I turned 30 on Friday and wanted to participate in one of my favorite internet rituals: codifying life lessons, the number of which is equal to the age one has surpassed.
Here’s some of the wisdom I’ve been gifted so far.
Human life is defined by polarities. Two of the more important ones are purpose and safety, and joy and fear. These days, most people have hyperactive fear/threat detection. For a fulfilling modern life, calibrate yourself so that you spend more time in purpose and joy.
One of the biggest things between you and what you want are reactive thought and behavioral patterns inherited from previous wounds and hardships. Spend time working on those.
Life, and everything in it, is really just one big evolutionary learning process. Seeing and leaning into that makes the whole thing more fun.
If you really want to think well, opt to ingest diversity AND quality of thought. Read only the best of many different perspectives and viewpoints.
There’s a point in modern American life when the marginal benefit of things that can be gained quickly gets really low. Another night out at a fancy restaurant, drinking, or a concert doesn’t get you what it used to. This even applies to quick wins at work. When this happens, the sooner you can adopt patience and play for the long-term, the better. Stop thinking in terms of days and months and start thinking in terms of years and decades.
Diversification as a strategy for creating resilience doesn’t only apply to finance: it also applies to how you source meaning in your life. Create meaning in a diverse array of things: wellness, work, relationships, arts, and hobbies. This makes you antifragile.
Life is for experiencing. Don’t miss out on the everyday beauty in front of you: pets, children, a loving relationship, the beauty of nature. Slow down and enjoy it.
There is a colossal difference between fresh any food and not fresh any food. Having something fresh for the first time, and I mean truly, just-out-the-kitchen-fresh, can ruin the non-fresh version forever, in the best way.
Having experiences that get you outside of yourself is key to your evolution and growth. Do psychedelics, go on a retreat, skydive, do an athletic event that feels impossible for you. These moments create massive shifts in awareness that are explosive for growth.
You will never regret saying “I love you” to your people too often.
A hell of a lot of problems come from a lack of intrapersonal emotional intelligence. Get good at identifying, feeling, understanding, and acting with and despite your feelings.
For good relationships, embrace candor (even, nay, especially when it’s hard) and allow for rupture and repair. A good relationship grows and benefits from the process of conflict and coming back together.
Beware any drug—any habitual source of dopamine that you need to function—be it alcohol, caffeine, nicotine, social media, work, or your phone. These things take you wildly off track while convincing you that it is anything or everything else in your life that is the problem.
Question and call yourself on your bullshit. Don’t buy your own excuses.
Learn to discern between what you authentically want and what you egoically want (someone else’s voice in your head). I’ve witnessed many people feel a calm serenity descend on them upon realizing and embracing what they truly wanted, and being ok with it taking decades of life to get it. There is release in being connected to your authentic wants.
Leadership isn’t isolated to leading a team. Leadership is a way of being that can and does live everywhere in your life. We are social beings who constantly look to each other for how to think and behave. The question isn’t whether or not you’re leading, it’s whether or not you’re leading well.
Find the things that you love and spend more time doing them.
If you’re struggling to make sense of the world, having a basic understanding of complexity and complex systems (and the challenges in understanding them) will help you understand the fundamental nature of everything better.
We evolved as predominantly social creatures who live in nature. Most people nowadays get too little of either. A solid solution for most woes: get outside, into your body, and in relationship. These are the foundations for a meaningful human life.
Whenever you notice yourself holding a black and white belief, you can almost always run a short experiment to invalidate it. That’s isn’t to say that your belief is false, it’s to say that the opposite of what you believe is also true, as well as everything inbetween. This can be terrifying at first, but is ultimately very liberating. Run experiments to challenge your beliefs regularly.
Life opens up a lot when you commit to accepting yourself first AND working on yourself second.
Having a great partner in life takes effort, and is easily 10,000x better than not. A younger version of me would’ve argued with this intellectually for months on end. The older version knows that the intellect simply can’t compute it. Darwin went through this same arc.
It’s only failure if you call it so and stop moving forward. Once you move past failure, it is recast as a lesson and another step on the journey.
If you’re thinking about reaching out to an old friend and stop yourself because “maybe they don’t want to hear from me”, stop that shit and give you both the gift of reaching out.
Talk to your loved ones more often.
Be wary of advice (oof, the irony!). Instead, find someone to help you make sense of what you really want and how you may be getting in the way of that. Advice can get you stuck living a life that isn’t yours. Choose self-authorship.
If you want a pet, get a pet. They make life so so good.
A lot of the places we get stuck are false dichotomies. We think we can have a job that gets us Money or a job that gives us Meaning. A committed relationship or an exciting life. Directness or Compassion in how we communicate. Life is long. You have time to create ands rather than ors. Embrace the challenge.
For all you know, you only have one life. At the end you may regret a number of things, but you won’t regret going after what you genuinely wanted as best you could. So please, for the love of god and yourself, get after it. And know that what you want may change in the process. Beautiful! When it does, get after that new thing just as enthusiastically.
Life becomes a lot more fun when you realize anything and everything can be play. Take life and yourself less seriously. Remember to play in it all.