In our early 30s, we stop keeping track of our age.
We know we’re not 29 anymore, but not 35 either. And that’s exactly enough information to keep us comfortable.
But a couple of weeks ago, I was filling out a form that asked for my birthday. The next line was auto-generated and read:
YOU ARE 32 YEARS OLD.
Damn it!
Anyhow, this little unsolicited truth bomb got me thinking: What has happened in my life so far? What have I actually learned?
Here are some of them, learned from life itself and/or from somebody else.
1 – 17
Going fast doesn’t mean you can drive well
You become a better driver when you learn all the tricks on the road: bank on the openings in the next couple of seconds, knowing when backing off gets you somewhere faster, and being in the right lane so you have several options instead of just one way out.
When we’re just flooring the gas pedal, we miss all these nuances.
We all eventually figure this out behind the wheel. But it takes years to realize these aren’t just driving lessons, that they apply to everything else in life, too.
Slow is fast, and fast is slow.
Turns out the clichés are all true
Growing up, we all hear the same old cliches about reading books.
- “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.”
- “Books are a uniquely portable magic.”
- “You can find magic wherever you look. Sit back and relax, all you need is a book.”
- And many more…
Turns out, all of them are true.
Damn electricity
Electricity doesn’t care if you’re a kid. If you touch the wrong wire, you’ll get electrocuted anyway.
Motivation comes from within
When we try to borrow someone else’s success story and get motivated by it, it can only create a spark of energy that fades away really quickly.
What works, especially in the long run, is a personal reference point.
This could be a bruising failure or a remarkable win in our own life; a failure so bitter we’d do anything not to go back there, or a win so sweet that we’d do anything to feel how we felt at that moment.
Our goals become far more attainable when we view them from the vantage point of our own failures or past successes.
To quote the British writer, Alan Watts, ‘The reason you want to be better is the reason you aren’t.’
If our success is a car, these reference points are its premium gas.
Other people’s success stories don’t give such reference points; only our own failures and successes do.
The beauty is in the attempt
Trying new things is hard. Trying new things that go against the norm is especially hard.
Nobody likes a contrarian.
And if you’re willing to do this—to be a contrarian—you are bound to fail 99% of the time.
Then people will cringe on your behalf.
But if you keep at it anyway, at some point, you’ll realize that you’re now ahead of 99% of the people you started your journey with.
18 – 21
There is no feeling quite like looking up from rock bottom
We climb to heaven most often on the ruins of our cherished plans, finding our failures were successes.
-Amos Bronson Alcott
When we try to win, not just survive, we often don’t realize that we haven’t left time to set up a safety net in case we fall. So when we fail, we fall all the way down to rock bottom.
It’s not an ideal place to be. But in hindsight, these were the moments I felt the most free.
At the rock bottom, we’ve got nothing to lose, and there’s no other way to look but up.
The only life hack that works like magic
There’s only one real-life hack I’ve come across so far, that is, to write down exactly what you want and keep it somewhere you can see every day.
Competition is for losers
If you’ve embarked on something just to compete with someone else, you’ve already lost.
Competition keeps you in line, but it’ll never give you enough energy to push yourself to the front of the line.
The ones who win are the ones who only compete with themselves.
Associate yourself with the glitches of the matrix
We are just an average of the people with whom we associate ourselves the most. So if you want to do something remarkable, it’s better to associate yourself with the savvy and uncanny.
22 – 25
Told you so (sincerely, your intuition)
Our 20s, especially early 20s, are such a malleable time.
Before then, our worldview is mostly shaped by gut feelings. But in our 20s, we’re exposed to all these ‘big ideas’. So we start doubting our gut feelings in favor of these newfound ideas. Without enough life experience, though, we can’t really falsify them on our own.
In our late 20s, early 30s, however, we have enough experience to see things through. We realize most of what we believed in our 20s wasn’t quite right, that the gut feelings we had as kids were actually true.
It all comes full circle.
‘Follow your gut’ isn’t such bad advice after all.
It’s extremely hard to find positives, but it’s quite easy to remove the negatives
It’s nearly impossible to figure out what’s good for us. So we have to let the good come to us.
For that to happen, though, first we have to remove the bad. The good news is, it’s quite easy to figure out what’s bad for us.
Remove the negatives, and the positives will find you organically.
Life only makes sense if the primary goal is to help other people
We didn’t choose to be born. So why are we even here?
So purpose is something we have to figure out on the go.
No matter how narrow we try to funnel that purpose—into being a doctor, nurse, teacher, engineer, artist—none of it makes sense, none of it’s sustainable, if the primary outcome isn’t to help another person.
When our intent to do anything starts from that basis, to help one another, every single piece of the puzzle fits into place, both spiritually and economically.
The rich get richer by building money-making machines, not by making money
We all have only 24 hours in a day.
Some work incredibly hard, pulling 80-hour weeks, for a certain salary. Meanwhile, others work only 20 hours a week and earn 100 times more.
While some trade time for money, others use their time to build systems that generate money on their own.
They get paid even when they’re not working.
Climbing a mountain is so much satisfying than guarding a summit
When we’re climbing up a mountain, we’re laser-focused on the goal.
But when we achieve it, and reach the summit, standing still keeps us off balance.
We’re better off living by the principle that ‘the top of one mountain is the bottom of the next.’
Education doesn’t give you wings, but it sure gives you feathers
Education, in itself, is not help. It’s a sophisticated tool to get help.
