 It seems like a lot of people are worried about the future right now. And while we are not going to be giving you a bunch of investment tips in this video, here are 10 things that you should understand about yourself in your 20s in order to set yourself for success later in life. Yeah guys, you are not going to hear a bunch of life hacks, body hacks, investment hacks. These are just things that wish, we wish we would have started in our 20s that we did not really pay attention to until our late 20s and our 30s. So if you get started on them now, Andrew, you have a chance to be very successful regardless of all the doom and the gloom in the media, by the way guys, it is the part of their profit margin to sell you the doom and the gloom. Let's get into number one, Andrew. You have to come to terms with your family. And I know that this is something that is very difficult to do for like second generation immigrant kids, Asian kids, because like the immigrant family, it's like so enmeshed into one being, you know what I mean? Like it's not like, I guess a typical American kid where there's some separation between the parents and the grandparents and the children. But it's just like there's sometimes there's so many people dealing with so many family pressures, whether they're the first child, the firstborn son, interfamily dynamics. Like there's a reason why a lot of Asian American kids go through therapy, right? Yeah, I mean, I think understanding your role in your family early on if you have that role is very, very important. Like I had a Vietnamese friend in college like she towards the end of high school she understood that she was going to carry a lot of the burden of the finances for her family growing up. So she was going to go to college. She got a scholarship. She had to get a good job. So she did not live a regular college life, go to all these parties and have fun. But her friends, we all knew that and we didn't distract her. We didn't invite her out and do all this other stuff. Menvin was focused, man. Yo, she was treating it like a Navy seal, man. And now she's financially stable. She has houses. She has a family. She has jobs and I'm sure she's enjoying life. But do you know the truth is Andrew? Not everybody handles it at a 10 out of 10 level, right? Some people crack underneath that pressure. Some people don't want it. Some people need to grow to group therapy, pro therapy. But pro therapy can be expensive. Some people need to go on Reddit as a starting point to meet other people who like share their qualms, right? Like everybody reacts to like their parents' pressures differently, right? Some people are like, David, I am so disappointed in you. You guys did not become Jake Paul, Logan Paul. Look at the Paul brothers where they are at. Then look at the Feng brothers. Long story short, you got to come to terms with your family situations or at least start the process. Point number two, Andrew, you have to know your own individual motivations, your own buttons. Andrew, you're a different watch than me. You have a different watch mechanism. I have a different watch mechanism. How do we DIY work on ourselves? Even though that is something to be fair, that's more the sign of a mature person. If you start figuring yourself out now when you're 20, you're going to be that much stronger when you're 30, regardless of whatever recession. Yeah, bro, you got to figure out what makes you tick and what ticks you off. You know what I'm saying? Like what's going to release the dopamine for you? You know, for me, releasing dopamine comes in all different types of forms, but basically it's not productive. So I acknowledge that. Yeah, have you seen Sarah Tonan? I'm like looking for her at this party. Listen, guys, I partied in college too. I will tell you this. It can lead to some realizations about where you don't want to be, but literally you have to go out and see a lot of different things in life. I'm not saying you can't party, but you got to go see a lot of successful projects of diverse kinds to see which ones really tickle your fancy. Moving on to number three, you have to be around successful people. However, there's a caveat. You have to be around successful people who share your similar mindset because if you're like the entrepreneur type, you have to be around entrepreneurs. If you're more of the corporate rise, the prebuilt ladder type, you have to be around that type that's more institutional because if you're around the other type, you know, you'll still see some of the work ethic and the motivation and the effort, but it won't fully out of 10 out of 10 level seep into your mind and your heart. Yeah, here's a tip. Try to look for other successful people who talk like you because how you talk is kind of a symbol of what culture you belong to or your mindset. So, David, I mean growing up in business school, one of the main things you took away from business school was not listening to any professors, but... Yeah, it was these weekly lunches that we had with the former VP of Starbucks who was one of the co-founders. He was worth $100 million. His name was Howard Bajar. And we had this like program because he was from Seattle. Starbucks is from Seattle. We could have lunch with him once a week and he'd kind of like, at least for like an hour and a half, kind of treat you like he was your uncle. By the way, Andrew, I did not have an American uncle that was worth $100 million that was willing to drop game on me. But I always remember like he was kind of crazy. He'd say wild things. He was brash. He wasn't like fully PC and that always appealed to me so much more than like being like my finance professor professors that were always like, yeah, we got to look at the obituals of the Deutsche Mock. Like that didn't appeal to me. I'm not saying there's people that aren't institutional like that that aren't successful with the Argyle sweater vest. But for me, I was looking at Howard Bajar and I was just like, yo, man, he's just crazy and he's rich. I like that. Number four, Andrew, do not spend all day on an activity that doesn't really make you a better attacker of life. This is a controversial one. Controversial for the Asian community. You know why it's controversial for the Asian community? Because we are community that likes to geek