 You know, I have this weird hobby where whenever I get this email in my inbox, I have to read it. And the email is from Cora, but it's always the same very specific thread. And that thread is what are the things you wish you knew in your 20s or in your 30s? And what do you wish you did differently? Well, in this video, I thought I would share one big thing not necessarily that I would do differently, but that I think this generation needs more than anything. You know, one thing you realize as you get older is that there's really never going to be a time to do all the things you've always wanted to do. There's never going to be a right time. When is our right time to get married? When you have enough money, when you're with the 100% right person, when you're fully settled and you have no student debt and your parents are both alive, all your siblings live in the same area. When's it going to be the good time to have a kid? When's a good time to take a salsa class or when's a good time to go on a shark dive in the Pacific? When's a good time to write your book? Start your business? Right? For so many people, this year was going to be the year that changed their life. Well, maybe it did and not in the way that they thought. You know, for most of the things you want, there's never going to be that good time. There's never going to be that good time because some of these things, it doesn't come from divine providence, right? God is not like knocking on your forehead like, hey, you know, Kelly, this is the month you're supposed to start writing your book or you should just marry that dude because you're 30 and you know, you want kids. And yeah, this is the time for sure. There's never going to be a good time. And so what most of us really need is guts. You know, one thing I always wanted to do because I was afraid was really spend time in the ocean like a prolonged period of time. So what did I do to get over this fear? I booked an internship when I was in college to go do marine biology research in Fiji. Now, Fiji is in the South Pacific. They have big man-eating sharks. They have crazy, huge creatures in the ocean there. All right. And I was sent there because I was going to be literally measuring and counting underwater fish and sharks and giant clams, et cetera. So you imagine me, little Alex, scared of the ocean. And I go on this mission to basically get over my fear of the ocean, right? And I'm doing this job where I'm literally in the water eight hours per day in open water alone. And I'm seeing sharks all the time, hammerheads, reef sharks, every now and then, tiger and bull sharks. And I was just thinking to myself one day that when was this ever going to happen any other time? Like, am I always going to be the kid that jumps off the boat last in the springtime or the summertime? Because I don't know what the hell is in the ocean beneath me. No, there was never going to be a good time. There's never going to be a good time. Not only conquering your fears, but also achieving your dreams. And I think that leads to a lot of disappointment later in life for people where they get to be 30 and they thought they would have done more. They thought they would have been married to their dream person and making six figures and starting that YouTube channel. But it never happened. And they thought they would also have achieved a lot of other goals. And then sometimes that realization is not until 40 or 50 or even later. And I think this is the true cause of the cultural phenomenon amid life crisis. Now, the second thing is that people need to stop waiting for permission. You need to stop waiting for someone to say, you're special. It's the right time. You have what it takes. You can be the next great author or creative or inventor or successful entrepreneur or world-class salsa dancer. Like, guys, human beings are really not that special. All right, in terms of a species on our planet, we have evolved to be special. We were really not that special historically. Now we're here. Who the hell knows in another 300,000 years what this planet and what humans will look like? But you know, one commonality you see among people that really did big things. Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Nikola Tesla, whoever you're thinking of, they weren't sitting around. You know, little Nikola Tesla wasn't sitting around like, well, no one said I could be a great inventor. So, you know, screw it. I'm not going to try creating or inventing anything. Isaac Newton didn't sit around like, I'm probably not that good. So I'm not even going to mess with the laws of physics and try to understand them or put together these equations. Clearly, whether they had that thought or not, that was not a big barrier to them taking action and trying to just explore things and create and fail. You know, the most damaging thing is when you see somebody online or someone famous or a great author and then you think they're special. And that reinforces this idea, this cultural myth, going back probably thousands of years of the genius that some people are just born with the goods and others are not. And so effort doesn't seem to do anything, really, because genius is that inspired quality given to you by the gods, right? Well, thankfully, that's not really true. So like Nikola Tesla, like Steve Jobs, like Elon Musk, they decided they were going to do something personally meaningful, powerful, that would change the course of civilization. And that decision was more important than their fear of not being good enough or not being chosen as the one. The last thing I think this generation needs is more leaders. And the way I think of a leader is that a leader is someone who takes risks on missions to go explore some new thing, right? Sometimes the pioneers are the ones with their arrows in their back, right? This old saying, sometimes the pioneer explores the new land and is killed by the natives, right? That's a historical fact, probably many thousands or tens of thousands of times over. Missionaries sent to the Amazon and they get killed by the natives. But I often think about what was the feeling of the first person who explored the Arctic had? What was the feeling of the first people that came to America or the first Vikings that came before Columbus and landed somewhere on the East Coast and called this area Vinland, wine land? I wonder what that feeling was for them exploring this new land or the Polynesians, the sailors sailing on these small rafts all around the South Pacific, using incredibly advanced cultural knowledge of the stars to navigate and the weather patterns and which way the currents were going. Sometimes by laying in a boat or even tasting the kind of water or the air. I think a lot about what these people must have felt. The combination of excitement and of fear. But ultimately what they did was they paved the way for the rest of their own culture and their civilization. And I see so many people today in this generation who are too busy following other people and consuming other people's thoughts and content and ideas and not spending enough time creating and taking risks themselves. You know, ultimately the spoils go to the people every day who are creating, who are shipping and who are trying out things not the people who are consuming. The riches and the spoils go to the creators and not to the consumers. And yet in our culture at this time it is easier than ever just to be someone who consumes mindlessly for hours a day. So this is a little bit of my fiery rant for the day what I think this generation really needs the most three kind of inner traits or qualities. But I'm curious what you guys think. What would you add to this list? Tell me right down there below. And I think most of all remember that no one chooses you and tells you that you're special. You have to realize that you have special gifts and special qualities that other people don't have. And when you realize that and when you realize that the greats you admire are probably not that special in many ways if you knew them then you realize that you can be the next icon in our civilization or in our culture. The only question is are you gonna actually take a step and do something about it?