35
35 bits of advice for my younger self
At a college internship at IMG academy coaching basketball, a player around my age once told me “I can’t tell if you’re 20 or 40”.
I was 20. Now I’m 35. And I’m sharing a list of 35 things I would have told/reminded my 20 year old self. Most of them are simple, but hard.
This list is focused on being happy. I’ve separately written pieces on career advice. This list is also a work in progress.
Take responsibility (the ability to respond)
This doesn’t mean that everything that has happened to you is a result of your actions. It means that you develop an ability to respond to whatever happens to you, even if you don’t control the consequences of your actions.
It means exerting maximal agency towards the things you can directly change (your behavior), and maximum acceptance towards things you can influence but not control (external circumstances, other people’s behavior).
No excuses. Don’t make some person, some event, or your parents the excuse for your actions going forward, even if they did influence your past, and even if they’re not changing at all. It only takes one person to transform a dysfunctional relationship or situation.
You can blame other people, but unless you change behavior, you might have similar reoccurring results with other people / in other situations, at which point you’ll realize a common denominator is you, and it’s worth rewiring certain patterns.
The most empowering thing I’ve heard is that there is a gap between stimulus and response, and that the key to both our growth and happiness is how we use and expand that space.
Our responses typically come from patterns and scripts handed down from our parents and our pasts. We are not hostage to those patterns, we can update them. A pattern that's run through your family for generations can stop with you. Vision is bigger than baggage.
Sometimes those patterns are deeply rooted. A pattern like anxiety may have been helpful in a previous unsafe environment but is maladaptive for our current safe environment.
My friend Kanjun calls this “trauma as overfitting”, since we don’t generalize well from childhood to adulthood. Cognitive behavior therapy or Byron Katie’s work helps us get new training data by asking questions like: “are you absolutely sure that’s true? How do you react when you believe that thought? Who would you be without that thought?“ This is great for updating limiting beliefs, of which we have many that are often mostly incorrect and holding us back.
Develop an abundance mindset
One pattern that’s worth rewiring is transforming from a scarcity mindset to an abundance, positive-sum mindset. This means loving people and wanting other people to flourish on their own terms, independent of what’s in it for you—even when it’s at your expense.
This is challenging because we’re not wired for abundance—when we lived in tribes, if someone took your food, or excluded you, you didn't have anywhere else to go. Which is why we instinctively feel someone else's gain as our loss. But the more you want others to succeed (and the more you help them), the more they’ll help you and want you to succeed. Genuinely see their success as your success.
What goes around comes around, less because of karma, but because of game theory. Life is an infinite game: If you cooperate, people will cooperate with you, and vice versa. To get long-term cooperators, you must suffer some defectors (“get taken advantage of”). Don’t defect. Embrace the paradoxical commandments.
You attract what you project. Write down a list of what you want in your relationships and the types of people you want personal and professional relationships with and then make sure you are bringing those attributes to the table too. e.g. If you want loyal friends, *be* a loyal friend. Focus on “being” rather than “having”, because you can only control the former, and by doing so you can influence the latter.
Learn to differentiate between needs and strategies
A strategy is a way to meet a need. We want to get that job because we want respect, autonomy, recognition, connection. But there are thousands of ways to meet that need. Acknowledging this makes you more flexible to what life throws at you, and makes it more likely you’ll get what you actually want deep down. A lot of stress in my life came from being set on certain strategies when if I appreciated what need I was trying to meet, I could have been more flexible in switching strategies.
6. Happiness and security are skills that can be developed.
If you can’t be happy now, it’s unlikely you'll be happy later. “I’ll be happy once I hit X goal” may be motivating, but it won’t be true—you’ll just move the goalposts. If this is how you’re motivated now, it’s unlikely to last because at some point you’ll figure out that your pattern is unfulfilling and you’ll stop following it. Then you’ll need to find a new way to motivate yourself. A more durable motivation comes from genuinely enjoying the process and the contributions and the relationships that stem from it.
