7 Life Lessons I Know in My 30s but Wish I Knew at 20

Now, I know I don't look at guys, but I am damn near 40 years old in 2 years. Now, looking back, you know these listicles on the internet, seven things I wish I knew when I was 20 years old. They're a bit corny, but honestly, I love reading them because you get to see how people's really unique life experience actually plays into the life they designed or created. So, in this video, I want to share some of the biggest lessons that changed the direction of my life, as well as what I view as some of the biggest mistakes that I made. Because if you're wise enough to watch this when you're relatively young, you can make the next years the absolute best of your life. What's up guys? Alex Hine here over at Modern Health Monk, author of the book Milk the Pigeon, a field guide for anyone lost in their 20s. Very related to this video, FYI. So, the first thing I think is very relevant for 20s is that you don't have to have it all figured out to take the first step. I've told coaching clients this many, many times, which is that I didn't have a plan to write these books ever in my life. I didn't have a plan to become a YouTuber. I didn't have a plan to get a doctorate in my field. I didn't have a plan to book a one-way visit to China to become a monk and a kung fu master. I didn't have a plan for any of those things. The path sort of revealed itself over time. And I love this story by Will Smith. You could go on YouTube and it's just called Stacking the Bricks. And he tells the story of his father that wanted him to basically build this brick wall. And he was like, "Well, you know, you got to build this whole wall and you have this, it's high and it's all these bricks. " And little Will was like, "Dad, how am I going to do it? It's all these bricks. It's a huge thing. It's going to require so much time. " And he said, "You don't build a wall by stacking all these bricks. You just stack that first brick. You stack it as perfectly as you can and then you stack that second brick third brick. And I talk about this in one of my chapters in Milk the Pigeon specifically because this is truly how life tends to unfold. In my 20s, I had so much anxiety about like finding my life path or like trying to become successful. But what I didn't know was that a lot of things if you have the conscious intent to evolve and improve will naturally unfold. For example, you know, I knew that I wanted to be self-employed and that's when you get that brain going, right? Your consciousness is trying to solve the problem. How do I be an entrepreneur? So, I was like a blogger, then a YouTuber, then author, and things evolved from that because my consciousness was searching for that problem. You can't expect yourself to know all of what you want all the time in every quadrant of life. That's just not reality. But every now and then when you get those intuitive insights like I would love to be an entrepreneur, listen to that hunch because that hunch will guide you to the next aligned action which for me was YouTube which then changed my life. One thing I want you to think of is you don't have to have it all figured out for the first step. But the danger and the mistake people in their 20s don't take the first step until they have the full plan. And that's the mistake because what will happen is then you'll be 25, 28, 30 and you haven't even started your damn YouTube channel. Don't do that. Now, my second thought is that your life can dramatically change in a year or even just 100 days. And I say this for those of you who are going through one of those hard phases of life, a hard season. If you're going through a really tough season of life, you have health problems, you're depressed, you don't have a lot of friends. If you're going through that season of life, this tip is for you. Because having had all of those things happen, best friend committed suicide, I've been through breakups where I was depressed for a year and a half. I've gone through financial struggles. I've moved back in with my parents. All things that are not that fun. And I can say when you're in it, you really feel like it's going to last forever. And health issues for me have been the worst because when you're chronically ill, you start to see the potential of your life closing because you now no longer feel well enough to live if you're that sick. And I was. If you're going through absolute hell, you can turn things around relatively quickly. You know, like when I moved back from China and I was about 25 at the time, I got super depressed. And this is pretty common in expat life where you go and you have this grand adventure, new food, new restaurant, new neighborhood, new apartment, new friends, new adventures, new language, and then you come home and all your friends are living the exact goddamn same life. Nothing's changed. It's all status quo. It's really sad because you've you evolved and no one else did. One thing that when I came back, you know, I had no friends. I had to start over, moved in with my parents, didn't know what to do. So just for 100 days, one quarter, one season of the year, I wrote on a goal sheet just like three things I wanted. I wanted friends that I had things to do with on the weekend. I wanted to meet a girl to date. And I wanted to find a job. Within 3 months, my life was pretty awesome again. It wasn't life-changing, but I had friends. I joined a judo club and as some of us would go out and get drinks, reconnected with friends from high school and we ended up hanging out and I met a friend of a friend that ended up dating her and then I got a job that I didn't love but at least I had somewhere to be 9 to5 and I'm often surprised in those dark phases

