10 Life Lessons for Anyone In Their 20s

I’m not wise nor am I a life coach, but I do pay attention to my successes and failures and try to learn from them.

Having recently crossed the threshold of 30, I feel compelled to reflect on the decade that brought me here.  Ten years from now I won’t have the perspective I have today, so these reflections are a time capsule for this point in time, ignorant of all that lies ahead.

Here are 10 things I wish I knew when I was in my 20s.

Your identity will not flourish if you leave it in a box

When I was in high school I wanted to become a civil engineer.  I started doing what you were supposed to do:

College brought new experiences and relationships.  I learned the skill of learning and discovered what being an independent adult meant (as much as one can in college).  After graduation I landed the job of my dreams and figured I was set.

Next step… get good at the job?

Although I was executing the playbook to perfection, something was missing.  A desire to do something greater occasionally nagged at me.  I didn’t realize it at the time, but it manifested in a few ways:

These outbursts were attempts by my subconscious to free myself from the box my identity was trapped in. It’s not that engineering wasn’t the right thing to do: it’s that I had made a decision for myself 10 years ago about who I was supposed to be for the rest of my life without all the facts.

As we grow up, we learn new things about the world and about ourselves.

It’s natural to anchor our life to the version of ourselves we outlined when we were younger while refusing to create space to grow in any other direction.  I wasn’t wrong to pursue a career as an engineer, but I suppressed my potential by believing it was my written destiny to do that until I died.

Lean into weird desires and adapt to the changing environment in the world and your mind.  Locking yourself into a portrait you drew when you were younger (and dumber) stunts your growth and can create a quiet resentment in your soul.

Have you ever come across a cranky old man?  Odds are good that he put his dreams to the side to be the person everyone else wanted him to be instead of who he really wanted to be.  Or maybe he put his dreams to the side to please some idea he had about who thought he should be when he was a young man.

Document your life, but don’t forget to live it

My parents are still alive, which means it is scientifically proven they lived until they were at least 30, but there is little evidence they existed before I was born.

They took and kept only a few pictures while growing  up, which is understandable considering people didn’t walk around with cameras in their pockets everywhere they went.  What happened during that period of their life is preserved and lost in memory, and memory is a terrible keeper.

What I can say about my parents is they did a lot of living.  Free from the distractions of technology, their lives were always in the moment of whatever was going on around them.  And as beautiful as that is, it doesn’t preserve much history for me or any future generations to learn from and understand.

Our memories fade when we get older, and even though our lives are just starting in our twenties, many formative things happen during that decade.  We experience marriage, loss, career shifts, children, moving, and independence for the first time.  In the moment, and especially when you’re young, it’s easy to think you’ll always remember these times but you won’t.

Some memories stick, some fade, and some are forgotten but permanently change your character and how you live without you realizing.

This period of human history has the greatest tools for preserving these parts of our lives.  I’m not suggesting you take even more vacation pictures, but don’t forget to capture moments and eras across every spectrum of life: pain, loss, elation, joy, and even the mundane.

When you lose someone you love, what remains is the impact they had on others, the memories you made with them, and anything physically recorded (pictures, videos, journals, etc).

But don’t live in a paranoid state as a life-scribe: be as present as you can with the people you love.  Take random pictures of places you worked or people you meet.  There are many moments from my twenties I’d love to relive through the artifacts as my memory of them weakens, but I can’t.

I don’t regret this lack of documentation because it meant I was living fully in the moment (or at least not staging these parts of life), but I would have done more if I had read this when I was younger.

Another idea that I haven’t taken advantage of, but would like to, is to interview and record your parents.  Have them tell stories and relive moments.  We live in an age where digital capture and storage is very affordable and easy, and they’ll only grow older and remember less as time goes by.

This documentation can have many forms: pictures, videos, or journals, for example.  It’s not just for you, but a gift to your loved ones.  Future generations can learn how you think, what you did, the adventures you went on, and the sound of your voice.  It’s for legacy just as much as memory.

Your health is driven by a lot of things, but nutrition is the most important

I grew up with a stellar metabolism.  

Nothing I ate, in any quantity, ever changed my weight.  I loved chicken nuggets growing up, and continued loving them into my twenties.  At no point did I shy away from good old fashioned fried foods, especially in college when I had more access to them than ever before.

While I was in college I was very physically active – regularly working out, walking to class, and probably using my brain more than ever (I swear this burns calories some days).  After college the activity dropped but my young male eating habits remained.