Similarly, get your security from liking yourself, not from external validation. If you get your happiness from other people’s approval, it’ll never be enough and you’ll be constantly chasing it. Whether it’s professionally or socially, learn to give yourself the validation, approval, forgiveness you crave from others. You can do this by acting in ways you’re proud of.
To that end, resist the urge to not do the right thing, even when doing the right thing is at your own expense. You will have so many opportunities to do the wrong thing: To gossip, to lie, to cut corners, to take short cuts. It’s never worth it, because then it makes it harder to like yourself. No amount of money or fame will make you feel good if you aren’t proud of how you’ve acted. If anything it heightens the contradictions, which is partly why famous people are often unhappy.
Learn to process emotions so you can move through them and they don’t negatively affect you
Much of our anxiety results from us being in our head too much. But you can’t think your way out of emotional problems. You need to express and feel the feelings to move them through your body. You can try to repress your feelings, but they’ll likely rear their heads in other ways. Ultimately, you can’t run from yourself.
You can’t be in your body and be stuck in your brain at the same time. The way out of the brain loop is through the body. If you feel feel the feelings it might take a few minutes or hours to pass them, whereas if you repress it it might take months or years.
I was always dubious of thinking like this until I tried somatic therapy and found it grounding in ways I couldn’t articulate.
Internalize the regrets of the dying: The biggest determinants of your happiness are likely the quality of your relationships & living true to yourself
If you knew that on your death bed, what mattered most would be the quality of relationships you formed in your life and to what extent you lived & expressed your true self, how would you live differently?
You’d likely optimize less for what other people want from you and more for pursuing what feels true to you and making memories with your people — you wouldn’t miss weddings, you’d call people just to check in, and you’d avoid a ton of arguments because at the end of the day what you care about is bonding with the other person, so why are you even arguing? (It’s not bringing you closer and you’re unlikely to change their mind.)
We need to constantly remind ourselves of what matters because we’re wired to survive and reproduce, not optimize for meaning and happiness. Religion or other meaning making structures help.
Go on planned trips with friends where you put your phone away. The anticipation is just as bonding as the actual trip. Keep in touch with old friends more broadly (I wish I did this better). Call them randomly, even if it’s been years. Keep track of what they care about.
Get a “life board” — meet with a crew of ~4 friends 3-4x a year to discuss big life, career, and finance decisions.
Accept all bids your people make from you. Affirm their intentions and what they mean to you, even when saying no.
The goal of social interaction is to strengthen relationships
In The Sims, every person you encounter has a score over the head meant to symbolize your relationship strength with them. Stephen Covey uses the term “emotional bank account” as a metaphor for relationship quality. Good interactions (e.g. deeply understanding someone) are deposits into the account, bad interactions (e.g. judging them, breaking trust) are withdrawals.
Thinking of the goal of social time as increasing the score makes intuitive sense. Why would you spend time with someone only to weaken the relationship? Look at the behaviors that are withdrawals on the emotional bank account — the ones that trigger and bother the people you care about — and unless you believe in them despite the cost, get rid of them, even if it seems irrational that they’d bother someone.
Reduce needless friction in engaging with you. Like in a negotiation where you ask for the thing you care most about and give in on the rest, you want to hold the line on what’s important/defining to you and be deferential on the rest. “Authenticity” can excuse a lot of behaviors that, if you changed, would bring you closer to other people, and wouldn’t cost you much. Being a default contrarian is not a personality, just to name one example.
Don’t engage with others when you’re not your best self
If you look back at your fights or negative interactions, they were probably when you were tired or otherwise moody. Don’t approach hard problems or get into arguments when you’re cranky or anxious and more likely to get triggered. Be able to acknowledge when you are not in a secure place, and be able to reset by working out, taking a walk, listening to music, talking with a friend, etc. Wait until the anger or trigger passes before acting. And never fight over text. And if you ever find yourself in a fight, realize you’re in one and calm down and ask yourself why you’re fighting.
