I was intelligent, bold, arrogant and really annoying.
In three more days, I'm going to turn 30 years old. I will be in Las Vegas and probably become completely crazy when it happens. But I am happy to report that I am much more responsible and much less pretentious now. I finished the school. And then I spent much of my 20 years lying in beds, making mistakes with business ideas and living in third world countries.
I have changed a lot in these 10 years. They do not arrest me anymore and I do not pee on other people's lawns. I have built companies, I have been around the world several times, and I managed to create a career as a writer - something I could never have predicted.
In our culture of immediate gratification, it is easy to forget that most personal change does not occur as a single static event in time, but rather as a long and gradual evolution where we are barely aware of what is happening to us. We seldom wake up one day to, surprisingly, notice wild changes that alter our lives. No, our identities change slowly, like the sand of the sea being pushed by the ocean, slowly forming new contours and forms along the passage of time.
It is only when we stop years or decades later and look back that we can notice all the dramatic changes that have taken place. My 20 years were undoubtedly dramatic. These are some of the things I learned:
1. Fail early and often; Time is your best possessionWhen you're young, your greatest asset is not your talent, it's not your ideas, it's not your experience, and it's your time. Time gives you the opportunity to take great risks and make big mistakes. Leave everything and travel the world for six years, or start a business to build that crazy application that occurred to your friends while they wandered one night, or pack your few belongings and move to another city to work and live with your cousin, just for a whim. You can only get away with this in all this when you are young, when you have nothing to lose.
The difference between an unemployed person of 22 years of age, with debt and without serious work experience, and an unemployed person of 25 years of age, with debt and without work experience is basically insignificant in the long term.
It is likely that you are not tied to all the financial responsibilities that come with adulthood later: mortgage payments, car payments, day care for children, life insurance and so on. This is the time in life where you have the least amount to lose by taking some risks, so you should take them.
Because of the disastrous failures of these years - that crazy romance with the Taiwanese dancer who made your mother lose her hair, or the business venture that convinced you a guy at Starbucks and turned out to be a fraud - are these failures that they will set you up for your successes of life. They are the best life lessons.
2. You cannot force friendshipsThere are two types of friends in life: the kind that, when you leave for a long time and come back, feels like nothing has changed; and the guy who, when you leave for a long time and come back, feels like everything has changed.
I have spent most of the last five years living in different countries. Unfortunately, that means that I have left many friends behind in various places. What I have discovered in this time is that you cannot force a friendship with anyone. Either it is there or it is not, and whatever "it" is, it is so ephemeral and magical that neither of them could even name it if they tried. Both only know it.
What I have also discovered is that you can rarely predict which friends will stay with you and which will not. I left Boston in the fall of 2009 and returned eight months later to spend the summer of 2010 there. Many of the people, who were closest to me when I left, hardly bothered to call me when I returned. However, some of my more casual acquaintances gradually became my closest friends. It's not that these other people were bad people or bad friends. It is not anyone's fault. That's life.
3. You are not expected to achieve all your goalsThe fact of spending the first two decades of our life in school, conditions us to have a focus intensely oriented to the result in relation to everything. You intend to do X, Y or Z and, or do it or not. If you succeed, you're great. If not, you fail.
But at 20, I've learned that life does not really work that way all the time. Of course, it is good to always have goals and have an objective to work towards, but I have discovered that, in reality, obtaining all these objectives is not the point.
When I was 24 years old, I sat down and wrote a list of goals I wanted to achieve by turning 30. The goals were ambitious and I took this list very seriously, at least during the first years. Today, I have achieved about 1/3 of those goals. I have made great progress in another 1/3. And I have not done anything, basically, about the last 1/3.
But actually I am very happy. As I grew up, I discovered that some of the life goals I set for myself were not what I really wanted, and setting those goals taught me what was and was not important to me in my life. Other goals I did not achieve, but the act of working towards them over the past six years taught me so much, that I am still satisfied with the result anyway.
I am firmly convinced that the objective of the goals is, in 80% to mobilize and in 20% to achieve an arbitrary standard. The value in any effort almost always comes from the process of failure and try, not to achieve it.
4. Actually, nobody knows what the hell he's doingThere is a lot of pressure on children in high school and college to know exactly what they are doing with their lives. It starts with the selection and entry to a university. Then it becomes the choice of a career and the achievement of that first job. Then it becomes a clear path of ascension in the race, reaching as high as possible. Then it is to get married and have children.
If at some point you do not know what you are doing, or you get distracted or fail a couple of times, they make you feel as if your whole life has been ruined and as if you were destined to a life of begging, drinking vodka in the banks of the plaza at 8 a.m.
But the truth is that almost nobody knows what he's doing at 20, and I'm pretty sure he continues like this until adulthood. Everyone is working on something other than your best guess.
Of the dozens of people I've had contact with from high school and college (and by "keeping in touch" I mean "harassing on Facebook"), I cannot think of more than one pair who have not changed jobs, careers , industry, families, sexual orientation or their favorite toy, at least once in their 20s.
For example, a good friend of mine, when he was 23 years old, was determined to climb the corporate hierarchy in his industry. He had a great initial advantage and was already winning and making good money. Last year, at 28, he just left. Another friend of mine went from the Navy to the sale of surf equipment, to then get a master's degree in education. Another friend of mine just picked up everything and took his race to Hong Kong. Another friend stopped working as an environmental scientist and is now a DJ.
I rarely had any idea of what I was doing. I receive emails all the time from people who want to know how I built my business, when I decided to be a writer, what was my initial business plan. The truth is that I never knew any of those things. They just happened. I paid attention to the opportunities and acted. Most of those opportunities failed drastically. But I was young and could afford those failures. Finally, I was lucky to find a way to do something that I liked and do well.
5. Most people in the world basically want the same thing.In retrospect, I've had about 20 very jovial years. I started a business in a very strange industry that took me to some interesting places and allowed me to meet interesting people. I've been around the world, spending time in more than 50 countries. I have learned some languages, and I have rubbed elbows with some rich and famous people and with the poor and oppressed, in the first and third world.
And what I have discovered is that, from a broad perspective, people are basically the same. Everyone spends most of their time worrying about food, money, their work and their family - even rich, well-fed people. Everyone wants to look good and feel important - even those who already look good and are important. Everyone is proud of their origins. Everyone has insecurities and anxieties, no matter how successful they are. Everyone is afraid of failure and looking stupid. Everyone loves their friends and family, but they also get very irritated with them.
Human beings are, in general, equal. It is only the details that change. This homeland for another country. This corrupt government by that other corrupt government. This religion for that religion. This social practice for that social practice. Most of the differences that we consider significant are accidental byproducts of geography and history. They are superficial - only different cultural flavors of the same humanity.
I have learned to judge people not because of who they are, but because of what they do. Some of the kindest and most polite people I have ever met were people who did not have to be kind or polite to me. Some of the most odious, have been people who did not have to be hateful to me. The world produces of all types. And you do not know who you're dealing with until you spend enough time with that person to see what you're doing, not what it looks like, or where it's from or what gender it is or whatever it is.