The next 4 years brought noticeable weight gains.  I got husky.  You wouldn’t describe me as extremely unhealthy, but I wasn’t the slim, active, somewhat athletic build I had in college either.  I’d start working out on occasion, but never really stuck with the habit for more than a few weeks.  Can you even call that a habit?

Everything changed the day that I realized I was getting tired around 2 or 3 in the afternoon.  I hated feeling tired.

I started researching and learning what kind of foods would help with energy.  Unsurprisingly, it involved healthier meals.  Making small changes to my nutrition in order to feel energized was an easy choice to make, and a pretty simple adjustment to my life.

Within a year I dropped back to a healthy weight for my height and frame.  Weight loss was never the goal – energy was – but I learned a lot about health during that time.  Choosing new and better foods led to curiosity about weight lifting.

Good habits began stacking on each other and I quickly found myself in the best shape of my life, with the clearest skin I’d had since early childhood, wondering why I ever enjoyed eating the way I had before.  We only get one body, and it’s on a one-way track to getting old.  The habits you form in your twenties aren’t permanent, but bad choices now can make the future miserable for you.

A boat sailing from Europe to the United States has to travel about 3,500 nautical miles.  If the captain has a 1° error in the path, he’ll miss the destination by over 52 miles.

The way you eat today is a trajectory for your health throughout life.  You can always make corrections later, but it’s easier to aim at the target now than to make aggressive changes later when it might be too late.  Your twenties is when the good will of an active childhood and higher metabolism begin fading and your weight and health will rely on your intentions more than ever before.

Sugar is fun, but should be moderated.  There isn’t anything long-term useful for sugary treats.  It ruins teeth, blotches skin (something I didn’t make a connection about for a very long time), and overshadows any gains the food it’s in has.

Weight change is mostly a calorie game.  The napkin math of weight science suggests that for every net-3,500 calories you have results in 1-lb of weight change.  Not every pound is created equal (muscle is denser than fat), but they all weigh the same.  My key to understanding how many calories I should average each week:

Staying on budget is extremely hard and requires a level of discipline in a variety of situations and temptations.  Eat foods low in sugar and high in protein and drink a lot of water every day.

Work ethic will set you apart more than talent

Ryan Serhant says, “Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard”.

I didn’t graduate at the top of my class.  I’m terrible at trivia.  Athletically, I leave a lot to be desired.  And I’m not super quick on my feet.  But I’m convinced that I can come out on top in a lot of situations purely from my ability to put my head down and focus on putting in maximum effort.

It doesn’t matter how talented you are if you don’t use it.  Someone’s potential won’t win them a gold medal – their results will.  And no one can take away your ability to work hard.

Part of this is doing 11 when everyone else is doing 10.  The extra 10% gets noticed and helps you grow more quickly. It involves staying late or working on something when it’s easier to stop or relax.  It also involves consistent, small sacrifices over time and saying no to some things to create room for your goals.

A strong work ethic also means being willing to eat the mud for a while to get where you want to go.

When I left engineering to start a new career in technology, I had no relevant experience on my resume.  All I had was my work ethic and a dream.  I opted to build a portfolio of work to demonstrate what I could do instead of going back to school.

Anyone can get a degree, but not everyone can deliver results.

After a few early interviews, the best I was offered was a slightly unrelated internship.  I jumped on it without question even though it wasn’t exactly what I wanted.

Why?

With a foot in the door I could demonstrate my potential with an unrivaled work ethic.  The company was large enough that I knew there could be a future opportunity to do what I actually wanted to do, but I was willing to symbolically sweep the floors until I got there.

The bet paid off, but if it hadn’t I would have repeated the same thing – with a growing intensity – until achieving my goal.

Work ethic transforms average people into relentless growth machines capable of living up to their full potential.

The world is not a meritocracy

School – especially college – taught me that our outcomes are based on a fair and even scoring system.  The answers are set in stone, and your ability to pass a test, complete an assignment, and attend classes culminate into a grade that represents where you stand compared to your peers.

Then you graduate and realize the best opportunities have nothing to do with passing artificially constructed tests.

Being good at your job matters, and having answers is important, but the world doesn’t greet you with fair, open arms.  The game of life has more nuance.  You don’t always get what you deserve.  Sometimes the bad guy wins, and the good guy loses the fight.

For 12 years we’re led to believe our placement in life is black and white – something we have control over – only to learn how cold and uncaring the world really is.