Work on expanding your capacity to not get triggered by doing things like meditation, somatic therapy, nonviolent communication, etc. Develop the ability to distance your thought patterns and emotions from your actions.
If you’re having a bad experience or are in a bad mood, attribute it to a biological need (e.g. hunger, tiredness) rather than psychological one (some complex). The former provides more agency than the latter (e.g. "Oh, I just need to eat/sleep/exercise better", as opposed to "I have a deep issue that will take a long time to work through".)
Get in touch with your light, your best self. And once you are, share it with the world.
Self-confidence can’t be faked, it can only be earned
Just like you have a bank account with others, you have one with yourself too, and it affects your mood and resilience.
Deposits into your own bank account look like being proud of yourself — contributing to others, gaining competence at something that matters, doing the right thing, keeping promises to yourself and others, and taking good care of yourself.
Deliberately study yourself and iterate
Track what people and activities and habits make you feel better and which drain you. Track when you get triggered or or when you trigger others and see if you can identify patterns. The less you can get triggered or trigger, the less friction you'll have.
Pay attention to what you pay attention to. Journal at least weekly, and also ideally 5-10 minutes every morning. Do a weekly audit where you can look backwards and reflect on what brings you closer to yourself or and vice versa and readjust how you spend time accordingly. In the same way that athletes watch game tape of their performance and change behavior accordingly, do the same for your life. Take all the time you spend angry at other people for not changing your behavior and instead apply it to changing yours.
Optimize your environment (people, city, digital life etc) to help guide you towards who you want to become
Although rewiring is worth doing, it's easier to change your environment than to change your insides. Change your environment & then let the new cues do the work.
Your environment is a one-time CapEx expense on your willpower. You fly to a new place, start working in a company or go to a campus or make this new friend. And then it just yields dividends.
If you want to, say, work out more, live near a gym and get friends who work out. Repeat for every new habit you want to start or stop.
Say less. Less is more
Most interpersonal mistakes are acts of commission rather than omission. Don’t hold back in speaking your truth, but stop saying what you don’t mean. If you’re going to offend someone, do it on something you care about. Not on an off hand remark or action that didn’t mean anting to you. If you’re unsure, wait a couple days to see if you still mean it. Usually you don’t.
People remember the negatives far more than the positives, so think about having a significantly higher percentage of positive experiences than negative ones.
There is a Buddhist saying that aptly describes this ability: “Don’t just do something, stand there.”
Listen more than you speak. Make sure you understand them before trying to be understood. See people the way they want to be seen and affirm them. People are very sensitive. They don’t remember what you say as much as how you made them feel. This means you can both disproportionately make them happy by making them feel seen and special and disproportionately make them feel sad by making them feel judged or rejected.
Spend one day a week entirely off social media.
You are what you put into your body. If you eat crap, you’ll feel like crap. Similarly, if you spend your time watching other people’s highlight reels on Instagram or engrossed in drama on X, you’ll feel more anxious and less at peace.
Do a weekly digital sabbath where you get time in solitude more broadly. Actually, turn off as many notifications as you possibly can more generally. And certainly turn your phone off before sleeping and don’t turn it back on until you free-write or meditate in the AM. Delete Instagram, or at least the feed. Go on seven day retreats with no phone. Buy an old iPhone with barely any apps. Don’t get hooked on politics or entertainment unless it brings you closer to people you care about, because it often divides. If being alone without distractions is brutal, it means you’re not at peace with yourself, and this restlessness will seep into your relationships. Develop the ability to be okay by yourself. If you only took one actionable thing from this, make it be this paragraph. Like all good cliche advice, it’s simple, but hard.
Your parents will die sooner than you think.
By the time you’re in your 20s, you’ll have spent 90% of the time you’ll ever get to spend with them. By internalizing their eventual death, you’ll be able to appreciate your remaining time with them. Instead of focusing on the ways they fell short, focus on how you wouldn’t exist without them, and how they enabled (directly or indirectly) all the wonderful things in your life. Do this for everyone in your life actually.
