How To Build Your Dream Life In Spite Of Your Haters

How to build your dream life in spite of the haters in your own family, friends or peer group.

In this video coaching newsletter, I discuss an email success story that was four years in the making. He found my work when he was a freshman in college. He didn’t get into the schools he really wanted and felt like he was settling. His girlfriend was also losing attraction, because he no longer felt like the successful state champion that he was in high school.

He shares how he eventually got into his dream college, graduated, got his dream job, saved $70,000 during college and is moving in with his queen. My comments are in bold italics like this below in the body of his email.

So, about four years ago, he was a freshman in college. He was walking around on campus for a few weeks, he hadn’t gotten into any of the schools that he really wanted to, and he felt like he was settling, so he decided to drop out. And his parents obviously were not very supportive of that. He decided to go to a junior college, and you could tell, he used some of the strategies that I used myself, back when I was in college, that I discussed in Mastering Yourself – which you can read for free at UnderstandingRelationships.com. Just subscribe to the email newsletter.

He was very successful in high school. He was on the golf team. He won the state championship for fitness, or something like that. And so, he was the man in high school, and then he goes off to college, doesn’t feel like the man anymore, because he didn’t feel that way about himself, and it started having a negative impact on his relationship with his girlfriend. She started losing attraction for him.

The number one, most important thing to women in a relationship that they find attractive in men is confidence. And when you go from being a really confident alpha male, a successful guy in high school, to in essence feeling like a beta male and like you’re not very successful, your words, the tone of your voice, your actions, your physiology, all of that is going to communicate that, and your girl is going to pick up on it. When a man goes from being really super confident to lacking confidence, it forces her to move into her masculine, which is not her natural essence, and she’s going to resent it.

He’s about to graduate, he’s got a great job lined up, saved a bunch of money. He’s about to move in with his girlfriend. They’ve been going strong for five years now, and he’s just killing it in life. And so, it’s a great success story, because he had members of his own family, his parents, that were just not supportive of his plans or his ideas or what he wanted to do, but he succeeded in spite of them.

Viewer’s Email:

Hey Coach,

I just wanted to reach out to you to express my appreciation for your work. You really helped me transform my life into exactly what I wanted. Four years ago, I was a freshman in college and found your work when I realized my girlfriend seemed to not have the same attraction to me as she used to.

So, obviously, he came across “3% Man,” and started applying that, which you can also read for free at UnderstandingRelationships.com. Just subscribe to the email newsletter.

When we had a conversation about it, I realized I wasn’t the man I was when we started dating. We met in high school when I was the captain of the golf team and a state champion in athletic training. I was charming, confident, and a natural born leader.

That’s what an alpha male is. An alpha male is courageous and brave and goes for what they want. It’s not about beating people up or being physically tough. Although, as a man, as an alpha, you’re supposed to be dangerous but kind. And a beta male shrinks from responsibility. When challenges happen, the beta male slithers away like a coward. That’s the way I look at alpha and beta.

You either show up as an alpha or you shrink and are a coward, which is a beta. It’s pretty simple. And, universally, people understand what the meanings of those words are, even though usually every time I mention those words in videos, there’s usually a few butt-hurt babies that appear in the comments complaining that alpha and beta don’t exist and all this other stuff to try to make themselves feel better about the fact that they’re a beta. We all have the ability to show up and be alpha, but it’s hard to be brave and courageous and consistent.

However, once college started, I knew something was off and found myself without any purpose or direction that caused me to start behaving in a scarce manner and being a needy little bitch. 

That’s radical honesty with yourself. As the late great Don Shula said, “Strong men blame themselves. Weak men blame others.” Because, if it’s somebody else’s fault, “Hey, I don’t have to fix anything. I’m all good.” That’s what the beta male tells himself. “It’s not me, it’s everybody else. Women have changed! They’re all different, Corey. You don’t understand.”

I would say that the internet has made it easy to access all of the dysfunctional, messed up people, versus in the old days, you just never heard about them. Really, everything boils down to your social group, your peer group, what you do for social activities and the kind of people that you hang out with. If you hang out with people that have strong families and come from strong family backgrounds, you’re going to tend to gravitate towards those types of activities. And if you don’t, you’re going to tend to gravitate towards the other activities.

It’s all vibrational. Like attracts like. People that like the same things tend to like each other. And the thing with the internet and dating apps is that people are getting exposed to members of the dating pool who aren’t really great long-term candidates, whereas before, you would meet them out and you would kind of know who they were. You would know, “That person is kind of a skank. You want to stay away from her. She cheats on all her boyfriends. She’s a town bicycle. She’s a moped.” A moped will get you to where you want to go, but you don’t want anybody to see you on it.

The instant I set foot on campus for move-in day, I knew that it wasn’t the path I was supposed to take. I didn’t get into the schools that I had really wanted to attend and felt like I had settled for less than I had wanted. I found myself going out for walks to clear my head each night and your voice continued to ring in my head, “Trust your heart, your curiosity, and your intuition because they somehow know what you truly want to become.”

