I recently came across @patrickc's collection of life advice he wished he could give himself before the age of 20. It inspired me to revisit a similar piece I wrote back in 2012. So here's my "updated" advice for those of you that are around 20—30. (I am about to turn 39.)
2/ When you’re young, you'll find that older people around you are resistant to new ideas that you naturally embrace. This is normal. It can have the impact of making you feel exceptionally open-minded, but you're not. You're just young.
3/ here's the thing- as you age, you'll naturally become more rigid and more beholden to the perspectives you’ve already formed. Your tolerance for risk will decrease over time. You won't notice this happening. It will be automatic and seem like you're "just changing your mind."
4/ Consequently, you should expect that you'll naturally do less interesting and/or risky things over time unless you choose otherwise RIGHT NOW. Seriously
5/ It's important to devote time and resources to exploring new ideas and taking risks, and improving parts of yourself that you're uncomfortable confronting.
6/ PS I wrote a whole short book on this, called The Flinch. It's free. Here's a PDF- raouldify.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/2011_1…
7/ Getting comfortable with discomfort will help you build an adaptive risk tolerance and keep your mind open to opportunities you wouldn't otherwise explore. This will get easier over time.
8/ once easy way to help your risk tolerance rise is to decrease your downside. Do this by reducing your cost of living as much as possible. It's effectively your burn rate, and the higher your burn rate, the fewer resources you have to take risks with.
9/ ie- Avoid letting your rent make decisions for you.
10/ (Caveat: Don't reduce your cost of living so much that you're no longer taking proper care of your own needs. That includes giving up food for Soylent.)
11/ Also consciously devote energy to building the right kinds of habits. If you don't, your lifestyle will randomly generate habits for you, and they're unlikely to be good ones, closer to your basic animal instincts then your idealized self.
12/ Some of mine that I think are pretty universally good: meditate; eat 100g of protein; check my posture; stretch/do yoga; read a book a week; exercise every day (I'm actually skipping that one right now to write this).
13/ If you don't know how to cook, make that a habit. If you don't deliberately build habits, there will be many important things that you just don't know how to do. These will build up over time and three habits are way harder to break when you are older.
14/ Read an enormous amount of books. More than you think you need to, not the ones that everyone else is reading, and ideally covering a wide range of topics.
15/ Domain expertise is great, but you also want to build a breadth of knowledge so that you can identify patterns and opportunities that others are yet to notice. Those "secrets" are the most important pieces of information.
16/ by doing this, you unconsciously end up building mental models that help you solve problems in totally unexpected ways, and that gives you a unique perspective on the world. Unique perspectives are very valuable- like undervalued stock- they give you an edge.
17/ (Reading the same books on pitching and marketing as everyone else cannot give you that.)
18/ in fact, it's important to seek out and empathize with perspectives that directly contradict with what you know generally speaking — or at least think you know — to be true.
19/ Simple example: In my 20s I was a vegetarian and later a vegan. I was convinced this was the objectively superior position for my health.
20/ But increasingly there were smart people around me talking about the nutritional benefits of eating meat. And I thought, "That's stupid. Doesn't eating meat give you a heart attack?"
21/ (Now I eat meat again. Don't @ me.)
22/ so ya- It's very easy to develop intellectual blind spots and instinctively dismiss others' points of view. This is especially prevalent in Silicon Valley - but it's true everywhere.
23/ When everyone is thinking about the same things — even in the spirit of extreme openness or positive future bias — it means everyone's blind to the same things. This is a big opportunity for you.
24/ No matter what you believe, there are alternative perspectives that are just as well-informed. It's worth understanding them and why they make sense to people, even if you fundamentally disagree.
25/ Perhaps the most important part of being young: this is a period of your life in which you should choose to DO SOMETHING ALL OF THE WAY.
26/ If you flit around from idea to idea without fully realizing any of them, you will enter your 30s feeling as if you have accomplished nothing. Worse, you will feel hesitant to take on anything new. Again, high risk aversion.
27/ Intrinsic motivation can easily fade, especially as you get older. If you rely solely on your natural will to create, you will find yourself feeling stranded when it's gone.
28/ It's important to prove to yourself what you're capable of doing when you commit to it. This is critical to building confidence in your own abilities for the future. Otherwise you're like "I'm shit," when actually the problem is that you don't commit.
29/ Even if you spend a year writing a book that no one reads, the point is that you wrote it. Now you know that you can write a book — and, consequently, any number of books. (Quality notwithstanding.) You can point to it. You made something that doesn't exist, exist.
30/ Completion is crucial. Completing something is what lets you say, "I did that." It's proof to yourself that you can follow through, which builds immeasurable self-confidence in the future.
31/ If you want to see my original advice from 2012, on my very 2012-looking blog, check it out here: inoveryourhead.net/2012/05/28/20-… - meanwhile, good luck with whatever you're working on. Peace.
32/ And of course, check out @patrickc's collection of advice he would give past-Patrick: patrickcollison.com/advice