The 90% line is true for all your longest friends, and certainly anyone you’ve ever dated. Don’t hold any grudges that you wouldn’t hold after someone is dead, because what’s the point. We’re basically almost there, and you don’t need to hold onto the grudge in order to protect yourself, it just adds more heaviness to your life. If you have anyone close to you who died, you know how important reconciliation is.
Forgive and remember.
Grudges are ankle weights on your soul. Resentment is drinking poison and hoping the other person dies. If you have extended anger with someone, even if they’re in the wrong, you’re both losing. Forgiving others is a gift to yourself because it frees you from the negative feelings and it gives you more agency over your emotional state.
Anytime you need someone to apologize to you or change their behavior before you can be happy, you’ve ceded your agency over your own happiness. Instead, let them and focus on what you can control.
Empathize with what needs they were trying to meet through their actions and then either reconcile with them or move on with the levity of being grudge-free. Sometimes they were acting out in an ill-attempted way to connect.
To be clear, by forgiving I just mean dropping the grudge and wishing them well; I don’t mean bringing them back into your life if you don’t want to. Hence forgive but remember (i.e. don’t forget).
If the conversation needs to be had (apologizing or forgiving), have the difficult conversation. If it doesn’t, let sleeping dogs lie.
Be okay with the idea that some people you want to like you just won’t like you as much as you’d like. Take solace in the fact that they’ve contributed to your growth, and you can be your own judge going forward so you don’t need absolution from them in order to be at peace. You can still honor them by living your best. And the same patterns will reincarnate in future relationships anyway.
Every setback is a lesson, sometimes it’s the only way to get that lesson, to get that growth, that increased resiliency and capacity. So every time you experience a setback, you should almost be excited for the corresponding growth.
The question to ask over any struggle is “What is this teaching”?
But make sure you don’t learn the wrong lesson. The lesson should be one that increases your capacity to love, not one that decreases it.
And make sure you listen when a lesson is being taught. Humble yourself before life humbles you.
Everyone is fighting a battle you know nothing about
Internalizing this is helpful not only because it encourages you to be easy on others, but also because it helps you be easy on yourself. After all, you’re not the only one struggling.
If something about other people triggers you, learn to accept it about them and see it as an emerging property of circumstances. Instead of saying that person's good or bad, look at what caused them to do X or Y.
Our judgments about other people are often reflections of our own insecurities. For example, maybe when you’re judging someone for showing off, you’re struggling with your own desire to be seen.
Try other tactics to get curious about other people instead of righteous. If you look at their childhood photos it’s hard to be mad at them. If you have your hands on your heart it’s hard to be angry at them. If you’re hugging your partner it’s harder to fight with them.
Develop a thick skin and a short memory
Don’t take slights or insults or rejections personally. Expand your capacity to not get offended. Just like you judging people has more to do with you than them, the converse is true as well.
Only listen to what people are needing, not what they’re judging. They have short memory too.
One self-connection exercise when triggered is:
How do you feel? (vent)
How does that feel on the inside? (connect with deeper feeling)
What do you want? (suggest strategy, get action oriented)
What would that give you? (connect with deeper need)
Your language influences your reality, adjust it
You want to maximize your ability to change your patterns, and minimize your ability to be negatively influenced by others. Have your language reflect this.
Use language that emphasizes the fact that people can change: Use verbs over adjectives and observations instead of judgments. For example, instead of saying, “X is always late”, say “X has been late the last three times.”
This dynamic, verb-based language, also known as nonviolent communication, will both avoid a ton of fights and also help create space for you and others to change.
The stories you tell about yourself become self-fulfilling prophecies. That’s another reason to use verbs instead of passive adjectives in your language — so that way you can change them.
You attract whatever you project, expect, and repress.
Your fears become self-fulfilling too. If you’re scared of being abandoned, for example, you will subconsciously look for signs that you could be abandoned and act in ways that make it more likely for someone to abandon you.
