The Guide
As you continue to build your life as an adult, I wanted to share this framework of sorts that I hope you’ll find useful. This is not advice, but a way of reasoning about the many choices and decisions that will come. Read and revisit as necessary ;)
Success is personal
There is no singular ideal, path, or goal that everyone should aim for. You are the only person who can define what success looks like for you, as well as how you feel about the pace at which you aim to achieve it. Hurrying up to chase someone else's dream is just as bad as feeling stuck at 1% toward your own dream. Also — your definition of success can and will change as you go. One way to think about how to define success for yourself is to sharpen your definition of your ideal lifestyle and work backwards from that. Your definition will feel fuzzy at first, and get more specific and crystalized as you go.
Build your inner circle
Your chosen family and friends are your inner circle — the most important asset you have. The journey is a waste if you can’t share it, and all that. Put the effort into building and sustaining these core relationships. If you were to lose everything else, you can gain it all back with the help of your inner circle. They say we’re the average of those we’re closest to. Choose wisely.
Grow Your Network
Enhancing your ability to say “I know a guy” in a growing list of situations. Beyond your inner circle, you will continue to connect with a seemingly endless array of people along your journey. Building and maintaining this network of people in your life will be incredibly beneficial countless times in your life. Connect, keep in touch, and deliver the same sort of favors you aspire to get in return down the road — insider insight, heads up, recommendations, out-of-network connections, etc.
Collect Life Experiences
Many of us aspire to live a life full of adventures, but this is about something else. It is tempting to feel like your time is wasted, or you “failed” at something if it doesn’t immediately yield the result you expected on the timeframe you anticipated. Instead, I think it’s helpful to think of ALL of your life experiences as things you collect over time. You’ve earned them. When you touch a hot stove, you have earned the experience of knowing why you don’t want to do it again. You will experience joy and pain and everything in between. Just remember that in all situations — this too shall pass. Take it in, learn what you can, and keep going.
Hold yourself accountable to your own high standards
Your reputation is often defined as what people say and feel about you when you’re not in the room. Are you fun? Friendly? Interested? Interesting? Attentive? Focused? Punctual? Dedicated? Creative? Thoughtful? Inspiring? What we want our reputation to be doesn’t really matter. There is no try, only do. Hold yourself accountable to act like the person you want to be. Hold yourself to a higher standard than what is required by others.
All we have is time
The singularly most important thing in your entire life is how you choose to spend your time. Nobody gets out alive. We don’t know how much time we get, but we can try to influence how much life we have in our days. Do you do this, or that? Do you do the easy fun thing now, or the harder important thing? I grew up with the motto of “work hard, play hard”, and I think the sequence is important. I like to earn my play. How you invest your time is a living testament to your values. If you say you value something, but spend no time on it, are you really living your values? Everything in life takes time. Sometimes weeks or months of years can go by and you feel like the time you spent was chosen for you. Classes take time. So does that job. That commute. Take the time to reflect on how you’re spending your time, compare that to your values and your goals, and adjust accordingly, as often as necessary.
Get Shit Done
It may seem surprising that in order to efficiently get shit done, you actually have to learn a set of strategies, tactics, and tools that actually work for you. Mastering your personal calendar, blocking your time in advance to focus on what matters, implementing Inbox Zero for your email, and maintaining a written journal/task list/brain dump thing are all essentials for me, but so are headphones and an endless loop of loud EDM. Find and fine-tune what works for you. There are millions of things you have to do in your lifetime, and much of it is just the operational stuff, not the fun stuff. Being efficient means you have more time for the good stuff. (Things to research later as this becomes more important to you — Getting Things Done, Pomodoro Technique, Kanban, Kaizen, Inbox Zero, Bullet Journal)
Essentialism
Quality over quantity. Do less, so you can do better at the things you care about. Derek Sivers concept of “Fuck yeah! or NO!” is a good mental model for deciding to add something to your plate or not. Everything you say yes to, steals time away from everything else on your plate. This doesn’t mean you can’t have fun and say yes to random things that come your way. It means that you have identified what is important and made specific time in your life to focus on those things, and in the extra time, you can fill it with other stuff. Keep the main thing, the main thing. Prioritize obsessively.
