It’s Not Going To Be OK

By Jon Skindzier  AskMen.com

If you’re one of those guys still lounging around and waiting for life to happen, consider this: By 35, many of the world’s great men weren’t just working on groundbreaking masterpieces, they’d finished them. Christopher Marlowe had inspired Shakespeare, and died, by the time he was 29; F. Scott Fitzgerald had written The Great Gatsby by 29; and Orson Welles wrote, directed and starred in what’s often considered the greatest film ever made at the doe-eyed age of 25.

In Welles’ day, most of us would have been married with kids by our mid-20s. Popular culture wants to convince us that we can remain young indefinitely (usually through buying things), but 30 is not the new 20 — 30 is 30. If you aren’t well on your way to what you really want to do with your life, you need to start yesterday. It’s not going to be OK unless you get off your ass and start doing something — now.

You are not going to stumble into your dream job

Your current job — what you’re doing right now — is your career and your identity. Does that thought satisfy you? If you took your current title and slapped it on a business card, would you be happy handing that thing out to hot girls, aware that they’d think that’s what you are as a person?

Careers take work. Dreams take even more. Malcolm Gladwell (a Canadian journalist) suggests that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to master something, and that “genius” is as much effort as it is talent. Mozart wasn’t some god-child; he was just a kid who practiced his ass off until music was his language. The same thing applies to your future — you can’t expect to succeed if you’re just yawning your way through life with vague, distant dreams. It’s not going to be OK if that’s your approach.

Make it OK: Get to work at maximizing each day and becoming the dude you envision yourself to be now. You’re never going to get to where you want to be if you’re treating your goals like a halfhearted hobby.

Your dream girl will not just roll up and find you

Romantic comedies hinge on two people just wandering into a meaningful relationship. Sitcoms tell us we’ll be right down the hall from gorgeous chicks who will love us for our quirkiness.

These are fiction. These situations do not just happen, and it’s not going to be OK if you think they do. Most guys do get married, but a lot of them wind up on the business end of a shotgun wedding because somebody got pregnant. If you’re leaving your love life up to chance, hoping for destiny to settle things, you’re delusional. You can either put real effort into meeting someone you’ll be thrilled with, or you can flounder between crappy relationships until you’re suddenly the only unmarried guy you know.

Make it OK: Meet people, preferably by going someplace where women are, someplace you actually enjoy. Don’t go to yoga for the chicks if you hate yoga — start with being genuine and confident, and work from there.

We have a few more signs it’s not going to be OK and how you can make it OK by doing something about it

You’re not going to get rich overnight

Outside of winning the lottery (odds: slightly less than being hit by lightning) or just being rich to begin with, wealthy guys have money because they invested or saved. Wealth won’t just fall into your lap, and you won’t just automatically make more money in the future as a matter of course.

According to the 2009 Great Male Survey, 78% of you would only really feel comfortable retiring on a $1 million nest egg. The most important thing is that you don’t see the word “retiring” and assume we’re talking to some old guy — this is what you should be doing.

Make it OK: If you save $4,000 a year at 7%, you’ll wind up with more than twice as much cash at retirement age if you start by 30 instead of 40. So start. Set up an automatic savings plan. Seek out, and care about, financial advice.

Your health doesn’t come with a guarantee

Your body and your brain pretty much quit improving somewhere around age 20. Every year after that, it gets harder to even stay the same, much less to make radical, positive changes. And it’s only going to get harder tomorrow for you to run a mile or bike up a hill than it already is today. Work on the stuff you actually can fix, before you’re saddled with the inevitable stuff (i.e., thinning hair and a slowing metabolism).

Make it OK: Find a gym, or get back to one. Go to your doctor, and your dentist. Quit drinking like you’re 21. Your body remembers your excesses, and will punish you for them.

Don’t leave life to chance

If you think about midlife crises at all, you probably picture some trivial old-guy desperation that happens to other people. But not seeing them coming is what causes them — they’re the sudden realization that youth is irretrievably gone, and you’re more prone to that dawning shock if you’re idling through life and trusting your future to chance. 

Is Tiger Woods Syndrome Making Your Wife Suspicious?

By Joel Keller Asylum.com

As if men didn’t have enough to worry about in the relationship department, along comes Tiger Woods to make it even harder. If TMZ is to be believed, his epic philandering has sullied the reputations of seemingly nice guys everywhere and is turning their wives into paranoid cell-phone snoopers.

They’ve dubbed the phenomenon Tiger Woods Syndrome, and the most high-profile sufferer is “American Idol” winner Kris Allen, whose wife is apparently “having bad dreams” after reading about the Tiger mess.

Until Tiger backed his Escalade over that fire hydrant on Thanksgiving night, he was seen as a pretty milquetoast kind of guy — intense and competitive, but a good family man. So it makes sense that wives might begin to wonder if their nice guy is stepping out on them.

Never mind that the actions of a super-rich, world-famous athlete don’t exactly equate to what might happen when the average woman’s husband stays at that Hampton Inn in Sheboygan for that twice-a-year sales meeting. Still, for the minority of dudes who actually are cheating, things have to be getting pretty uncomfortable.

Has the Tiger Woods scandal made your wife or significant other more paranoid?