out on anime, gadgets, tech, like just geek out on anything. I know people who don't even play basketball, who will be the masters of fantasy basketball and know all the VORP ratings and P.E.R.'s. Yeah, I mean, I think one thing that obviously as people who play sports, I would recommend people do some type of sport. It doesn't have to be basketball, but do some type of team sport because guess what? Everything in this world after that sport usually involves a team. To be fair, Andrew, we do know a lot of guys who got rich off crypto and NFTs that were in anime, Starcraft, Warcraft, League of Legends, Dota, more of like the nerdy or macro style strategy games. I think the average person needs to maybe slow down how much first person shooter games they're playing. And if you're going to play any video games, I guess it would be more of the chess-like video games, you know, with the whole team building, kind of like your League of Legends, Starcraft, things like that because at the end of the day, to build anything in the real world to make money, it usually involves being on a team somehow. No, it is true. When you talk to a lot of business people, I'm not saying it's going to change way, way, way in the future, but as of right now, people still bring up Michael Jordan, Tom Brady, Serena Williams, Tiger Woods, Wayne Gretzky. People are always bringing up sports legends as an allegory or an analogy or a metaphor for business. I have never in my life heard anybody say, yeah, I just wish I played a lot more Fortnite and Counter-Strike in college. Why didn't I play more Halo? By the way, guys, we're not saying video games are fully bad, we're just saying like if you are going to dedicate yourself to something in so much time to something. I'm guilty of this too. Geek out on something. Make sure it has some transferable analogies to the real world that can make you better at living your life IRL. Oh, by the way, Andrew, a lot of guys who love Street Ball and just one-on-one isos, they're not necessarily good business people either because that's removing the team aspect out of basketball. That's true. If you only like to do crossovers in basketball, what does that say about your business acumen? Moving on to number five, Andrew, if you live with your parents to save money and I know a lot of Asian kids who do this. I know a lot of second-gen kids who do this. They're living with their parents to save money, but then they just take trips to Vegas. They go to EDC. They buy drinks. They lease a car that is way out of their league in terms of payment. They're not following through on the, yeah, I'm gonna buy a house by the time I'm 25 planned. So it's like, you kinda gotta know, if you're gonna live at home, then just live at home and actually run the plan. Basically, we had a lot of friends growing up who saved money living with their parents, but they would spend so much money just to make up for the fact that they're living with their parents. So maybe they're saving $2,000 a month, but then they're spending 1,500 on a car payment for a BMW, going out to eat, buying drinks for other people, having fun, you know? Yeah, and I do think that they're also gonna miss out on the networking effect, but they could have multiple properties. It could go either way. It depends on what you're trying to game plan. You're trying to run for your lifestyle. Andrew, number six, this actually connects to number five. You want to spend the extra money generally to be in a hyper-ping-filled area where you can meet a lot of successful people from a lot of diverse fields. You can talk to them, talk to them about their industry and also talk to them about their life story. So if you grow up in like a blue collar town, you might not meet that many people immediately that are trying to go into tech, right? Because that's kind of a nerdy thing to go into. But what happened, what my friend did, my Filipino friend did, was that we come from the same town, right? But to network with all the tech founders, he actually cold emailed like a hundred of them one summer and tried to meet up with as many as he could over a cup of coffee. He bought them coffee. Now, through that, a lot of them didn't even become his mentor, but he did end up relating to one or two of them, and that's all he needed. Yeah, and also some people, Andrew, if they want to be in a more like old-school industry, like old-money industry, they just work at the golf course. However, for us, Andrew, we actually just play basketball and we meet a ton of really successful people actually playing basketball, believe it or not. However, I will say this, Andrew, at the CEO runs, you definitely need to be on your best behavior and you need to move the rock and pass the ball a lot. Moving on to number seven, Andrew, here's an analogy for you. Sometimes you just need to put on whatever helmet you've got laying around if you're about to go on a bike ride, but make sure you also take it off quickly if it doesn't fit. What I learned is a lot of young people, Andrew, they talk too much about their plan, so they're actually not getting started early enough, but then when the plan goes sideways and it's clear that the ship is sinking, they don't hop off the ship and end the project early enough either. Right, because I think at the end of the day, listen, the best team you have are the people who want to do something with you, right? If you have nobody else, if you want to start a clothing line and nobody else around you wants to do it, you either do it yourself or you work with the people around you that want to do it. Now, that's okay, but that might not be the most successful team either. So at some point, you need to understand, okay, listen, guys, you know what? This is not working out and I'm just gonna call it a fail. So we need to just, we just need to check this off and say, yo, okay, we did a trial run and we need to restart over or I need to find some new teammates. Andrew, we were in a failed, I mean, like it did something and had a spark when it started, but then ultimately failed sinking ship, clothing line in college and we probably stayed in it like two years, too long to be honest. Like we were just hoping that it was gonna regain that initial spark. We were hoping, we were hoping, Andrew, there was no