The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Bros

They’re obnoxious, entitled, and endlessly repulsive. But what can they teach us about living well?

Photo by Or Hakim on Unsplash

I am not a bro. I was never a football star, never got my kicks “smashing chicks,” and I’m not super into EDM or Acro-Yoga.

I imagine you’re not like that, either. If I was forced to speculate, I imagine bros don’t kill their time reading think-pieces on Medium.

[They’re definitely writing them, though — looking at you, random dude who spam-posts four listicles a day sharing trite MRA-adjacent platitudes, I’m onto your ruse — as well as sharing listicles from the Forbes contributor network.]

Whenever I think of bros, I think of three archetypes. Straight white women will know these as “The 3 Douchebags You Meet on Tinder”:

• Brad — Republican Goldman-Sachs VP bro who loves Luke Bryan, quarterbacked his high school football team, and was President of Delta Kappa Epsilon
• Chad — Democrat tech-startup bro who blares Migos, played college soccer and used his dad’s VC money to coke himself out after securing an eight-figure seed round
• Connor — Spiritual entrepreneur relationship-coach bro who listens to binaural beats, remodeled a VW bus, surfs nearly every morning, rarely wears a shirt, and did ayahuasca in Peru that one fucking time and now never shuts the fuck up about how “everything is connected”

Brad’s in an abusive marriage, Chad’s in a sexless marriage, and Connor’s the hub of a polyamorous sex cult. All three are Dan Price.

I digress. This was supposed to be the opening salvo of a TedTalk but I could honestly go for an hour or longer on the above alone.

As we’ve (unfortunately) learned again and again throughout history and our lifetimes, the bros are killing it. They’re investment bankers and software developers, they’re starting businesses, they’re building their dream houses, they’ve got their pick of dating partners, they’re podcasting, they’re marrying off and they’re posing shirtless on Instagram for 1,587 likes and meanwhile your artful landscape shot is lucky to crack double-digits.