Just A Thought:

Life Lessons at Age 30:

It’s never the right time. Any time you catch yourself saying, “Oh, it’ll be a better time later,” you’re probably just scared. Or unclear on what to do. There is never a right time for the big things in life: having kids, changing jobs, breaking up, getting engaged, getting married, moving in together. And no, it’s never an amount of money, either.

Err on the side of too early over too late. It’s almost always better to do things “too early.” Your conception that it’s too early is just your fear, and once you dive in, you’ll figure it out. Old people tend to regret what they didn’t do or didn’t do earlier. Not the things they did.

Bad things happen fast; good things happen slowly. You have more time to build a career than a family. You can complete great work well into your 80s and 90s. If you want to know your grandkids as adults, you only have until your mid-30s to start a family. Every year you spend waiting is another year you lose with your future family.

Get in shape. It’s not enough to not be overweight; you need to be strong and have endurance too. Find a form of exercise you enjoy doing. Focus more on increasing your physical capacity than on losing weight; the weight loss will follow if you’re getting better at running, swimming, lifting, etc.

You do your best work when you’re not working. Your brain needs downtime to connect the dots like your body needs rest to strengthen itself for the next workout. If you’re always working, trying to download information, and being productive, you’re stifling your best insights from bubbling up.

Remote relationships cost you real relationships. Every minute you spend cultivating relationships with people through a screen is a minute you’re not deepening relationships with people you can actually see and touch and smell.

No one is thinking about you very much. So don’t worry about looking stupid or embarrassing yourself or whatever. No one cares.

Someone else has already solved your problems. Unless you’re at the fringes of science and technology, your problems are not new; people have been dealing with some form of them for thousands of years. Read books; they’ll give you answers.

Money is a tool for freedom. The best reason to accumulate wealth is to buy yourself freedom from anything you don’t want to do and the freedom to do the things you do want to do. Money is not an end in itself. If you sit on it and never use it, you’ve wasted your life.

Rebuild some relationship with nature. Spend as much of your day outside as you can. Eat local food. Go for long walks. Try hunting or harvesting your own food at least once. You were not meant to sit in a wooden box staring at technicoloured glass all day.

Another water bottle won’t fix your hydration problems. A new note-taking tool won’t make you a better writer. If you find yourself looking for a tool to solve a problem, you’re probably just procrastinating.

Many of the best changes in life are unknown until you make them. Feeling “fine” is a dangerous attitude. You might have no idea how much better you could feel, how much happier you could be, how much fuller your life could be. Changes like exercising regularly, and cleaning up your diet,  it is impossible to convey the change in perspective to someone who has not experienced it. Sometimes you just need to trust the zealots.

Advice only works in retrospect. You usually have to have experienced a failure or loss to understand the relevant advice. Hearing some piece of advice will rarely stop you from making the related mistake.

No one is crazy. They just have different values and information than you. If you had their life experience, you’d probably think the same. The sooner you embrace this, the sooner you can empathize with people you disagree with instead of pretending you’re superior.

There’s interesting gray between the black and white. If something seems obvious, but people strongly believe the opposite, see if you can convince yourself of their view. You might just learn something.

You find what you like by trying it, not by thinking about it.

Increase the difficulty. If you’re reading this, your life is (probably) already on easy mode compared to the global and historical standard. You need to introduce some challenges to keep yourself motivated strategically. Don’t ruin yourself, but don’t let yourself get too complacent, either.

If it looks sad, it needs water. A good rule for houseplants and humans.

You usually kill by overwatering, not underwatering. Another rule for houseplants and humans. Sometimes the best action is to do nothing or wait instead of trying to constantly do something.

Trust your negative gut, not your positive gut. If you have a great feeling about something, you might just be excited or gullible or not thinking it through, so take your time. But if you have a bad feeling about something, you’re almost certainly right about it.

Stressing about a problem rarely fixes it. Try to bias towards improving things instead of whining about them. Or if you can’t fix them, forget about them.