So here's the dirty little secret about attractiveness: we are given a picture of what's attractive based on—well, it used to be media, now it's social media. It's all kinds of different places. We're given a picture of what's attractive, and that picture is completely and totally unrealistic. As a man, am I supposed to have a body like I'm a superhero from a Marvel movie? That's ridiculous, it's impossible. Even the people that are doing it—when I look at Wolverine and he's coming out of the water and he's shredded—okay, maybe Hugh Jackman looked that way for one moment, but I believe the story is that he didn't drink water for a couple of days before that so that he was so dehydrated. I heard he could even smell water when he was on the set. We look at that in a movie and we think, "Oh, well, that's what I should look like." No, you shouldn't. That is an unrealistic expectation of what we look like.

We've been doing this for a long time. You know, it used to be that it was just—we photoshopped photos. You know, that went on. Now it's—now we have videos with filters that make us look five, ten, twenty years younger than we are. It's not about, "How do I live up to these impossible standards?" It's understanding that it's an illusion. What we see online and what we actually want to have in person is something entirely different. Don't be tricked by the illusion.

Now, the illusions are there for a reason. There are pieces of the illusion that actually do attract us. A person that is in shape, that's fit, that burns plenty of calories and looks like it—that gives us a certain energy about who they are. That tells us something about the vivacity in the person, about how engaged they are and alive they are in life. That's attractive. That's attractive. That's not a picture, that's an energy coming out of the person.

When it comes to being super wealthy, you don't have to try to compete with the Jeff Bezos and the Bill Gates of the world. That's completely unrealistic. It's not necessary to have really everything that you want in life. It's simply unnecessary. The part about money though, that is important, is that you are on top of your finances. That you are building wealth over time, that you sleep really well at night because you have plenty of money to take care of whatever emergencies might come up. That's gonna be attractive to people around you. That's gonna be attractive romantically, and that's just attractive to friends.

All of us wanna be with somebody that we feel has their game together. They've got it together and they're going somewhere progressively—they're going somewhere bigger, larger, more exciting than where they are today. That financial piece, that's part of that—to be feeling like you're building on a foundation and getting to a bigger and bigger place. So that's the realistic aspect of it, not the "Either I'm a lottery winner and I have, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars, or I'm just waiting and I'm not one of the special ones." The reality is there is a middle ground between those two in which we are steadily building towards it.

You're building the money, and you're becoming more and more fit and stronger the same way you go to the gym and you work out and you get more and more strong. I could go on to many different areas of life, but when you see these unattainable pictures that are online, don't buy into them. They're illusions. They're exaggerations of good qualities. Look at the good quality behind it.

Yes, we wanna be physically attractive. Yes, we wanna be fit. We wanna have finances together. We wanna have all those things. But when we show up with those things actually embodied in what we're doing, that's at the heart of it. That's what actually attracts people. When we're in person, I'm not comparing somebody I see in real life to somebody that I see online. Those are two different worlds. I don't get out my phone, look at a picture of a woman and go, "Oh, well, you don't look like this. You don't look this amazing." We all know instinctively that there is a difference between this digital world that we have and the real person that we're looking at.

It's very hard for us to unhook from that, but that is one of the things we have to do if we're going to feel satisfied in our lives. We have to realize the digital world—it's photoshopped, it's filtered, it's unrealistic, and it's not a fair comparison to make for ourselves. Find the elements that are attractive. Find realistic, in-person examples to follow and go about it that way.