My nephew is getting old enough that his little personality is starting to come out and I can imagine him going through the different phases of life. He’s still too young to need or to listen to any of my advice, but that doesn’t prevent me from wanting to give it to him. I’ve decided to write some advice for him that he can read as he gets older, and in the process of thinking about what to write I realized that it’s really an exercise in distilling down the important things I’ve learned so far, which may be of interest to adults as well.
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I have now probably finished the first half of my life, so I thought I would try to condense the most important lessons I’ve learned so far into a format that may be useful to you as you grow up. My fear is that you’ll make the same mistake that I sometimes made, which is that you will hear advice, believe it doesn’t apply to you, and then a decade or two later realize it actually did apply to you. Maybe ignoring advice like that is part of growing up, though.
The reason I believe that my advice will be useful to you is primarily because I arrived at most of these conclusions by myself through experimentation and trial and error, and have also been able to successfully translate that advice to other people through coaching. Also, anecdotally, I think I have the best life I could possibly imagine, largely because of the lessons I’ve learned. Your ideal life will look different from mine, but I think the underlying principles will hold true regardless.
My first piece of advice, which will undermine all of the following advice, is that you should listen to a large number of people and make your own decisions based on all of the information you learn. So even though I’ll be happiest if you just do everything I say to do, and I’m completely convinced that I’m correct, the truth is that no one is completely correct and you’ll benefit most by exposing yourself to the best ideas of many people and analyzing them yourself.
At your core, your goal should be to be the best version of yourself and to share that person with the world. Almost everyone, at some point or another, makes the mistake of trying to conform to a generic ideal of what a person should be. This isn’t just a difficult game, but it’s a game that’s impossible to win. No matter how hard you work towards reaching someone else’s goals for you, you will never reach your own. Discover what is important to you and work towards that.
Maybe the most direct piece of advice I’ll give in this letter is to never drink, use drugs, or smoke. This is also the piece of advice I’m most scared you’ll ignore, because most kids will experiment with it, and without the benefit of decades of life experience and seeing different paths people take, it’s very hard to understand why it’s bad. In school you’ll be given many reasons not to do these things, but they miss the most important reason not to, in my opinion.
You shouldn’t drink, smoke, or do drugs, because these things give you results that you haven’t earned. In the short term this is great, but in the long run it makes you lazy and incomplete. For example, drinking can make you act more confidently. When you act more confidently, you will almost always get better results. But alcohol doesn’t actually make you confident. And, in fact, it can make you less confident because you never build the skill of confidence. Every effect of these drugs is to receive a feeling that you haven’t “earned”, and every time you do it you become less able to create that feeling naturally. When you are young you can’t tell the difference because someone who just starts drinking hasn’t missed out on a lifetime of learning actual social skills, confidence, etc., but over decades the effect compounds and people who casually use these substances often become unable to function normally without them.
The counterargument would be that some people use these things in moderation and receive some of the benefits with none of the downsides. This is true. My response would be that you are still better off not needing them and that it’s very risky to assume that you’ll just happen to nail that compromise. All of the substances I mentioned are fundamentally addictive and there’s just no point in taking that risk. You should take risks in your life, but they should always be risks with very high payoffs and manageable risks. Alcohol, smoking, and drugs are the opposite— they offer very limited upside with nearly unlimited downside.
On the subject of risks, you should take a lot of risks when you are young. In particular, if you’re inclined to start a business you should do so. If you put all of your money into a business and fail, it’s very easy to just start again. Try ten of them with enough diligence and you’ll have one be successful. You’ll also find a lot of peers in the same position, so it’s fun to learn and try things together. As you get older you have more to lose and less time to recover, so you’ll be more reluctant to put it all on the line. When I was in my twenties I assumed I’d have the same attitude in my forties, but I definitely don’t.
I’d like to convince you to invest money young and let it compound, but I’ve found it’s almost impossible to understand why this is important and how well it works until you’ve seen it work for other people. And even more difficult is to convince you that when you’re old enough to enjoy the money that it will still matter. When I was a teenager I remember being totally unable to fathom being forty, and not really caring very much about my forty-year-old self. But time flies and I’m incredibly grateful for the sacrifices I made when I was younger that have paid off in the meantime.
The argument, though, is this: any money you invest at 20, will be worth about 4.5x when you’re 40 and about 32x when you’re 65. It can feel like those ages don’t matter or that you’re so disconnected from them that there’s no point in considering them, but when you reach those ages and the sum of your decisions has shaped your life, you’ll either be very glad or regretful for the decisions you made.
You will find competing pressures to impress different people. You want to seem cool to your friends, attractive to girls, like a good son to your parents, etc. Sometimes these pressures compete with each other. Your friends may think it’s cool for you to sneak out, but your parents may be disappointed if they catch you. It’s best to seek to impress only yourself, mostly because you have to live with yourself 24/7 and it’s hard to fake things to yourself. In the meantime, you’ll probably find that by impressing yourself you end up impressing everyone else by accident, because it’s rare to find someone who seeks only their own validation. This is especially impressive to people who are busy trying to impress other people, which is almost everybody.
It’s hard to imagine what the world will be like when you read this advice. Technological change has been the defining factor of my generation, and with AI just now becoming mainstream, it seems that this change will only accelerate. In a world where technology dominates it’s good to be involved in it and to understand it, but outsized results will be had by focusing on universal skills that others have forgotten. Learn social skills, learn to be an interested and interesting person, learn to have empathy and kindness. Learn technology too, but you’ll find that both in your personal and professional life, these soft skills are rarer and therefore more valuable.
The people you are around will end up being one of the biggest factors in the quality of your life. This is less obvious when you’re young because you’re just around people all the time. As you get older you have to be a good friend for people to want to be around you. Being a good friend and having good friends are the biggest assets you can possibly have in your life. The easiest way to be a good friend is to be interested in your friends lives and to be there for your friends even when it isn’t convenient for you. If you say you are going to be somewhere or do something, follow up and do it. If a friend entrusts you with a secret, don’t share it. If a friend needs your help, offer it without expecting anything back.
I’m the kind of person who can rattle off advice all day, but I think if you just do these things you’re guaranteed to have a great life and to make the lives of those around you better. I’m excited to see the person you become!
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Picture is me and my favorite little guy on his first island trip!
The gear post should come in December this year… I think it’s the best one in many years, with tons of new stuff most people have never heard of!
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