r/RelentlessMen

Hey guys,

I’m turning 25 in a few days, which officially puts me in the second half of my twenties.

Every year before my birthday, I sit down and write a list of goals, lessons, and reminders for myself. This year I thought I’d include Reddit in that tradition.

If you could give your 25-year-old self one sentence, one piece of advice, or one goal to focus on for the year, what would it be?

I’d love to hear from men of all ages. I’m looking for the kind of wisdom that usually only comes with experience. Life today can sometimes feel overwhelming, and it’s easy to feel like you’re trying to find your way through a world that keeps changing.

So, gentlemen. Write away. I’d love to be inspired by your experiences, and maybe others reading this will be too.

ok so this one matters because high functioning ADHD is one of the most misunderstood things out there. people see someone with a job, a degree, a put together life and assume the ADHD must be mild. the research and lived experience say otherwise. looking fine and being fine are different things, and the gap between them is where the real cost hides. here is why, with what the science actually shows.

quick frame. high functioning does not mean the ADHD is mild. it usually means the person is compensating hard enough to hide it, and that compensation has a price the outside never sees.

• The functioning is bought with exhausting effort. what looks like a managed life is often held together by constant overcompensation, elaborate systems, over preparation, and sheer white knuckle effort. studies on adults with ADHD show high rates of burnout and anxiety precisely in the ones who function well, because the functioning itself is depleting. the output looks normal, the cost is enormous.
• The impairment is just hidden, not absent. ADHD is fundamentally a challenge with executive function, the brain's management system for attention, planning, and impulse. that does not disappear because you are smart or successful. you may ace the project and still be unable to start your taxes, answer a simple email for three weeks, or regulate your emotions at home. the impairment moves to the invisible parts of life.
• Late diagnosis deepens the wound. because they coped, many high functioning people are diagnosed late, after years of being told they are lazy or just need to try harder. research links this to significant secondary anxiety, depression, and shame. you internalize a story that you are failing at easy things, when your brain was working differently the whole time.
• Emotional dysregulation is part of it. often overlooked, ADHD frequently includes intense emotional swings and rejection sensitivity. someone can look completely competent at work and be drowning in emotional overwhelm nobody sees.

here is the line i keep coming back to. high functioning ADHD does not mean it is not hard. it means you are paying the full price in private so it can look easy in public.

now the leverage. understanding this reframes the exhaustion and the shame, because you stop measuring yourself by how fine you look and start accounting for what the looking fine costs. learning how your brain actually works is what lets you build real support instead of just performing competence until you break.

so here is what is worth your time.

• ADHD 2.0 by Dr. Edward Hallowell and Dr. John Ratey, a current, science based picture of the ADHD brain. Start here.
• Driven to Distraction by the same authors, the classic that validated the adult experience.
• Scattered Minds by Dr. Gabor Maté, on the emotional and developmental side.
• You Mean I'm Not Lazy, Stupid or Crazy?! by Kate Kelly and Peggy Ramundo, a warm guide for adults who coped too long.
• Podcast: the ADHD Experts podcast from ADDitude is excellent and evidence based.
• Flourish, a daily mental health app built by Stanford psychologists, where, as a nerd, I love seeing the science behind each technique, which helps me know what I am experiencing is real and I am not alone. An avatar named Sunnie nudges journaling and mood tracking, gentle structure that does not run on the willpower high functioning already drains.
• BeFreed, the one I lean on, built by a team out of Columbia, which probably explains why it leans on the actual clinical research. it is a personalized audio learning app, you tell it what you want to understand, for me it was high functioning ADHD, and it assesses where you are and builds a plan matched to that from real sources, ADHD clinicians and researchers, then adapts as you go. i run it on walks. it is for learning and self understanding, not a replacement for a real assessment or treatment, but it helped me see the hidden cost clearly.

so if your ADHD looks managed and you are quietly struggling, you are not exaggerating and you are not weak. you are paying a real, invisible price, and naming it is the first step to getting actual support instead of just applause for looking fine.

what is the invisible part of high functioning that you wish people actually understood?

i went deep on the actual research on millionaires, not the instagram version, and the most surprising finding is how boring and invisible most of them are. the loud, flashy, clearly rich people are usually the broke ones. the real millionaires are quietly mowing their own lawn. there is one core skill behind this, and it is the opposite of what the culture sells.

i know, i know, you have heard live below your means a thousand times. stay with me, because the research makes it concrete and a little shocking. the landmark study here is The Millionaire Next Door by Thomas Stanley, who actually surveyed American millionaires and found most were not doctors and executives with sports cars. they were ordinary people, often in unglamorous businesses, who lived in modest homes and drove used cars. the flashy spenders he studied were mostly high income and low net worth, what he called under accumulators of wealth.

so here is the one skill, broken into the two moves that matter.

• Move one, decouple your spending from your income. this is the whole thing. when you get a raise, the broke high earner upgrades their life. the future millionaire banks it. Stanley found the strongest predictor of wealth was not income, it was a frugal, consistent gap between earning and spending, invested over time. looking rich and being rich are usually opposites, because every dollar spent signaling wealth is a dollar that never compounds into actual wealth.
• Move two, let the invisible gap compound, untouched. the money you do not spend goes into boring, broad investments and you leave it alone for decades. that is it. no timing, no hot picks. compound interest on a consistent gap is the quiet engine, and it works precisely because you are not draining it to look impressive.

the reason this feels hard is social. spending is visible and net worth is invisible, so the culture rewards the costume and ignores the substance. the millionaire next door simply stopped caring about the costume.

here is the line i keep coming back to. the people who look rich and the people who are rich are usually two different groups, because the money you spend proving it is the money you never get to keep.

and the real leverage is this: building wealth is mostly behavioral, not mathematical. a modest earner with a high savings rate and patience beats a high earner who spends it all, every time. that gap is a learnable discipline, and it quietly compounds into freedom while nobody is watching.

a couple things that genuinely helped me, since this is a habit and not a fact:

• The Millionaire Next Door by Thomas Stanley, the eye opening data on who actually builds wealth, and it will cure you of wanting to look rich. honestly i had it sitting unread on a shelf for a year, which is a little on the nose for a post about delayed gratification.
• The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel, the best book on why wealth is what you do not see.
• YNAB, a budgeting app I run everything through so the gap gets saved before i can spend it.
• BeFreed, the one I use to keep the mindset sharp, since the hard part is mental. it is a personalized audio learning app, you tell it what you want to work on, for me it was spending discipline and money psychology, and it assesses where you are and builds a plan matched to that from real sources, the wealth researchers and behavioral economists above, then adapts as you go. i run it on walks. it kept the ideas in front of me until banking the raise felt normal instead of painful.

so if you want to actually get rich, the move is almost anticlimactic. spend quietly, save the gap, invest it in something boring, and let the years do the work. the people who look the part rarely keep it.

what is the most quietly wealthy person you have known actually like, and what did they spend money on versus skip?