When I started in engineering, I believed honing my technical engineering skills would create more opportunities.  I didn’t enjoy social work events, so I stopped going.  But my ability to meet the job description didn’t open the hundreds of career doors I thought it would.

Everyone experiences this when they get rejected from a job interview.

It’s easy to blame ourselves.  If only I was better at X, then they would have picked me. But the truth is it doesn’t matter how qualified or perfect you are for the role as much as whether the interviewers felt good being around you, confident in your cultural fit, or even if they already had someone selected for the role and your interview was merely a formality.

Merit only plays a minor role in the outcome.

It’s still incredibly important to work hard, improve yourself, and grow to a point that merits a reward, but it’s equally important to recognize that 80% of the things going on around you, or even happening to you, are not in your control.  Life is not a standardized test with a grade – it’s more like an essay or a piece of art in a gallery, observed by many, compared to everything around it, and only truly appreciated by a very small crowd.

At work, invest time in getting to know the people around you.  Not only your leaders, but those you work alongside or even those who work below you.  The richness of life happens through the relationships we build with others, and the best opportunities you’ll have come from your network of friends, family and peer group.

Relationships put you in the room where decisions are made and ideas are explored, and it’s usually found in social atmospheres like lunches, happy hours, and water cooler gabbing – far outside the formalities of a workplace.

Don’t eat out to save money

In my twenties, money was tight.  I didn’t have much left over at the end of the month, which forced me to learn more about how to manage what little I did have to make the most of it.

What followed was an awakening to the mystery and influence of how money relates to happiness.  How I managed my budget and spending don’t necessarily apply to others, but many of my experiences with money in my twenties resulted in timeless lessons – some of which I learned the hard way.

First, growing wealth has more to do with how much you spend than how much you earn.

This is the type of advice that makes people suggest you should give up buying coffee forever so you can retire on an island… which I think is misguided advice even if the principle is agreeable.

Rather, I learned that very few things I bought actually brought me deep satisfaction, and 100% of the things I spent money on lowered my account balance.  Instead of pinching pennies for the sake of it, I improved my ability to distinguish the types of things that were truly worth buying from fraughtless wants with little to no returns beyond the immediate gratification.

I also started realizing all the things in my needs category that were actually wants: staples of my lifestyle that I’d convinced myself I had to have but that weren’t fulfilling me.

The average person can amass a fortune on a mediocre income if they’re disciplined about spending.  Happiness can be fueled with spending, but it can also come more foundationally from taking the long way around, saying no to shiny objects to strengthen your spending muscles, and doing things yourself.

Doing things yourself has the added bonus of teaching you new skills and engaging different areas of your life.  Your results won’t always be perfect, but you’ll almost always be glad you attempted something yourself despite the time and money.  A sense of ownership is a worthwhile pursuit that most people forget comes when you invest your own time and sweat into something instead of outsourcing it or paying to replace it.  IKEA’s entire business model relies on this psychological principle.

Second, debt is terrible and is almost always the best thing to put money toward.

When I graduated college my student loans came knocking.  I went from living a very modest student life to having bills, rent, loans, and groceries for two people in a span of two months.  At one point, I added a car loan on top of that.  My discretionary monthly spending allowance after everything?

$20.

I wasn’t shackled by debt, but there wasn’t much room to maneuver until I started clawing my way out, so that’s exactly what I did.

Over the next 6-7 years, I paid everything I could toward my loans to free myself.  Debt was a priority – every last extra penny I could afford went toward paying it down which meant making sacrifices.  

The snag with debt is interest rates.  Unreasonable interest rates, like ones found in car loans, credit cards, and some student loans – take your hard-earned cash and burn it.  Willingly taking on a loan for something you can’t afford to pay for outright and don’t need in the first place is a surefire way to create financial trouble for yourself down the road.

If you wanted to buy a $20,000 car and you happened to save up $20,000 – paying in cash is a very sensible idea because the asset will be worth less in the future.

But if you took out a loan at the 2023 average interest rate of 6.58%, over the lifetime of the loan you’ll end up paying roughly $2,000 – $3,000 more for the car than if you paid cash.

But Kevin, how else am I going to get a nice car?

I’m not saying you shouldn’t take out a loan.  I’m suggesting you find ways to limit or avoid debt.  Here are my personal recommendations:

Your mileage may vary, and the nuance of your situation will be uniquely yours, but the principle that bad debt is like burning perfectly good money applies.

