Many men still feel like a teenage boy walking around in a grown man’s body.

Because they do not feel like mature men, many of these young men are putting off adult responsibilities like careers, families, and civic involvement until they can look at themselves in the mirror and say: I am a man.

In the meantime, these young men drift insecurely through life, wondering when they will finally start feeling like grown men.

Conventional wisdom tells us that before you do something, you first need to feel like doing it or feel like the kind of person who would do that sort of thing.

And in order to feel like doing something, the thinking goes, you need to get in the right mindset, find yourself, or discover your deep inner truth.

Most men believe that at some magical moment in the future, they will feel like a grown man, and once that happens they will finally have the motivation to start doing manly things.

Or they read books, meditate about masculinity, and attend weekend men’s retreats, hoping that they will start to feel like a man through pondering manhood.

But they do not seem to make much progress. They have moments of inspiration, but when the retreat is over or the book is finished, they are back to feeling insecure about their status as men.

How can you start feeling like the man you’ve always wanted to be? Follow the advice given by both ancient philosophers and modern psychologists:

To feel like a man, you have to act like a man.