of life. Things can get better quickly sometimes but you need to have a plan and not be inactive. My third thought here is to plan your life or your life will plan itself and it's usually not the life you want. You know, one thing I've seen as I've aged is that a lot of people end up reliving the same year and they end up calling that a life. And the reason is that behavioral change is hard. It's hard to get out of debt because you have to change how you spend, which means changing how you live, which means changing what you do every Friday night at 7:00 p. m. with your friends or decreasing spending for half a year in order to pay off all of your debts. It's often very hard to just live the default life even though it feels easy now. I had been thinking for years about the dream life I wanted to live. I knew I wanted to work for myself. So that meant I had to learn how to be an entrepreneur. I knew that I wanted to travel. And for the past years I've traveled 4 to 8 weeks per year. And as a result over the past like 10-15 years I've been to like 60 countries and I've had life experiences that the majority of people combined will not have in one lifetime. Not because I'm special, but because I chose to be conscious and deliberate about the life I wanted to live. Nearing 40, that becomes less and less possible. When you get married and you have kids, those kinds of adventures become delayed or they become different. Maybe that risky trip to the Himalayas to study with gurus is not as good when you have young kids who could be harmed or get sick or you have a spouse who's not physically fit. So really think carefully about what are the experiences like bucket list experiences. What do you want to do with your life? You should be doing them as soon as possible. Do the things you want now. I've included a goal setting worksheet below this video, which is how to have your best year ever. Really relevant for your 20s to really have a deliberate focus going forward. But basically on that worksheet, we talk about your vision for the year or for the season. That stupid simple worksheet I invented is the simplest way to write books, become a YouTuber, build your dream life. So download it and go through it. Now, my fourth thought here is that most people don't think. It's literally that simple. Most people get prescribed a medication from their doctor and they take it until the day they die. Even if something inside of here is like, "Do I really need to be taking high blood pressure medication at 25 years old for 70 years? " Most people literally are, you know, I need more money. How do I make more money? Just go get a job. There's no thinking about gigs or freelancing or learning second skills. Most people who are always single just blame everyone else. The hardest thing to find, sadly, is people who think literally about anything. It doesn't take a lot of effort to change your life, but it takes a lot of self-awareness. And self-awareness is a lot harder to cultivate than intelligences. They just think like, "When I get to 30, I'll be making six figures," not realizing there's a skill progression that you have to go through to have a six-figure income. Like, if you're an account executive at like a marketing place, you may not realize you have to be a marketing manager to make 100K. But a marketing manager has harder skills than you currently have to acquire. And you may need to take night classes for six months or a year. You may need a transitional job that's harder where you have to learn and study and hustle. But then you can make it to marketing manager. For some reason, most of us don't think about that. The transitional process of how life is built, we often forget. So if you just think often about your life, journal, think how does this happen? You are more well equipped to build an amazing life in your 20s and 30s than the majority of 20somes who just let life go by the wayside. The fifth thought is that your life gets better or worse 1% at a time. Not by hurricanes, but by little whispers, those little breezes by the wings of a butterfly. This is the whole foundation of my book, Master the Day. You know, the way you get high cholesterol and potentially get a heart attack, it doesn't happen from eating one cheeseburger. It happens from eating out three times a week over the next 5 to 10 years and suddenly your cholesterol and your blood pressure is really high. You ignore it for a bit. Maybe you take medication and then at 45, boom, heart attack. It didn't happen from one cheeseburger. It happened from a couple cheeseburgers a week for 5 or 10 years. But it's hard to observe that process because it doesn't happen in one day. How do you get in $10,000 of credit card debt? Well, I'm going to go out Friday night with my friends, have dinner and a couple drinks. Well, okay. Hey, my new friends are inviting me out Saturday, too. Let's just do that, too. You forget about it, right? And then suddenly in a year, oh my god, I'm $10,000 in credit card debt. It didn't happen in a day, a week, a month, 6 months, 9 months. It happened in a year. In the same way that your life gets worse 1% better at a time, it gets better 1% at a time. I didn't write this book in a day. I sought out to write a,000 words per day for 100 days. And I did that seven days a week without a day missed. And then of course I spent a year to do all the other process. But I wrote the core of this book in one hour a day. Every big thing comes from the accumulation of these little 1% activities. Now the sixth thing here is

that the people you admire really aren't that special. But especially in your 20s, you may admire someone who's like a leader, the guru, the author, the doctor, the whoever, not knowing that one day, 15 years ago, they were just like you. And most of them are really not any more special, not any more intelligent, not any more driven. They've just spent more time on the right path. And when you realize that, that unlocks that like demolishes imposttor syndrome because you could write books if you want to. You could be a well-followed YouTuber get a doctorate if you want to. Anyone can do it. The majority of these things. When you realize that, it sort of unlocks something in your brain because a lot of the time we don't take action because of self-sabotage. In my 20s, I felt a lot of intimidation talking to women. And that just comes out of the product of being a quiet nerd basically. And then I worked on that skill and I don't have that anymore. Over time, when you build those skills, whatever the skills are, the confidence, the intelligence, the domain specific skill set about being a YouTuber or being an author or being a doctor, whatever it is, and you stop realizing that other people are special and you're not, you start today. You don't procrastinate on your dreams. Now, I want to leave you with one final thought that's really important in your 20s, which is that time is so short, guys. It's relatively speaking true that you have a lot of time in your 20s, but the brutal truth is you don't know how long you're going to live. You don't know if you'll make it to the average 82year-old lifespan. You know, I'm 38 now. In the last 10 years alone, I've seen best friends commit suicide. People die of freak accidents. Friends who wanted children so badly and now the women are 40 and they can never have a child. I've seen people work 10 years for a dream job as a doctor at the World Health Organization and then Trump signs a bill that defunds the WHO and his 10-year dream is gone like that. There's no more jobs for him. So much of life can change so quickly that you have to live with urgency. Not with anxiety, not with adrenaline, but live with urgency because your future years are not promised to you. You never know what will happen. Anything can change at any moment. And that's why you have to live life with a sense of urgency. You have to live it like tomorrow is not promised. You have to earn your keep every single day because you never really know. And I can tell you that these experiences are just going to increase as I age because more things happen to more people. Heed these words carefully. I hope this video is connected. If there's something in particular that you feel like resonated, let me know right here at the bottom. Now, if you don't believe that you can change your life and live whatever life you want, I shot a video that's pretty awesome that's all about the story of my 20s and how I designed my dream life. So, I'd highly recommend you check it out right up here because it will give you some insights.