It trains us to see opportunities, introduces us to interesting people and ideas that we would otherwise not have even noticed.
These are the feathers that education places within our reach. When we collect enough of them, we eventually get to make our own wings.
26 – 29
Working with a highly secure boss is more important than working with a highly competent one
Some people’s insecurity starts as low as 10% of their competence—that is, they get extremely insecure if someone is performing at even 10% of their competence level. If you go above this 10%, well…bad things will start to happen to you.
This is a really bad deal, especially for someone in their early 20s, because your growth is limited by someone else’s insecurities.
The most competent boss is not always the most secure one.
There’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in
When we’re younger, more often than not, we project ourselves onto an idealized version of who we think we should be. We hide the things we believe to be our weaknesses, trying to blend in with the crowd.
But when we get into our late 20s, early 30s, we realize nobody is thinking about us as much as we thought before. In light of this, we slowly realize the things we tried to hide are actually what make us unique and give us a competitive edge.
They become our greatest strengths.
Silence is a choice
Maturity isn’t measured by what we decide to say, but what we decide not to say.
Don’t marry a princess, marry a warrior princess
300,000 years ago, when we were hunter-gatherers, men used to go on long-distance hunts, kill animals, bring the food home, and carry the whole system forward.
Wrong!
While men were busy hunting, women were busy gathering dependable foods and staple carbohydrates. Put the two together—predictable calories from women, occasional protein from men—we got the best of both worlds.
Jump forward about 300,000 years, in 1206, a young boy from Mongolia built an empire that lasted 800 years. His name was Genghis Khan. After his death, his sons ruled it and carried it forward.
Wrong again!
After Genghis Khan died in 1227, his sons were barely holding the empire together. Their wives and mothers ruled the homeland, handled politics, managed finances, and kept things running while they were off fighting. This hidden matriarchy helped build and protect one of the largest empires in history.
The masculine urge to take care of a woman, by itself, has never been sustainable.
True, we men naturally want to protect and provide. But a marriage works best when one is willing to hold the fort while the other is fighting on the front line.
Originality is a myth
Everything is a copy, of a copy, of a copy, of a copy.
So trying to make something 100% original is impossible, a waste of time, a waste of money, and most importantly, unnecessary.
We need our own war to fight
In 1429, Joan of Arc, a peasant girl with no military training, led the French army to multiple victories. She turned the tide of the Hundred Years’ War, and boosted the morale of an entire nation. She was executed for crimes she didn’t commit in 1431, and later became a saint, a national heroine.
She was only 19 years old.
And yesterday, I caught myself complaining about my Wi-Fi being slow.
We have to let dead dreams die
When we’re young, we all have a list of dreams to accomplish when we grow up.
But in our late 20s, early 30s, we realize some of these dreams aren’t compatible with who we actually are.
One of the hardest yet most important decisions we have to make is to kill these incompatible dreams we’ve held so dear for so long.
If we don’t let go and drag those dreams into our 30s, we lose the chance to become truly ourselves and drown in holding onto dead weight.
Money is well spent when buying experiences, not things
Buying the shiniest gadget will only give you a moment of pleasure. But hosting an event, going on a road trip, would create memories that will last a lifetime.
29 – 32
Most things will work again if you unplug them and replug them in a couple of minutes
Doesn’t matter how sophisticated or how expensive it is, unplug and replug and give a little tap, it’ll come back to life.
This is water
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”
-From David Foster Wallace’s famous speech, ‘This is Water.’
It’s natural for us to think we are at the absolute center of the universe. There is no experience we’ve had where we were not the absolute center of. But the truth is, we don’t even know what we don’t know.
Just as we’re blind to the very water we swim in, we’re blind to the struggles of others passing by.
Everyone is fighting their own battles. It’s better to be kind and understanding to one another, as much as we can, as often as we can.
Rationality is overrated. It’s okay to believe in the irrational
- Parents’ prayers always work
- Good people always win in the end
- The multiverse is real
- Your dog really does understand what you’re saying
- My wife is always right (*sponsored)
The ultimate ‘thinking’ machine
Sharpening your mind only takes two absolutely free tools: coding and writing.
Coding forces precision; Writing forces clarity.
An uninterrupted 8-hour sleep can solve 99% of your life’s problems
As we get older, the number of problems to solve in a given day gets higher and exponentially more complex.
Most of them are dull, too.
So it’s really easy to get to the point where you think, ‘Is this too much? Have I gotten myself into more than I can handle? When it comes to this, in my experience, instead of trying to answer it right then, going to bed has always been the right move. There’s something about REM sleep that recalibrates everything.
And the next day, you realize most of the problems you were spiralling about just got solved while you were busy sleeping.
AI will not replace us, unless we are willing to replace ourselves
Using AI to do something AI can do on its own might bring short-term gains, but we’re practically training our own replacement. Eventually, AI learns to do all of that without us.
The key is to work with AI, not let it work for you, to create something using AI that AI could never create on its own.
We stand on the shoulders of giants, and we think we’re flying
30 years is a long time, long enough for some important wins and many bitter losses.
It’s tempting to drift into our 30s thinking we did all the work to get here, when in reality, all we had to do was show up and be consistent on the foundation our parents and mentors built for us.
Understanding this brings humility about the head start we’ve been given, and with it, a natural awareness of how to pass it forward.