things you're genuinely grateful for — not generic gratitude, but specific. The specificity is what gives it force.
#13 Get Up Early and Win the Day
The cliché of the 4am cold-shower warrior is overblown. But there's something real underneath it: early mornings give you uninterrupted time before the world has demands on you. I take my kids to school, I eat breakfast with them — my day doesn't start before 8am professionally. But I'm up before that. The morning hours before anyone else is making requests are where my best thinking happens. Getting up early gives you a head start, not just metaphorically. Use those hours.
#14 Understand 80% Is Good Enough
80% out the door beats 100% never finished. Every time. Perfectionism is a form of fear wearing a respectable mask — it looks like high standards but it's actually avoidance. A carpenter who builds a beautiful table but never gets around to the rubber feet still has a functional, beautiful table. Celebrate the 80%. Learn from the gap. Move on to the next thing. The volume of good work you produce over a year will always outperform the single perfect piece you're still polishing.
#15 Listen Before You Speak
Most men are waiting to speak, not actually listening. The difference is noticeable — people can tell. High value men listen with intent. They understand what the other person is saying before responding. They read what's underneath the words. That capacity — to actually hear someone — makes you more trusted, better informed, and more effective in every relationship you have. Practice it. Start by not formulating your response until the other person has completely finished speaking.
#16 Keep a Diary and Stick to a Calendar
A diary gives your brain permission to stop holding everything in working memory. When you write it down — goals, progress, frustrations, wins — you're externalizing the storage so your mind can focus on the processing. It's not soft. It's practical cognitive load management. Pair that with a rigid calendar that you actually honor, and you've built the infrastructure that every productive person I've ever studied runs on. Specificity matters: write the date, the place, what happened, how you felt. Vague entries teach you nothing.
#17 Pay With Cash and Avoid Credit
My house in Wittenberg is paid off. The truck in my driveway is a 1997 Chevy Silverado I bought in Cedar Rapids, Iowa — hit two deer, still runs. I don't carry lifestyle debt. The rule is simple: if I can't write a check for it today, I don't buy it unless it's a strategic investment. This isn't austerity for its own sake. It's the creation of options. When hard times arrive — and they will — a man with no consumer debt has choices. A man drowning in payments doesn't. Live below your means consistently, and that gap between income and spending becomes your freedom fund.
Build these habits one at a time. Don't try to overhaul everything simultaneously — that's a recipe for quitting. Pick the one that costs you the most right now, and work it for 90 days. Then add the next one. Compounding doesn't require doing everything at once. It requires doing something right, repeatedly, for long enough that it stacks.