Third, and perhaps most important, is that going out to eat isn’t something you do to save money.

Generally speaking, I’m a huge advocate of spending money on experiences.  Eating is one of them, but most restaurants cost more than cooking at home.

I think that goes without saying.

If you’re going to spend money, do it the right way.  Sitting in a nice restaurant and only ordering side salads to save money is the wrong way to eat there.  Learn when it makes sense to spend and when it makes sense to pull back.

Piggy banks (or savings accounts) are great for these kinds of things.

Have a plan for the day, a strategy for the year, and a dream for the future

Yogi Berra said, “If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up someplace else.”

In my early twenties I was locked in and committed to the life plan I made when I was a sophomore in high school.  I expected to be an engineer until I retired.

What I didn’t know is that I was avoiding the answer to “Where do you want to be in 5 years?”

I always thought that was a dumb question, but I liked having my answer.  A civil engineer, of course.  I was off the hook!  No need to think of something new or challenge my beliefs in any way!

My “plan” gave me an excuse to wander through my twenties without aim.  Even though I don’t think we have to figure out our life in our twenties, it’s worth exploring the answer to that proverbial question while studying yourself.

In our early twenties, the male brain is very far along in its maturity (though still lagging behind females by a decade, some experts say).  It also happens to be a great time to sit down and explore what drives you.

To dream.

To lean into ideas, skills, and hobbies that inspire you.

To think about the impact you want to make on the world around you, however big or small.

There isn’t enough dreaming these days.  Schools discourage creative, loose thoughts about the future in favor of focusing on objectively standard skill sets and education.  

When I was in 7th grade, I didn’t care about what my science class was teaching: I wanted to doodle.  I created small comic books from my loose leaf notebooks and sold them to classmates for a quarter each… until I got caught.  My grades slipped because I wasn’t conforming to the rigid walls of the education system – not because I wasn’t smart enough to pass the tests (I was, but I put my energy into creative ideas instead of dull homework assignments).

By 9th grade, this creative spirit was finally stripped from me and I was brainwashed into believing that my success and future depended on passing tests, or knowledge of world history and calculus.

I’m probably not the only person to experience this: generations of people graduate school and get jobs that treat them like factory workers.  There’s little to no room for dreaming about the future or supporting entrepreneurial spirits.

Dreams get you out of bed in the morning and excite you.  They’re large, motivating, scary, and necessary for living a fulfilling life.  It might be to grow a large business, raise children, serve our country, or run for political office.  It can even be a new career aspiration or lifestyle.

But if you aren’t any closer to your dream at the end of your twenties, what have you been doing the whole time?

Even if the dream changes over time (and it probably will… that’s normal), you should still seek growth as a person every year.  At least once a year, shut yourself in a room or get away for a weekend and spend time reflecting and projecting.

Reflect on the year you just had: the highs, lows, pains, and joys.  Ask what went well, study what didn’t, including the role you played in making those things happen.  Take time to think.

Next, project and consider what kinds of things you want out of the next twelve months of life.  Develop a strategy for the rough trajectory of where you want life to go.  I don’t believe in having an inflexible, supremely clear 3-5 year plan for your life, but I do believe in having some idea of the type of person you want to be.

Address these areas of your life by thinking about the habits you want to have and want to change in each:

This isn’t about goals – it’s about habits.  Habits set the trajectory for our success.  There isn’t a right or wrong way to do this as long as it’s helping anchor your life on a path of general improvement and movement toward the future you want.

Finally, and this will sound like productivity guru nonsense, have a plan for your day.

I spent many days making things up as I went.  The result was a series of years chasing the flavor of the day, wandering without much purpose except to satisfy my immediate cravings.  I’d occasionally chase a small hobby, or a selfless pursuit of improvement, but usually improvised.  Days and nights all collided and even though I was plenty happy, I wasn’t making the most of the talents and potential I was given.

It wasn’t until my late twenties that I started thinking about my weeks as something I have control over.  Being the business owner of my life was a new concept and I started taking full advantage of it.  I started spending a few minutes on Sunday night outlining weekly milestones – at work and home – until that habit snowballed into a full on weekly ritual that I still participate in to this day.

Structure the purpose of your days to steer energy into activities that support the identity you want to have.  I don’t micromanage my time: I become extremely intentional about how I’m spending my days, even if the answer for a particular day is to just relax.