Those are actually Steve Jobs’s words. He said, “You must trust your heart, your curiosity and your intuition, because they somehow already know what you want to become.” So, he had this nagging feeling that the path that he had chosen wasn’t the right path. And when I was younger and his age, I really struggled with listening to that. Most people do, especially in the West. You’ve got to be realistic. You’ve got to go with the flow. Don’t rock the boat. Don’t bash into the walls too much in society, as Steve Jobs would say.

After about 2 weeks of trying to ignore it, I had enough. I decided I wasn’t going to settle for this any longer. I decided to drop out of that university, move back home with my parents, attend junior college, work, and give myself a shot to transfer to my dream school, because I knew on my deathbed that I would regret trying and failing more than if I never tried at all.

Going to a junior college, you can take the same classes, they’re going to be cheaper, and quite frankly, they’re easier. Work smarter, not harder. All of my friends, everybody that I know that have had kids and watch them grow up, all give them the same advice. If you take the really hard classes, take them at a junior college, and then that way you’ll have more free time and you can do a little bit more partying and have a little bit more fun. Because if you take all of your classes at the big universities, they’re going to be harder and you have to study more, and that’s less time. Again, I’m all about path of least resistance. Work smarter, not harder.

My parents were furious and thought I was making a huge mistake. They went as far as projecting their own self-hatred and self-loathing onto me, almost in hopes that I would fail to validate their mutually extreme fear of taking risks. They said things to me like, “Just know, this is the biggest mistake of your life,” “98% of long-distance relationships fail,” “We look like idiots, and you are embarrassing our family,” and so on.

Boy, thanks mom and dad. Thanks for the pep talk. You guys are swell. Really going to go far in life.

However, I saw the vision. It kept me up at night when I wasn’t taking action towards it, and I trusted myself to get it done. I soon was able to use their words and use it as a chip on my shoulder, knowing it was going to be a fucking sweet feeling when they eventually ate their words.

“Success is the best revenge.” I can’t remember who said that.

After dropping out of university, I began taking courses at junior college, working about 30 hours a week in fast food, building up a podcast editing side hustle on Fiverr, and studying how to invest the extra money I earned each month. To be blunt, it sucked absolute shit.

I’m with you. But like all good 3% men, the grind is the grind. “Grinding is my rest,” as Ray Lewis would say.

I was constantly working, had no free time, no social life, and knew I just had to grind it out for the next couple years.

Yeah. See, when you’ve got a plan and you’ve got an outcome, you know what you want and you know why you want it, you’re willing to eat shit for a few years. And that’s the importance of having a vision for your life, knowing what you want, why you want it, having emotionally compelling reasons, and obviously executing a plan to make it happen.

But I also knew this was the perfect time to refine myself into the man I knew I needed to become. I listened to your first book, How to Be A 3% Man, 32 times over the course of those 2 years and still make sure I read it about once every 3 months as a tune up.

This is a serious student. This is why it’s such a great success story. He put the time and the work in. If you do the work, it will pay the dividends.

I am currently on my 6th listen of Mastering Yourself and will make sure I do at least 15. The wisdom in your books have truly changed and shaped my life. You were the confidence boost I needed during this trying time.

Well, I’ve been through all of this stuff before, so it’s easy for me at this point in my life to put all of this stuff down in a book. And a young guy like this that’s where I once was many decades ago, hey, here’s the cheat codes of life, dude. Here’s how to avoid all of these landmines of life and all of these problems that I learned the hard way to overcome, and you can just effortlessly succeed.

Not that it was effortless. Obviously, it’s a lot of work motivating yourself to go do a shitty job that you hate, but when you understand the philosophy and the mindset, you can get through it. Plus, when somebody else has already done it, it makes it a lot easier for the next guy that comes along, because now you get a roadmap. It’s like a treasure map of life. Here’s where all the golden nuggets are.

I can proudly report back to you that after those 2 years of junior college, I got into not just 1, but all 3 of my top schools that I got rejected from in high school on academic scholarship.

I remember when I was in my freshman year, I had several of my friends, because I couldn’t get in to UF, I couldn’t get into any big schools, because I enjoyed myself in high school. I didn’t get the greatest grades, and so my GPA was not high enough to get in. And I remember one of them was sitting in a class – I think it was Florida State maybe or UCF, it was just one of the basic classes – and the professor starts in and one of the first things he says is, “Hey, this is what we call a weed out class, and most of you are going to drop out.”

He proceeded to tell this to all of the students who had, for all of these years, been trying to get into the school, finally got there, and the teacher’s basically speaking to the 900 people going, “we’re trying to weed the ones out that don’t really want to be here and don’t have the mental mindset to get through it.” So they have a space for those people, and then you get a lot of people dropping out or transferring, and so what happens? Now, you’ve got more space.

