 Alright guys, so the other day I got a really interesting question and the question was during an Instagram live Or someone was asking about the biggest mistakes I made in my 20s and what the lessons were that I wish I knew in my 20s So in this video, I want to share basically the key lessons I wish I knew especially like I would have killed to know these when I was a teenager All right, guys So the very first lesson here is that only you know what you want and the trick is or the problem When you're a teenager, you don't have life experience. You don't have confidence Usually the two go together and so you know what you want to do at least on some level You may not know what you're passionate about you may not know that thing you want to do for the rest of your life But then you have your mom and your dad They want you to go to Yale and go to Harvard to go to the best school get the best job Get the boring white picket fence life probably right? That's what parents want their kids to be okay So they don't have to worry about them So the thing is if you don't have the self confidence because you don't have life experience It's really easy to do what your parents want what your teachers want what all your family wants and in my own story You know I as a kid I'm like the perfect example of someone who showed a strong childhood calling for one topic and that was every book I read was about natural medicine medicine or spirituality And so it's not surprising now that I have a fusion of kind of like monk stuff in my life and medical stuff in My life and yet it wasn't until 12 years old. I was reading books on this stuff. It wasn't till 29 almost like Think about how much time that was that went by when I had the self-confidence to go after the thing that I knew Was the most exciting and it was because I didn't have self-confidence But now I feel like I'm actually living my truth. I'm on the path I felt like I'm supposed to be on the second habit here is that 30 is not the new 20 So the overall habit is remember that the clock is always ticking. It is always ticking You're 15 years old the clock is ticking you're 30 the clock is ticking you're 70 the clock is ticking You know, I had a lot of friends that would spend their 20s aimlessly backpacking around Asia and that's cool and that's great You're getting life experience, but a lot of them did it not to go towards some goal in their life But because they were like screw it. I don't want to work for the man I don't want the nine-to-five and so what they did was basically Pissing time away just in a different way the person with the nine-to-five may be bored on a day-to-day basis and the person That's doing like the hippie backpacker lifestyle Maybe be having fun on the day-to-day basis, but neither are really making that much progress towards an awesome life And the problem is once those people often hit 30 then they were like Crap like I have no job. I have no skills. I have no income. I didn't make any progress in the last eight years I just existed it was fun, but I really did nothing and That's kind of a big revelation and I think so many 20-somethings are in this mode that I'm young I got time and their parents will even say that you have time Jimmy You don't have to figure it all out. No shut up mom You don't have time the fact is the clock is always ticking and if you can figure out the work you love at 20 Why would you not like? Why would you not do that if that's the thing that most excites you the sooner? You figure it out the better like spend your 20s trying things But always make it trying towards the purpose of growth Acquiring skills trying to find work you love trying to date So you kind of find the women or the men you're into try to figure out like growth The third habit here is to always make decisions based on love and not fear, you know I've coached Over a hundred people personally and well over a thousand informally through emails Instagram messages YouTube comments over and over and over and I've seen the same problems come up And you know the number one thing I see in people that reach their 30s and their 40s and their 50s And they're not fulfilled that number one trait is they made decisions out of fear and not out of love or or Being pulled towards something that they love they were into that gravitational pull It's getting married because you're like well shit I don't think I'm gonna find anyone else as good as this girl or as as good as this guy might as well do it or The clock's ticking gotta have babies gotta get married so they marry the best person they're with even though They know it's not really that good of a person or that good of a match They do the career they stay in they hate it because they're afraid How am I gonna make a living doing what I love? What is my passion? They don't travel the world because they watch all these TV shows with news about getting blown up in Syria and Iraq and Turkey so they never travel the world The number one trait I've noticed in the people that are unfulfilled in their middle age is that they always Chose fear to make the decisions and not the excitement the potential. What's the cool thing? I want to do that I want to explore The fourth habit here is always choose growth in terms of skills and not money in your career The thing is I think so many people play that two-year view where they're like, you know what? Oh, if I do this major be a lawyer, I could make a hundred K or a hundred fifty K Five years out of college and yet ten years out of college You might be doing the same damn thing and you may not have acquired any valuable skills or grown at all or changed The thing is if you value growth you value skills over money Like my trajectory has been interesting I never once took a job for the money and as a result before I have my own company I never made a lot of money like I never even made over forty thousand dollars my whole 20s All right, and I chose to pick the careers where I had skills to learn that I was passionate about and that I was always getting better and I was always acquiring something valuable in the intangible realm and So in the two three four five-year window all my friends made more money every single one made more money than me But now at 30 31 my friends are usually still in those same jobs. Most are pretty disenchanted with the jobs Most one variety they want travel. They want to do their own thing But now because I finally found work that I really care about not only do I have a very impactful life and career? That excites me I also make a lot more money than many my friends And so if you view it in terms of the ten-year window instead of like a two-year window You want to win in the ten-year window not the two-year window? And I think people optimize for money way too quickly and they get stuck Now the fifth habit here is to every week reflect on your life trajectory So in my early 20s, I got super depressed after moving back from China. I had no friends no job I didn't know what I was passionate about I moved back in my parents I was really grumpy for for years not like a few months like three years from like 23 4 to almost 25 and The thing is I started doing these weekly reviews about like what was the direction? I wanted to go my life and every week every Thursday I would just dedicate an hour and I would just fill up this document I was like, what do I want to do and am I moving towards it? And so one of the things I did was I had this idea to do a flow test based on Mihaly Chicks at Mihaly's research in the book flow So every day I would write down what my happiest most flow producing moments were and Eventually I tracked this every day for a year and I have them in an Evernote document on my computer to remind me what the best moments were Generally are in my life and that one little test from that one question from that weekly review I've remembered now for six years and I think that's going to serve me for the rest of my life And I think too many people get caught up in the autopilot lifestyle I wrote that it's like the very first chapter of my book master of the day It might even be the first page the autopilot lifestyle the unconscious like we show up get our muffin get our coffee 9 to 5 bitch and moan Traffic come home the kids and then it's just like this is like the dominant energy of a person's life And it's just like worse than death, you know It's that life of quiet desperation like Thoreau said and I think if you can just do a reflection each week It shows you where you're not happy and what you have to change and mostly if you systematize that Whereas each person maybe reflects once a year on what they want to change about their life the new year if you do that once per Week, that's 52 times you're reinventing yourself and that goes a long way towards living a better life All right guys So I hope that video helps the best way to stay in touch is to grab my free personal development and weight loss challenge at modern health mom calm forward slash YouTube and you can check out the last videos here and here or again the link to That challenge in the description box there below