Conversely, the more you look for good in people (and yourself), the more good you will see, and the better you will last towards them, soliciting. It’s a positive flywheel.
It’s better to face/feel the fear and let it move through you rather than repress it and subconsciously will it into existence
Assume the best in good people. Whatever you anticipate, you’ll be more likely to find.
Choose being happy over being right/winning.
Don’t use language that implies badness. People are central characters in their own stories so they won’t respond well to insinuations that they’ve done wrong. If your goal is to connect with others or influence them, it’s better to see things from their side than try to overpower them with guilt.
Anytime you see yourself judging, lean into curiosity. Labels, comparisons, and diagnoses are all forms of judgment. Cultivate that sense of empathy and wonder about how people work, instead of moralizing.
If you are secure and full of love, you won’t do any of these things naturally, so cultivate practices that make you feel secure.
Don’t bring work mode to relationships and vice versa. For work, you want to be efficient, outcome oriented, and prioritize winning above all. With people, you want to be effective, process oriented, and prioritize connection above all. For work you want to be right (accurate), for relationships you want to be happy (connected).
Life isn’t fair, so don’t get hung up on fairness.
Don’t keep score, your patience will run out. And equality doesn’t matter. On your death bed you won’t wish things were more fair, but you’ll regret that your insistence on fairness prevented you from connecting with an open heart.
25. Before changing the world, try changing your world
The way to change the world is in your heart, head, and hands and work outwards from there.
For most people, it is more noble to give yourself completely to one individual than to labor diligently for the salvation of the masses.
To be sure, these aren’t mutually exclusive and you can try to have micro and macro impact, but very few people will have meaningfully positive macro impact (and many people’s impact (e.g. activism) might be negative), whereas everyone has a micro impact on their families, friends, and local communities and we don’t pay enough attention to making it great.
Since all you can control is your own behavior, it doesn’t make sense to focus so much on what others are doing. Use things like politics, sports, social media etc as ways to meet or get closer to other people, but don’t use it as something to make you angry or further from others.
26. Be enjoyably useful
Get really good at something rare and valuable and start helping other people with it; give it away.
Worry less about finding your passion and more about following your contribution. Do what you’re meant to do. It usually looks easy for you but hard for others, or is something you can’t not do.
Cultivate what makes you unique. The more distinct your path is, the less competition you’ll have, and the less you’ll compare yourself to others because you’re running your own race.
Sometimes you don’t have to figure out *exactly* what you want to do, you just need to know what *not* to do. Many people wind up going against their instincts, and it makes them miserable.
27. Have close friends who’d love you just as much if you lost your job, and vice versa
Life’s too short to spend with people who you already know you don’t want to spend a lot of your life with.
You have all the answers inside you but only when you're in touch with yourself. Most of the time you have a million distractions, so have people you can share your whole self with and who appreciate you for who you are and who you want to be.
Commit to rituals with them — weekly dinners, annual trips, whatever. Introduce them to each other—bringing friends from different parts of your lives together will make you even happier than you think it will.
Don’t cap your ceiling
Be wildly ambitious: Envision the highest version of your own success and strive to get as close to it as possible while also being happy with wherever you land. You can just do things.
The big Silicon Valley cultural lesson is that, for whatever you're currently doing—your startup, your art, your personal growth—you can do it 10x bigger, an order of magnitude bigger than what you thought you could (should you want to).
The people you admire, the people doing things you wish you could do — you can get closer to them than you think. And if you’re ambitious and showing growth, some of them might want to meet and help you too.
Protect your dreams, and encourage others to protect theirs too. When I was younger, my dream was to be an NBA player. I still play a few times a week. Maybe I’ll be a part-owner some day instead.
Have high standards and work hard but don’t beat yourself up over the past or your future either. Your past was what you needed to get here (no regrets), and fretting about what will happen in the future bond what you need to prep for it won’t help either. Most ambitious people on their death beds wish they were less hard on themselves beyond what was needed to have high standards. The happiest people are best at focusing on what they can control and not letting past drama or future worries get in their way.