If I had done this in my twenties, I’m convinced I would have awoken with more purpose and direction, excited to take another small step toward realizing my dreams.  Doing it weekly allows frequent pivots as you learn more about what you want and where you want to go, and is a cadence I haven’t changed since starting it years ago.

Always think of questions

An important skill, especially in the age of technology, is critical thinking.

I believe the most important way to hone this is to always ask questions.  The exercise of thinking of questions forces you to explore the topic or person on a level of curiosity.  Most people refrain from asking questions because they fear judgment.

Whether you’re talking to someone, listening to a lecture, watching a video, or researching a topic, continuously think of questions even if you don’t have the opportunity to ask them.  Odds are good that if you have a question, others do too.

But the effect of questioning goes beyond the lecture hall to personal relationships: asking others about something forces you to listen more effectively too.  After all, you can’t ask good questions if you’re not paying attention to what they’re saying.

We love talking about ourselves or about things we’re passionate about.  If you get others to talk, they’ll automatically like you more because you’re showing interest and giving them space to be heard – a rare thing in a time where attention spans are dropping at an alarming rate.

Take thousands of calculated risks

There’s a time and place to be lazy, hang with your friends, and do nothing, but as you age it becomes more imperative to explore new hobbies and interests.

Finishing high school and college is a lot of work.  At the end of it, we’re left with ridiculous amounts of free time, no homework, and a new level of independence.  It’s natural to ease into the new lifestyle with a simple job and few obligations.

There is nothing wrong with spending most of your free time doing unproductive things.  In fact, wasting time with people you love is one of the most productive, unproductive activities you can do.

But if you leave your free time to the whims and results of unproductive behavior for too long, you’ll miss out on a special opportunity.  You’ll never have as much time, youth, and energy as you do at this very moment.  Older people joke that youth is wasted on the young: they’re referring to the idea that you can’t get this time back, and a lot of people throw it away on leisure.

I’m not suggesting anyone in their 20s should immediately lose their friends and hop into a career-first mindset.  I am saying that spending your days playing video games, drinking, and playing a few sports may have consequences in your later life.  As families grow and professional obligations pile up, it becomes a lot harder to learn new things, explore different hobbies, and take financial risks.

Your twenties are the perfect time to do this, even if you aren’t sure exactly what “it” is.

Time is the only resource in life you do not get back.  You can always make more money, but you can never create more time than life has planned for you.  Today is the most time you’ll ever have left in your life from this point forward.

It’s vital to make mistakes.  Most decisions are reversible.  Try new, weird things, and say yes to something that scares the crap out of you every once in a while.  Dave Ramsey said, “Success is a pile of failure that you’re standing on.”  No one makes it to their personal summit without falling a few times and screwing things up a bit.

The odds of finding the best restaurant, life partner, or parking spot on the first try are statistically very low.  Similarly, committing to a specific career or hobby this early in life ignores the absolute hugeness of the world and its opportunities.  The fact that I thought I had life figured out when I was a sophomore in high school is a testament to this: I didn’t know what I didn’t know.  Not only about myself, but even what a job as a civil engineer really meant.

The average person changes jobs 12 times before they retire.  Doesn’t that mean it’s okay if you don’t land the perfect one right away?  Don’t put so much pressure on yourself to have it all figured out.  Don’t end up on the streets with bad decisions, but don’t play life so safe that you burn out on boredom either.

Waste time with people you love

There will be a time when you won’t be able to call your mom or dad.

One day you’ll celebrate a birthday without someone you love today.

Eventually, you’ll be forgotten.

These sad realities should anchor you to focus on the part of life that means more than anything else: relationships and love.

When I moved out of the house, I was excited to be on my own.  It wasn’t that I didn’t want to see my parents every morning and night, but the step into adulthood was something I looked forward to because of my independent spirit.

But it’s easy to overlook the simplicity of proximity in relationships.  When you share a meal together every night, or participate in activities with someone, it’s easy to stay in touch and deepen your connection.  If you lose that excuse of being together, building the same intimacy requires a lot more intention.

People grow together and apart – that’s life.  But we tend to assume we’ll always have enough time with someone.  We assume nothing will change.  And then one day, it does, and they’re gone.  

If you love someone, romantically or not, make spending time together a priority.  You don’t need an agenda, just be together doing nothing.  Create memories.  Get together for no reason other than to see each other, and cherish the time you have.

When you’re with someone you love, there’s no such thing as wasted time, because being together is the heart of life.