In the meantime, you’ve been going to a junior college, which is cheaper, and you’ve got to take the same classes. And the classes transfer, so you save money, they are easier, you have more time, a better quality of life. And then, all of the other suckers that went and spent all that money and dropped out, you just slide right into their space. He got into all three schools. Work smarter, not harder.

These are the little simple cheat codes in life. Because at the end of the day, when you graduate with a degree, the degrees is from the college you wanted. They’re not going to go, “Did you take any classes at junior college? Oh, I’m not going to accept that degree then.” It doesn’t happen. It’s just a piece of paper anyway. What I’ve found, because I’ve hired and fired hundreds of people in my career, is that people that typically will go to college and do the whole process and get the degree tend to be better workers and more consistent, more reliable, more dependable, and quite frankly, smarter than people that never go to college. That’s just the reality.

Now, it doesn’t mean all of them, but the majority of them, when I’ve hired people that are college graduates versus those who never went to college, never had any interest in it, the college graduates just perform better. Because what it really does is show the mindset. Somebody is willing to dedicate themselves to something, a goal, a challenge, and get through it. It is what it is. It doesn’t mean that you need a college degree to succeed. What I always tell people is you should only go to college if the degree is going to get you a job that is going to pay you a lot more money than you would have otherwise gotten.

Because there are so many people these days graduating with these absolutely, completely useless degrees, hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, and then they’re waiting tables. It’s like, that’s not a success, that’s a failure. That’s somebody that got scammed by the school system, and that’s not right. And then you can’t discharge that debt in a bankruptcy, which is unconscionable. If you get a crummy degree that doesn’t do anything to help you get a better paying job, it’s useless, and then you got ripped off. Millions of people have had this experience.

I still remember opening those acceptance letters telling myself, “I fucking knew it 2 years ago,” and loved every second of the looks on my parents faces when I told them the news and watched their attempts to project their worldview onto me come crashing down.

Success is the best revenge. See, mom and Dad, you should have listened.

I’m now graduating from my dream school in a couple months and even got my dream job in my dream city, all of which I envisioned 4 years ago.

So, this is four years. You know, all of the things that I teach, the stuff that’s in “3% Man,” the stuff in “Mastering Yourself,” these are not things that are going to make you an overnight success. Success is long in coming. I’m not the quick fix guy. But the results that you’ll get from the things you learn from me you’ll be able to utilize for decades, for the rest of your life.

It’s in sales at a software unicorn, and I was able to negotiate stock options into the offer after reading your article on your friend who did the same with AOL.

Yep, that was 25 years ago now since he did that. I just had lunch with him the other day – amazing dude.

In my offer letter, they mentioned how much they appreciated my undeniable authenticity and the confidence I had in my skills.

Well, what is confidence? Doing what you know how to do and doing it really well.

I can also happily report that my girlfriend and I have been together for over 5 years now, and we are moving in together (her idea) this summer.

Nice! Good job. Cheers to the 3% man.

She now constantly showers me with compliments, telling me how nobody raises a candle to me, how excited she is to be on this journey with me, and how she’s loved to watch me grow and succeed into the man I am now and where I am going through all the adversity.

Yep. The harder the course, the more rewarding the triumph. It’s true, and it’s got to be satisfying when you struggle and then you succeed. And in this guy’s case, now he’s got his girlfriend totally supporting him and cheering him on. That’s the way it’s supposed to be.

I’ve even managed to save up about $70,000, which I hope to use to purchase my first rental property in the next year or so, not bad for a 22-year-old kid.

Damn dude, that’s impressive.

Corey, your principles have helped me build my dream life and my relationship has never felt as easy and natural. You are a gift from God, my friend, and I’m eternally grateful for all that you do.

Thank you,

Bob

Well, here’s to you, and tell everybody you know. Thanks for sharing that, and congratulations in all your success and the magical things that you and your girlfriend are going to continue to experience together. You deserve it, and now everybody that didn’t believe in you now sees you winning. Now you’re the person that everybody in your life, including your parents, looks up to and admires. You have exceeded their expectations. How sweet is that?

So, if you’ve got a question or a challenge and you would like to get my help, go to UnderstandingRelationships.com, click the Products tab at the top of your screen and book a coaching session with yours truly.

“Haters don’t really hate you. They actually hate themselves and are projecting their own self-hatred and self-loathing in a feeble attempt to make themselves feel better by tearing down others. If someone is able to successfully make you feel worse than they do, then they feel better about themselves at your expense. Never give them the satisfaction, because what they really need is for you to succeed in spite of them so they have an example to follow and believe in, because they don’t believe in themselves. Haters want to be you and want what you have. Besides, other people’s opinion of you is none of your business anyway.” ~ Coach Corey Wayne

Click Anywhere on Today’s Instagram Image Below & You’ll Be Taken To My Instagram Page. When you get to my Instagram page, click the “Follow” Button so you can follow me on Instagram. I upload several new Instagram photos per week.