second spark coming, but it was hard for us to swallow because we didn't know anybody else who wanted to do anything else. Now, I'm not saying that you starting something with your old hometown friends won't work the first time, but that's rare. Usually there takes some calibration and like swapping out members to get to that point where it's fully banging on all cylinders. Number eight, Andrew, this sounds kind of crazy because I know a lot of people don't like this word nowadays in 2023, but you do have to accept hierarchy to make a system work to an extent. Yeah, listen, whether you're playing basketball, you're starting a clothing brand, you're starting a YouTube channel, or you're starting a Discord, there's always somebody who kind of has like more access or more power. There's the admin, there's the moderator. There's somebody that generally has more say and is the leader and you need that in general. That's why a lot of people don't like playing pick up basketball with randoms because you play with random people. You don't know how they play. You don't know if they're gonna bind to the system. Are they gonna grab rebounds or are they gonna shoot the ball at times? They're not the main score. You're the main score, or maybe you think you are, but they actually are. Nobody knows their role in pick up basketball. That's why if you want to get anything actually done, you have to make up roles. We had a clothing brand that we were just talking about and at the meetings, there was like six or seven people. That's just way too old to talk the same amount. No, everybody wanted their import and that's including me. I didn't have the same role as you. So I'm saying like everybody wants their import, input and wants to feel equal but actually you cannot have everybody equal to get things done. Number nine, Andrew, find a mentor, a big brother, somebody who's further down the lane that you want to be and has climbed that ladder that you want to climb further than you that wants to help you out and drop some gems on you. And it's probably because they relate to you or just understand you or want to see you be successful. Yeah, I think this is the tough thing about coming from an immigrant community. Like maybe your options are somewhat limited as far as mentors that are from your exact background. But like I said in an earlier point, try to find someone who you just relate to as far as like the way they speak. Listen, not everything is going to line up. You can't just be the same ethnicity, same religion, same this, they look the same as you and they're very successful and they want to mentor you. The two most valuable things are availability and they care about you. If they care about you, they're going to be available for you and they'll be able to talk to you and help you out. Yeah, a lot of the out of the box successful guys that are Asian right now in America had a non-Asian mentor because like we said, Andrew, previously most of the Asians in America for a very, very long time were either in a systemized corporate route or they were like running small businesses like a restaurant or a bakery or something on the side. You know, a small construction operation. It wasn't really fully like the exact modeling of something that the new generation wants to be a part of. Last but not least at number 10, Andrew, if I was 20 years old, I would start to do a lot of things once. You know, a lot of guys, their roommates, they struggle to clean their crib together. I would just pool some money together and make sure everybody puts up the money and hires a professional cleaner to do a deep clean just so you can see what it's like to trade your money for an elite service that you could not do on your own. That's the same for like a lot of things in life that a lot of people try to do, whether it's like this thing or that thing, you got to see at least once what it's like to pay a highly trained professional to do it for you. Then you can decide whether or not it's worth your time or like how good you are doing it. Oh yeah, definitely hire a professional to do it once and then try to copy what they do. That's the best thing. Instead of just trying to like work things out yourself, just pay that one time fee. It's like getting a haircut. Go to the nice barber shop once, get a good haircut, pay the $30, $40, $50 that it costs, pay attention to what they do and try to recreate it if you need to cut your own hair. If someone's cleaning or cooking in front of you, just learn how they're doing it. You might not be able to replicate it 100%. Of course you're not. However, even if you take that as a lesson and you can start to recreate it as a 60, 70%, that's pretty good. Yeah, I will say this. The one life hack that I will mention in this that I saw earlier is, and this doesn't work for everybody, but it could work for you, Andrew. A lot of people sometimes need to see nice things one time, buy a first class ticket one time, buy a really nice pair of shoes one time. And if they find that that really like triggers their buttons, that's going to be a great way to motivate them to keep doing the things to get that feeling again and again. So like we said, it all kind of links together, guys. These are all things that I did not even think about until later in my 20s or maybe when I turned 30. If you start doing them now, Andrew and you get in line with these things, like it doesn't really matter whether you know 2023 is a recession year or the inflation is really high or not because you will be poised to be more successful in the future. Hey, listen, maybe your investments are down right now, but your self-improvement can be up even in the recession. Haha. Hey, listen guys, it's better to get started now when you're 20 than when you're 27. All right, everybody. Thank you so much to leave it in the comments down below. If we missed anything, what are some other things that you would recommend people know about themselves moving into their 20s and 30s and just overall successful advice that has to do more on the introspective side, not just kind of a monetary side. I think that's a totally different video, but please let us know in the comments down below. Hit that like button and thank you so much for watching the Hot Pop Boys and until next time, we out. Peace.