Tl:Dr

Succes is an individual journey, unique to each man.

Body

Recently while speaking with my younger brother about self improvement, he questioned why I'd be listening to men talk about how they overcame their trials and tribulations. Simply put, while my road to the top is my own, there are plenty of great guides that are willing to lay out what they had to do to get to where they are today. However, following their word to the T won't guarantee the same success. Pleanty of reasons explain this; the timing is off, the market's saturated, technology has changed, society is different but mainly it comes down to the fact that I am different.

I'm not them, you're not them, you're not me or any other knuckle head that drags his fist across the keyboard to type out a post. That being said there are aspects that almost every successful person have in common. There are pleanty of universally agreeded upon habits that'll help get you to where you'd like to go. The execution is what's argued upon. The ability to not only learn from others who've gone before but to add and build your own personalized addition to their foundation is key.

Start thinking of these self help guides as recipes that are modified over time, adding and subtracting minior parts until you have your own, working, unique flavor. Understanding that you won't know what's best right away but after putting time and effort into an area of improvement, you'll gain a wider set of knowledge, allowing you to make your own judgment calls. You don't want to have to always check in with the experts. Dr. Whoever says you gotta get your exercise in first thing in the morning because X, Y and Z and maybe you can only make it to the gym at night. Maybe callistetics are more your thing than lifting weights. For this reason fitness is the easiest example to explain.

Fuck if I knew what to do. Popped on here, found Starting Strength and punched my information into a Calories Calculator and off we went. Good place to start as my knowledge of weight training, kinesiology and nutrition was zero. The information I was obtaining was coming from good, tried and tested sources. All I had to do was stick to the plan. That worked for awhile. Picked up some information on macros, learned about form, rest periods and tempos. Unfortunately for me, after months there was terrible pain in my wrist. Doing more research, I found by swapping Barbell Bench Press for Dumbbells negated any of those issues. Five years later, haven't had any related wrist issues since changing out barbell exercises for a dumbbell variant. Another issue I had was eating 3400 calories and not seeing the scale go up.

When I asked about my intake, was told I had to be wrong. No boy needs that much food to maintain but months of careful calorie tracking showed me time and time again, anything under 3800 calories wasn't getting me north of 175lb. I had to take the information that was thrown at me and react accordingly with my own personal results: even when expert opinion was telling me otherwise. This is not to say I'm a better nutritionist than the folks I took my information from. They understood nutrition as a whole, while I saw it's effects on my body. Having to tweak what was given to me, to see the results I wanted.

Now three years after the discovery and I have a medical diagnosis for my wrist issues the actually correlates with my bodies inability to gain weight. While the main message stays the same, progressive overload combined with a surplus of calories equals muscle building, my routine is my own. Seeing good results with the exercises I've patched together from my own experience, general knowledge and personalised advice from specialist who've dealt with my unique issues.

In Conclusion

There's no reason to start any adventure now a days with zero knowledge. To much good information is out there to justify reinventing the wheel but that's only meant to get you going. There are parts of every adventure undetermined and unknow until you're knee deep in the flames. Once you start developing down these paths, once you reach a certain level of mastery it becomes your duty to fine tune these plans to best be geared towards your individual results. At the end of the day they're not you and you're not them; take even expert advice with a grain of salt and think for yourself.