*siapin kamus*
On my
20th birthday, I got drunk and peed on some old ladies' front lawn. A
cop saw me and stopped me. Fortunately, I talked my way out of going to
jail that night. I already had an arrest record, but he didn't bother to
check. My 20s started out with a bang.
This post originally appeared on Mark Manson's blog.
At the
time, I was aimless. I had just dropped out of music school and cut my
long, tangly hair. I wanted to move out of Texas but didn't know how or
where. I would sometimes lecture people about the spiritual aspect of
consciousness and had a number of half-baked ideas about the theory of
relativity and whether the universe actually existed or not.P
I was smart and audacious and arrogant and really annoying.P
Three
days from now, I will be turning 30 years old. I will be in Las Vegas
and probably completely out of my mind when it happens. But I'm happy to
report that I'm far more responsible and far less pretentious these
days. I've changed a lot in these 10 years. I don't get arrested anymore
and I don't pee on people's lawns anymore. I've built businesses, been
around the world multiple times, and managed to create a career for
myself as a writer — something I never could have predicted.P
In our
instant gratification culture, it's easy to forget that most personal
change does not occur as a single static event in time, but rather as a
long, gradual evolution where we're hardly aware of it as it's
happening. We rarely wake up one day and suddenly notice wild,
life-altering changes in ourselves. No, our identities slowly shift,
like sea sand getting pushed around by the ocean, slowly accumulating
into new contours and forms over the passage of time.P
It's
only when we stop years or decades later and look back that we can
notice all of the dramatic changes that have taken place. My 20s
certainly were dramatic. Here are some of the things I learned:P
When you
are young, your greatest asset is not your talent, not your ideas, not
your experience, but your time. Time grants you the opportunity to take
big risks and make big mistakes. Dropping everything and traveling the
world for six years or starting some company to build this crazy app you
and your friends came up with when you got high one night, or randomly
packing up all (four) of your belongings and moving to another city on a
whim to work and live with your cousin, you can only get away with
these things when you're young, when you have nothing to lose. The
difference between an unemployed 22-year-old with debt and no serious
work experience and an unemployed 25-year-old with debt and no work
experience is basically negligible in the long run.
Chances
are you aren't strapped by all of the financial responsibilities that
come with later adulthood: mortgage payments, car payments, daycare for
your kids, life insurance and so on. This is the time in your life where
you have the least amount to lose by taking some long-shot risks, so
you should take them. Because its the disastrous failures of these years
— that crazy love affair with the Taiwanese dancer that made your
mother lose her hair, or the entrepreneurial joint venture some guy in
Starbucks talked you into that turned out to be an elaborate pyramid
scheme — it's these failures that will set you up for your life
successes down the line. They are the best lessons of your life. Get
learning.
2. You Can't Force Friendships
There
are two types of friends in life: the kind that when you go away for a
long time and come back, it feels like nothing's changed, and the kind
that when you go away for a long time and come back, it feels like
everything's changed.
I've
spent the majority of the last five years living in a number of
different countries. Unfortunately, that means that I've left a lot of
friends behind in various places. What I've discovered over this time is
that you can't force a friendship with someone. Either it's there or
it's not, and whatever "it" is, is so ephemeral and magical that neither
one of you could even name it if you tried to. You both just know.
What
I've also found is that you can rarely predict which friends will stick
with you and which ones won't. I left Boston in the Fall of 2009 and
came back eight months later to spend the Summer of 2010 there. Many of
the people I was closest to when I left could hardly even be bothered to
call me back when I returned. Yet, some of my more casual acquaintances
slowly became the closest friends in my life. It's not that those other
people were bad people or bad friends. It's nobody fault
3. You're Not Supposed To Accomplish All of Your Goals
Spending
the first two decades of our life in school conditions us to have an
intense results-oriented focus about everything. You set out to do X, Y
or Z and either you accomplish them or you don't. If you do, you're
great. If you don't, you fail.
But
in my 20s I've learned that life doesn't actually work that way all the
time. Sure, it's nice to always have goals and have something to work
towards, but I've found that actually attaining all of those goals is
beside the point.
When
I was 24, I sat down and wrote down a list of goals I wanted to
accomplish by my 30th birthday. The goals were ambitious and I took this
list very seriously, at least for the first few years. Today, I've
accomplished about 1/3 of those goals. I've made significant progress on
another 1/3. And I've basically done nothing about the last 1/3.