Your life is full of chapters
As time progresses, the pages of your story turn. It’s only in retrospect that we start to see that a particular turn in the pages started a new chapter. Graduation. Moving out. The time we spend living in a place. The duration of a job. A relationship. There are many ways to identify various chapters in your life. The reason this is good to meditate on a bit, is that it serves as a reminder that no single chapter represents your whole story. When you make a big decision — move to a new place, strengthen a relationship, take a job, etc. — that’s not your whole story. It’s a part of your story. Some chapters are short. Others seem endless. You can’t undo a chapter, but you can always start a new one. Life is impermanent, so nothing is truly forever. Let that free you from decision paralysis. Make the call. Start the chapter. And when you need to, do it again. You will have several relationships. Several jobs. Probably several whole careers. Just make the best choice for the chapter you’re in, and take solace that you’ll have another chance down the road to choose again when you need to.
Wide vs. Deep
Another way to think about the chapters of your life is to think about going wide vs. going deep. When teams are trying to make collective decisions there are usually two phases. First, you want to get as many ideas and options on the table as possible. That’s going “wide”. Then, given the options, you want to choose one and go as deep as you can, getting the most value out of that choice. Your college years are mostly about going “wide”. It’s more important to have a diverse set of experiences, see things from different perspectives, open your mind about what is possible. There will be later chapters of your life where you instead need to go deep. Maybe you’ve got a job in a career you’re focusing on at the time — you’ll likely want to go deep — do your best work, learn as much about this one thing as you can, gain as much expertise as you can, grind it out and make an impact. The thing is… you can’t really do both at the same time. Be conscious about what modality will serve you best at the time — wide, or deep, and spend your time accordingly.
Never Stop Learning
In order to make decisions about the direction of your life, you need to be presented with choices. In order to have choices, you need one of two things — knowledge, or money. Knowledge and money buys choice. Stay curious. In the age of YouTube and deep research AI models, acquiring knowledge has never been easier. That also means it’s less valuable. I think that puts more value in gaining a larger, more diverse set of experiences and knowledge that when brought together, brings new insights. Your ability to learn new things, mash it all up with everything else you know, apply that knowledge and/or communicate that new knowledge to others — that is what raises the odds that someone else in positions of power and access will choose you instead of someone else for that job or that thing. I still think reading books, on paper, and writing your thoughts down in a paper journal, will continue to be highly effective, despite its simplicity.
Reflection — revise and refocus
Nobody is perfect, whatever that even means. You will routinely find yourself feeling off course. This is normal. When this happens, but also at least every few months, you should book some time alone to reflect. Take stock. Look at how you’ve spent your time over the last few weeks or months. What does that say about what you value? What have you learned about yourself? How do you want to spend your time differently? I have always hated the phrase “work/life balance” because I see it in my mind like a teeter totter where the “balance” is something like 50/50. Instead of “balance”, think “budget”. How do you want to budget your time and what do you need to do to actually make those changes of how you spend your time on a daily basis? One of the hardest things we all do is to decide, when things get especially hard, to stay the course and grit it out or pivot and do something else. Small changes are easy to make, but we often put off the big changes, even though they may be the most necessary. There is no easy answer, but your inner circle should be able to help.
Money
Just like time, if you apply your money to every single whim you have, you’ll never have enough saved up to buy yourself the bigger choices in your life. Budget your time, budget your money. Make honest decisions about where you want to invest your money to achieve your own definition of success, for the chapter of life that you’re in. There are chapters for mostly fun and new experiences. There are chapters of investing in yourself (literally — courses, seminars, books, tools, consultants). There are chapters for saving up for the big big things. And there are chapters for slowly spending it on the life you’ve earned. Mind your time. Mind your money. (The “Bogglehead” strategies, particularly concepts like your Emergency Fund and the Three Fund Portfolio are worth learning about)
Onward!