When decision-making, think in terms of asymmetric upside/downside, not pros and cons
Asymmetric upside opportunities could lead to new relationships or forms of growth. Asymmetric downside opportunities could lead to sacrificing your health or your relationship or your reputation.
In order to have time for asymmetric opportunities, you need to say no to most things. “Hell Yes or No” is a good framework for the biggest decisions in life, but maybe not the more frequent, smaller ones .
Spend time on exactly what you want to be doing, and say no to everything that doesn’t excite you or provide asymmetric upside.
You’re either doing it or you’re not. You’re either working on something you believe in and matters to you or not. You’re either spending time with people you want to be in your life or not. If you’re not, leave to make room to do it. Figure out what truly matters and run to those people, places, beliefs and activities as fast as your legs can possibly carry you to them. Don’t settle.
Be comfortable with what John Keats called negative capability. The point is not to find the answers but to live the questions. What often matters most is not what decision you make but how you act after you make it. There are a million ways to be happy.
Let people be who they are. Love them for it.
Ultimately, if you invalidate someone, they'll invalidate you back. If you try to control someone, they'll try to control you back. You win by letting go.
Let other people be who they are and love them for it. Don’t try to change them. It’ll backfire. Paradoxically, by giving them that safety, they’ll more likely move closer to you anyway.
Strive for wisdom and integrity and a thousand-year heart
Don’t pursue money and status at the expense of a character and virtue and being true to yourself. Or at least not for long. Ideally align them all. Do something your 10 year old self and 100 year old self would be proud of.
Live as though you’ll be 100 (in terms of wanting to have long-term relationships, doing things that compound) but also live as though everyday will be your last (in terms of prioritizing relationships and connection and memories).
Pray.
Be more discerning about what you care about.
Most people make the mistake of caring too much or too little indiscriminate about the stakes
Care about what the right people think of you, as a good feedback loop, but don’t care about what everyone else thinks about you.
Care about making good work, which means not caring about people seeing your shitty work along the way so you can receive feedback and get better.
Care about about loving the people who mean a lot to you, which means not caring about them seeing you vulnerable and all the other embarrassments of being known
Care about helping others by/and being true to yourself, which means not caring about people saying bad things about you.
33. Strive to being a light to the people in your life.
Other people should feel safely sharing their true selves to you knowing they won’t be judged and can trust you can keep a secret, they should be soliciting your opinions because you have good discernment. Love people not only for who they are but also for who they want to be. Let them grow.
Practice gratitude
“the more you become a connoisseur of gratitude, the less you are a victim of resentment, depression, and despair. Gratitude will act as an elixir that will gradually dissolve the hard shell of your ego—your need to possess and control—and transform you into a generous being. The sense of gratitude produces true spiritual alchemy, makes us magnanimous—large souled”
Cultivate a daily gratitude journal (or prayer) practice as a way to increase your emotional bank account with yourself and others. Share gratitude and appreciation with others like 50x more than you share feedback or criticism.
It’s never too late to change.
It’s never too late to start that passion project, to get more in touch with yourself, to learn from your mistakes. It’s never too late to pick up a habit. To rewire your patterns. To strengthen or repair an existing relationship. It’s never too late to apologize. It’s never too late to forgive (even if you don’t want that person in your life). It’s never too late to let go. To move on. It’s never too late to look back at your life and the people who’ve enabled and contributed to all the amazing things that have happened and tell them how much they meant to you. Even if someone is dead or you are dead to them, you can still send them love from afar. Maybe it will make its way there. It’s never too late to cultivate your light. Or develop your motivation and drive. Or your sense of peace. It’s never too late to find whatever you’ve been searching for, or what you wanted but didn’t even know. It’s never too late to change. Every day is a new chance.
Happy Birthday, Erik! Thanks for the write-up, these are great ideas and there's a lot of wisdom there.
Great advice. Clear that it's hard-earned wisdom. Thanks Erik