Abs, time, and money
How success culture is evolving
Success culture for ambitious dudes is evolving. The Company Man, The Finance Wizard, and the Tech CEO all had a good run as icons for successful men.
But young men spend a ton of time on social media, and so the new ideal is getting determined by who has the best content game. For better or worse, being a good manager or Wall Street investor does not lend itself to social media. Tech CEOs definitely do have a better Twitter game, but they’re not on the platforms most young men spend time on - Instagram, Tiktok, and Youtube.
A different masculine ideal has taken hold on those platforms: that of the solopreneur. A solopreneur is someone who makes money working for themself without much staff. They have complete control of their schedule and so are able to market their lifestyle like few others can, and invest in activities that fall outside their jobs – such as fitness. Generally speaking, their lifestyle tends to focus on three things: abs, time, and money. What do I mean by abs and time? I mean they have abs and do fitness associated activities, like cold plunges. Or they jet off on week-long retreats in nature. All of it becomes content.
I think this has big ramifications for how ambitious men will define success over the coming decades. But first, some context of how we got here.
A 15 year history of abs, time, money
It’s 2007 and tech world hustle culture is in full swing. If you’re not coding until 2am on a diet of Red Bull and ramen, you’re leaving money on the table. Success is in the air - all you have to do is kill every waking hour chasing it.
A select few realize they can be their own boss without running a big company. They can sell stuff on the Internet and contract out all of the major processes. For example, if I sold supplements, I can contract out purchasing ingredients, manufacturing, marketing, and order fulfillment. All the major processes can be outsourced and a lot of the coordination can be delegated to virtual assistants. At least for this narrow slice of business, it is possible to make money while not working very much at all.
Tim Ferris writes all of this down in a book called “The 4-Hour Workweek” and does something magical: convinces ambitious people to work hard at not working hard. In 2010 Tim Ferris follows this up with “the 4-Hour Body,” one of the foundational bodyhacking manifestos which puts abs on a lot of tech leaders’ todo lists. For his followers, free time becomes the ultimate pursuit. And while his book steadily grows in popularity, business and tech largely continue as usual.
Then the pandemic hits, and priorities shift. Hundreds of thousands of millennials in tech realize they’re burnt out. Many of them have an idea: what if I worked for myself? Remotely? Service and content industries pop up to support this notion. A few examples:
Sam Parr and Shaan Puri from My First Million podcast has 260 thousand subscribers on Youtube and extols the virtues of making money without killing yourself in the process. They have episodes like “13 businesses making $1 million a year with 0 employees,” “4 Side Hustles to Make $1,000 / day in 2023,” “The Easiest Way To Make $10,000/Month In Passive Income.” It’s the kind of stuff that seems scammy at first, but they deliver with receipts as successful entrepreneurs themselves who follow their own advice inspire thousands to start their own successful businesses.
Daniel Vassalo, a former Amazon engineer, runs a popular community called Small Bets which encourages members to monetize work in many small ways - such as selling a PDF or an online course. And I don’t mean like a professionally produced online course or a super comprehensive PDF. We’re talking minimal viable effort and asking people to pay for it. His schtick is to get people to ditch their corporate jobs and embrace small bet ways to make money to regain control of one’s lifestyle. Daniel’s twitter bio is simply “Bad for the economy.”
Sahil Bloom, one of the most popular lifestyle and productivity advice givers on Twitter and Instagram, advocates for becoming a “time billionaire” (meaning someone who has time to spend with loves ones) consistently extols the virtues of taking time away from work to be present for one’s kids. Also he’s super jacked and films himself doing a cold plunge every week.
AI newsletters have become ubiquitous on the Internet, and tend to cover how folks can do more work (set up whole websites, create videos, write ad content etc) with just a few AI prompts. Here are a few.
Meanwhile, COVID has everyone thinking about health and men’s health podcasts like Andrew Huberman and Peter Attia come out and drum the same basic advice into men’ ears: get 8 hours of sleep, get sunlight, and work out 5+ days a week. Peter Attia is famous for claiming that if you want the last decade of your life to active enough where you can pick up your own groceries, you should get as strong as you can asap, as we need all the muscle we can get now given our ability to grow muscle declines over time. For me as a man, this is an extremely compelling argument to spend more time in the gym.
The consequence of practicing this health advice is that it is at odds with working the kinds of hours a lot of highly paid jobs require – especially for men with families. It is also a different identity than the traditional corporate boss identity. The idea of a solopreneur who provides for his family, spends time with his family, and gets jacked (and posts about it on Instagram) prizes autonomy over managing other people.
Is this good?
I say all this because the marketing is absolutely working on me, as well as hundreds of thousands of others. No business opportunity sounds cooler than making money while having complete control over my own time. It’s also given me more things to worry about. Before I was worried about making money - now it’s those things, plus getting a six pack with plenty of time for eat-pray-loving. But I’d rather my insecurities be well rounded. And I think more evolved anxiety is what counts as progress in modern times.