Lessons from 30 years of living

This is the introduction to a book idea I am working on regarding lessons learned from a common but turbulent 30 years on earth.

INTRODUCTION

Growing up is a wonderfully hectic affair. One of the most turbulent times in our lives is our 20’s if we are lucky enough to get through it. During this decade, we go through monumental changes, attempt to discover ourselves, begin to understand how time works, and look for answers to questions like what am I going to do with my life, who am going to be, what do I value? It’s a difficult time and without solid role models or a foundation of knowledge to help us bridge the gap between the known and yet-to-know we can often feel lost and a little helpless in our direction. No wonder we feel this way, with so many external stimuli attacking our senses. Social media, diets, career paths, relationships, and challenges present themselves in what seems like a never-ending cycle of up and down.

During our twenties we might go through the loss of a loved one for the first time, we might experience heartbreak when a partner ends a relationship with us, or end up overwhelmed by the extreme pressure from the surrounding narrative of which career path to focus on, which hobby we should be pursuing, what beauty standards are acceptable, and what we should care about. We hear a lot of do this and do that, stop doing this and cut that out, that is, we hear a lot of opinions, usually before we even have the chance to decide for ourselves how we feel about something.

When we move through our twenties, we inevitably make many mistakes and experience a great deal of failure. As you will see throughout this book, failure is a good thing, not something to seek out, but something that will offer huge growth opportunities if we are in the right mindset. We also experience success and navigate the pros and cons of the feelings that arise when we succeed at something. Our twenties are about defining ourselves; about discovering how to deal with our failures and successes, discovering what we truly value, figuring out what to prioritize, and building confidence in who we are, and we do this by experiencing the world around us.

We figure these elements out by pursuing that which we are interested in, by avoiding that which we are not interested in and by listening to ourselves and learning how we feel, how we think, what makes us tick and what does not. Often, life is more about figuring out what we don’t want to do, and what truly annoys us, and in doing so we can arrive at a life that presents more opportunities to do what we genuinely want to be doing.

By the end of our twenties, we are part the same person that started on this journey a decade earlier, and part a new person, built from the paths and roads that we have decided to focus on for over three and a half thousand days. We are a hybrid of old and new, and ideally, we are in a better place at the end of the decade, than when we started. You want to be closer to your goals not further away, even if the goals have been moving around all over the place. One day you might decide to take a certain path and after a few years of working and travelling this road you may realize it is not for you, are you a failure because you did not see this through till the end? The answer to that question is not that simple.

To answer that question, you have to ask many more. Did you try your hardest? What did you learn by going down this road? Did you develop any skills or build on the experience that may come in use later in life? Did you develop an idea of how difficult things can be to achieve, how hard it is to come by greatness? Why does this idea of failure hurt you? Are you attaching your self-worth to this idea? As you can see, there are a lot of elements to play with when failure arises and we discover a lot about ourselves through answering these questions. You begin to realize that it is better to try and fail than not to try at all. Just because you sunk a $15,000 loan into a photography business that failed two years later doesn’t mean you did anything particularly wrong.

Hopefully, you learned more than how to change your aperture and shutter speed, for example, maybe you learned how to get up before the crack of dawn and put in some hard work, maybe you learned that you can teach yourself anything and that if anyone else in the world has achieved it, so can you. Even more, maybe you realized that if no one else in the world has been able to achieve this, there has to be a first, and that person can be you.

Most importantly, our twenties will help us get a better footing and move towards what we value. You may not know what that is yet, you might be feeling a little lost, a little directionless. That is okay, I felt like that too. I still do sometimes, even though I’m better now at navigating the emotions. What happens when you start to experience the wider world around you during this period is that you have some of your first experiences on your own. You alone have to figure out how to deal with life, you alone have to decide what is important, and as it turns out, it doesn’t have to be as complicated as it seems.

I do wish there were things I knew earlier in life, as I’m sure we all do, and that is why this book exists. It is here to offer a glimpse into a very defining period in our lives, it is here to offer a window into what is to come, what may be, and how to deal with it so that things do not become overwhelming. It is here, I hope, to be a sort of guiding framework to make the bad times a little better and to offer clarity in a busy world. Think of it as a mini role model, a hidden buddha, something to turn to when things are tough, a resource for when you feel lost.

You don’t have to be in your twenties either to pick up a thing or two, I assume these will be the same resources I draw on in later life to better understand the situations I end up in, as you will see, wisdom gained is not often lost.