But
I'm actually really happy about them. As I've grown, I've discovered
that some of the life goals I set for myself were not things I actually
wanted, and setting those goals taught me what was not important to me
in my life. With some other goals, while I didn't attain them, the act
of working towards them for the past six years has taught me so much
that I'm still pleased with the outcome anyway.
I'm
firmly convinced that the whole point of goals is 80% to get us off our
asses and 20% to hit some arbitrary benchmark. The value in any
endeavor almost always comes from the process of failing and trying, not
in achieving.
4. No One Actually Knows What the Hell They're Doing
There's
a lot of pressure on kids in high school and college to know exactly
what they're doing with their lives. It starts with choosing and getting
into a university. Then it becomes choosing a career and landing that
first job. Then it becomes having a clear path to climb up that career
ladder, getting as close to the top as possible. Then it's getting
married and having kids. If at any point you don't know what you're
doing or you get distracted or fail a few times, you're made to feel as
if you're screwing up your entire life and you're destined for a life of
panhandling and drinking vodka on park benches at 8AM
But
the truth is, almost nobody has any idea what they're doing in their
20s, and I'm fairly certain that continues further into adulthood.
Everyone is just working off of their current best guess.
Out of
the dozens of people I've kept in touch with from high school and
college (and by "keep in touch" I really mean "stalked on Facebook"), I
can't think of more than a couple that have not changed jobs, careers,
industry, families, sexual orientation or who their favorite power
ranger is at least once in their 20s. For example, good friend of mine
was dead-set when he was 23 of climbing the corporate hierarchy in his
industry. He had a big head-start and was already kicking ass and making
good money. Last year, at age 28, he just went and bailed. Another
friend of mine went from the Navy to selling surf equipment, to getting a
masters in education. Another friend of mine just picked up and took
her career to Hong Kong. Another friend stopped working as an
environmental scientist and is now a DJ.
PI
rarely had any clue what I was doing. I get emails all the time from
people wanting to know how I built my business, when I decided to become
a writer, what my initial business plan was. The truth is I never knew
any of those things. They just happened. I paid attention to
opportunities and acted on them. Most of those opportunities failed
drastically. But I was young and could afford those failures.
Eventually, I was fortunate enough to work my way to do something I
liked and do it well.
5. Most People in the World Basically Want the Same Things
In
hindsight, I've had a pretty rollicking 20s. I started a business in a
bizarre industry that took me to some interesting places and allowed me
to meet interesting people. I've been all over the world, having spent
time in over 50 countries. I've learned a few languages, and rubbed
elbows with some of the rich and famous and the poor and downtrodden, in
both the first and third worlds. And what I've discovered is that from a broad perspective, people are basically the same.
Everyone spends most of their time worrying about food, money, their job and their family — even people who are rich and well fed. Everyone wants to look cool and feel important — even people who are already cool and important. Everyone is proud of where they come from. Everyone has insecurities and anxieties that plague them, regardless of how successful they are. Everybody is afraid of failure and looking stupid. Everyone loves their friends and family yet also gets the most irritated by them. Humans are, by and large, the same. It's just the details that get shuffled around. This homeland for that homeland. This corrupt government for that corrupt government. This religion for that religion. This social practice for that social practice. Most of the differences that we hold to be so significant are accidental byproducts of geography and history.
They're superficial — merely different cultural flavors of the same overarching, candy-coated humanity. I've learned to judge people not by who they are, but by what they do. Some of the kindest and most gracious people I've met were people who did not have to be kind or gracious to me. Some of the most obnoxious asshats have been people who had no business being obnoxious asshats to me. The world makes all kinds. And you don't know who you're dealing with until you spend enough time with a person to see what they do, not what they look like, or where they're from or what gender they are or whatever.
Everyone spends most of their time worrying about food, money, their job and their family — even people who are rich and well fed. Everyone wants to look cool and feel important — even people who are already cool and important. Everyone is proud of where they come from. Everyone has insecurities and anxieties that plague them, regardless of how successful they are. Everybody is afraid of failure and looking stupid. Everyone loves their friends and family yet also gets the most irritated by them. Humans are, by and large, the same. It's just the details that get shuffled around. This homeland for that homeland. This corrupt government for that corrupt government. This religion for that religion. This social practice for that social practice. Most of the differences that we hold to be so significant are accidental byproducts of geography and history.
