#1. Fail early and frequently
Your greatest asset is not your talent, not your ideas, not your experience, but your time. Time allows you to have the opportunity to take big risks and make big mistakes.
When you’re young, you have nothing to lose. Possibilities are you aren’t strapped by all of the financial responsibilities that come with later adulthood like mortgage payments, car payments, tuition fees for your kids etc.
When you have the least amount to lose, take some long-shot risks. Because its the disastrous failures of these years that will set you up for your life successes down the line. They are the best lessons of your life.
#2. Avoid assuming you can attain all of your goals.
You set out to do A, B or C and either you accomplish all of them or you don’t. If you do, you’re GREAT. If you don’t, you fail .
It's agreeable to always have goals and have something to work towards, but attaining all of those goals is beside the point. Life doesn’t actually work that way all the time.
As you grow, you will discover that some of the life goals you set for yourself are not the things you actually wanted, and most of the things are just not important.
The whole point of goals is to get up and to hit some preferred benchmark. The value in any enterprise always comes from the process of failing and trying, not in achieving.
#3. You can't forcibly retain friendship
There are two subdivisions of friends in this life: the kind when you go away for a long time and come back, you feel nothing's changed, and the kind when you go away for a long time and come back, you feel everything’s changed.
You can’t force a friendship with someone. Either it’s there or it’s not.
You can't predict which friends will stick with you and which ones won’t. It’s not that those other people are bad people or bad friends. It’s not their fault. It’s just life.
#4. You will not have any idea what you are doing.
Nobody has any idea what they’re doing in their early life, and that continues further into adulthood. Everyone is just working off of their current best guess.
You may change your jobs, careers, industry at least once in your 20s. You will rarely have any clue what you are doing.
The truth is you will never know what things will happen. You pay attention to opportunities and act on them. Things just happens.
#5. Majority of people essentially want the same things.
From a broad perspective, people around the world are basically the same. Everyone spends most of their time worrying about food, money, their job and their family, even people who are rich and well fed. Everybody is afraid of failure. Everyone loves their friends and family yet also gets the most irritated by them.
Humans are, by and large, the same. It’s just the details that get shuffled around. Roses are not red but the details are. Judge people not by who they are, but by what they do. This world has all kinds of people. Some are gracious people and some are obnoxious people. And you don’t know who you’re dealing with until you spend enough time with a person to see what they do, not what they look like, or where they’re from or what gender they are.
#6. Thinking and doing are two very different things.
Success never comes to look for you while you wait around thinking about it. You are what you do, not what you say you’ll do.
Good things don’t come to those who wait; they come to those who work on
meaningful goals. Ask yourself what’s really important and then have the courage to build your life around your answer.
Remember, if you wait until you feel 100% ready to begin, you’ll likely be waiting the rest of your life.
#7. Internet is full of extremes.
Your life will immediately get better when you realize that the information you consume online is greatly influenced by the 10% of each extreme view and that 90% of life actually occurs in the silent middle-ground where most of the population actually lives.
When you read the internet, you will legally start to think that World War 3 is close at hand, that Ebola is the end of the world, that corporations rule the world through some illegal act, that there’s a war on Christmas, that all women are lying (which is fairly accurate), that all poor people are lazy and destroying the government, etc.
It’s important to sometimes withdraw to that quiet 90% and remind yourself that life is simple, people are good, and the deep opening in the earth's surface that appear to separate us are often just cracks.
#8. The world seldom think about you.
No matter what you do, one day it will be forgotten. It will be as if you never existed, even though you did. Nobody will care. Nobody seldom think about you. Nobody cares what you actually say or do with your life.
The good news is you can get away with a lot of stupid things and people will forget and forgive you for it. It simply means that there’s absolutely a reason to be the person that you want to be. The pain of un-blocking yourself will be short and the reward will last a lifetime.
#9. The result of small things matter more than the big things.
Once a interviewer asked Dustin Moskovitz, the co-founder of Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg’s college roommate, what it felt like to be part of Facebook’s “overnight success.” He replied, “If by ‘overnight success’ you mean staying up and coding all night, every night for SIX years straight, then it felt really tiring and stressful.”
We have a natural inclination to assume, things just happen as they are. We tend to only see the result of things and not the difficult process and all of the failures that went into producing the result.
We have this idea that we have to do just this one big thing that is going to completely change the world, top to bottom. We don't realize that those “one big things” are actually composed of hundreds and thousands of daily small things that must be silently and consistently maintained over long periods of time with little outward display.
#10. Your parents are people too.
See your parents not as protectors or uncool authoritarians but as friends, who are doing their best despite often not knowing what they’re doing.
Possibilities are your parents screwed some things up during your
childhood. And you will start to notice all of these screw-ups while you are in your adulthood. It can kick up a lot of bitterness and regret.
Acknowledge, accept, and forgive your parent’s flaws. They’re people too. They’re doing their best, even though they don’t always know what the best is.
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