They're superficial — merely different cultural flavors of the same overarching, candy-coated humanity. I've learned to judge people not by who they are, but by what they do. Some of the kindest and most gracious people I've met were people who did not have to be kind or gracious to me. Some of the most obnoxious asshats have been people who had no business being obnoxious asshats to me. The world makes all kinds. And you don't know who you're dealing with until you spend enough time with a person to see what they do, not what they look like, or where they're from or what gender they are or whatever.
6. The World Doesn't Care About You
The
thought that is so frightening at first glance — "No one cares about
me!?" —becomes so liberating when one actually processes its true
meaning. As David Foster Wallace put it, "You'll stop worrying what
others think about you when you realize how seldom they do."
You, me, and everything we do, will one day be forgotten. It will be as if we never existed, even though we did. Nobody will care. Just like right now, almost nobody cares what you actually say or do with your life.
You, me, and everything we do, will one day be forgotten. It will be as if we never existed, even though we did. Nobody will care. Just like right now, almost nobody cares what you actually say or do with your life.
And this
is actually really good news: it means you can get away with a lot of
stupid shit and people will forget and forgive you for it. It means that
there's absolutely no reason to not be the person that you want to be.
The pain of un-inhibiting yourself will be fleeting and the reward will
last a lifetime.
7. Pop Culture Is Full of Extremes, Practice Moderation
Source: http://lifehacker.com
My life
immediately got about 542% better when I realized that the information
you consume online is predominantly made up of the 5% of each extreme
view and that 90% of life actually occurs in the silent middle-ground
where most of the population actually lives. If one reads the internet
enough, one is liable to start thinking that World War III is imminent,
that corporations rule the world through some conspiracy, that all men
are rapists (or at the very least, complicit in rape), that all women
are lying, hypergamous whores, that white people are victims of reverse
racism, that there's a war on Christmas, that all poor people are lazy
and destroying the government, and on and on.
It's
important to sometimes retreat to that quiet 90% and remind oneself:
life is simple, people are good, and the chasms that appear to separate
us are often just cracks.
8. The Sum of the Little Things Matter Much More Than the Big Things
I
remember reading an interview of Dustin Moskovitz, the co-founder of
Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg's college roommate. The interviewer asked
Dustin what it felt like to be part of Facebook's "overnight success."
His answer was something like this, "If by 'overnight success' you mean
staying up and coding all night, every night for six years straight,
then it felt really tiring and stressful."
We
have a propensity to assume things just happen as they are. As outside
observers, we tend to only see the result of things and not the arduous
process (and all of the failures) that went into producing the result. I
think when we're young, we have this idea that we have to do just this
one big thing that is going to completely change the world, top to
bottom. We dream so big because we don't yet realize — we're too young
to realize — that those "one big things" are actually comprised of
hundreds and thousands of daily small things that must be silently and
unceremoniously maintained over long periods of time with little
fanfare. Welcome to life.
9. The World Is Not a Scary Place Out to Get You
This
gets said all the time, but it's basically true. I've been to a fair
amount of dangerous shit holes both inside and outside the US. And when
given the opportunity, the majority of people are kind and helpful. If
there's one piece of practical advice I would give every 20-year-old,
regardless of circumstance, it is this: find a way to travel, and when
in doubt, talk to people, ask them about themselves, get to know them.
There's little to no downside and huge, major upsides, especially when
you're still young and impressionable.
10. Your Parents Are People Too
SEXPAND
And
finally, perhaps the most disillusioning realization of your 20s: seeing
mom and dad not as the all-knowing protectors like you did as a child,
and not as the obnoxious and totally uncool authoritarians like you did
as a teenager, but as peers, as just two flawed, vulnerable, struggling
people doing their best despite often not knowing what the hell they're
doing (see number 5).
Chances
are your parents screwed some things up during your childhood. Pretty
much all of them do (as my mom always likes to say, "Kids aren't born
with instruction manuals.") And chances are, you will start to notice
all of these screw-ups while you are in your 20s. Growing up and
maturing to the extent that one can recognize this is always a painful
process. It can kick up a lot of bitterness and regret.
But perhaps the first duty of adulthood — true adulthood, not just taxed adulthood — is the acknowledgment, acceptance, and (perhaps) forgiveness of one's parent's flaws. They're people too. They're doing their best, even though they don't always know what the best is.
But perhaps the first duty of adulthood — true adulthood, not just taxed adulthood — is the acknowledgment, acceptance, and (perhaps) forgiveness of one's parent's flaws. They're people too. They're doing their best, even though they don't always know what the best is.
Source: http://lifehacker.com
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