7 things I wish I knew at 20

i recently turned 30 which means my 20s is done and damn and it feels like extreme relief but taught me a lot and that's what this video is going to be about seven things i wish i knew at 20. the most powerful lessons that i've personally learned over the past decade enjoy number one your twenties won't be the time of your life don't get me wrong they're gonna be cool they'll be fine but according to most of the people i know who are older than me and myself now that i've finished my twenties they're a

little bit over hyped and i think that where this comes from is how your 20s are portrayed in advertising and tv and movies you know we're showing this whirlwind of cocktails and cool romances and interesting jobs and so before we get to our 20s we've had like an entire childhood of this expectation of this wow i'll have five friends and one of them's called chandler and you'll be a writer like carrie bradshaw you'll be young you'll be beautiful and all your self-discovery will be charming and marketable but then you get to your twenties and you're

like ah that was only one side of the story what we see a bit less of is the fact that you're inexperienced you're broke you're scared you have a whole slew of mental health issues and a childhood back catalogue of drama that you have to work through instead of the heineken ad type 20s what i'd say that your 20s really look like is a combination of the two yeah you've got the fun times the times where you party when you take wild risks when you fall in love all the cool stuff but for the most

of it you feel like a naive child in the adult world and you're finding it hard to be taken seriously you're broke you're lost and you're emotionally volatile it's uh i don't know it's a cool thing to have in my past put it that way two you don't do things for you you do things for future you this is a lesson that i learned in my later 20s and it was a pretty simple lesson every time i have a decision ask myself what does future me want so for example when i wanted to quit drugs

and alcohol i'd say what does tomorrow may want does tomorrow may want to feel shame and sad and the first time that i answered no the days ticked over tomorrow me was inevitable because it always is and i felt instead of shame this tremendous amount of self-respect and i was like oh oh i get it now our decisions create our future i have no idea how that lesson just bypassed me but it made me think about it in a more long-term sense i was like all right if i make decisions to make tomorrow me happy

and that makes my life better surely if i make decisions to make me three years from now happy that will make my life amazing so i started doing that i was like all right what does me three years from now on and the cool thing about that is three years passing is inevitable you will become that person and you'll thank yourself three years ago and be like oh man you really have my back thanks for working so hard or thanks for working on your body or thanks for investing the time in this or investing the

money in this and i think that was just a really cool lesson to learn i mean i've heard all the cliches you reap what you sow but to truly experience it was something else three assume everyone's got the way i see it you've got two options you can assume everybody's doing better than you you can put yourself in the victim role and you can put them on a pedestal you can endow them with a perfect life that you end up becoming resentful of even though it's fictional until everybody's just hurt and hating each other or

you can assume that they're fighting a crazy big demon just like yourself and that they are struggling just like you and you can meet them with compassion and love and give them space to express themselves obviously don't feel guilty if you can't act like a saint all the time you've got too man but what i found is that the latter is always true everybody always has the demons man everybody i've never found an exception in fact there was this one time i had to interview a guy he was like a famous artist and he'd grown

up kind of like nice upper middle class family and then just transitioned into stardom and it didn't seem like there was that much struggle from my point of view and i remember after the interview i had this resent and i was like oh damn you've got the easiest life ever and then a few months later he came out with this piece about how he was struggling with depression and anxiety and i was like damn i was too arrogant to see that and it reinforced the idea that i'm struggling you're struggling we're all struggling but we

struggle a little bit less if we acknowledge it and struggle together hell yeah four at some point drugs stop being fun don't get me wrong drugs start out really fun but over time they get less fun and less fun until one day they're not fun at all now here's the thing that i wish i knew at 20. they don't get better that point does not reverse it's not like more drugs will eventually make them fun again once they start to suck they stay sucking and there's this idea that we all cling to because every once

in a while they are really cool and that's usually because of the company in the environment you're in not because of the drugs but then we're like oh maybe the drugs will get cool again but they don't they just don't once they start to suck they stay sucking it took me way too long to learn this but there's a terence mckenna quote that i really like he was referring to psychedelics but i kind of like it for all drugs and alcohol once you get the message hang up the phone put more simply if drugs have

started to suck it's time to change maybe there's another quote that i really like which is sobriety has given me all the things that drugs and alcohol promised and i would say largely i'm not 100 sober i still slip up i ain't no saint but i've found that to be 100 true five don't stress if you don't crush it this decade i've talked about this before but damn man there is a freakish pressure that the internet is putting on young people especially young creative people to be stupidly successful super young and to pump out as

much high quality stuff as they possibly can like an amount that isn't even human and the result is a whole generation of people being like am i not enough it's cooked man if you're in your 20s and you're watching this and you're like why haven't i achieved my wildest dreams by now then you're not alone at all oh my god you're in like the 99.9 maturity the thing that i wish i knew in my 20s was that the thing that i was chasing wasn't the thing that was going to fulfill me and i know it

sounds trite like material success won't make you happy which is a phrase i'm usually suspicious of because it almost always comes from people who have heaps of material success but what i've found to be more true is once your needs and standards are met so once you kind of got like enough money enough food enough space around you and enough freedom everything beyond that is on you so i guess the life advice would be if you're quite focused on traditional success split that a little bit and also focus on building up systems within your head

that make you appreciate what you got i finished this book last night by greg mcewen called effortless and there's a really cool quote note that says if you focus on what you lack you lose what you have if you focus on what you have you gain what you lack in short get your needs met be grateful then go for success flipping those last two doesn't work i've tried six hard choices easy life easy choices hard life i've talked about this one as well on this channel but it really bears repeating in a video like this

it's a quote from the olympic weightlifter jersey gregoreck what it means is if you pick the easy path you know like sleep and chill and smoking cones all day your life will ironically end up really hard you wake up at 30 and you'll be like ah man i ain't got nothing but if you pick the hard life you know freaking running cleaning working your life will end up really easy there's another bro dude jocko willing who has this mantra that i love discipline equals freedom and he's right the more disciplined you are the more mental

freedom that you buy yourself because you're like yeah i did all this therefore i respect myself therefore i have space to just exist the things that you haven't done don't torment you in your head because you've done them i think i used to think that this only applied to big decisions like should i move to this city or that city should i take this job or this job but what i've realized and what i wish i knew at 20 was this is way better applied to smaller decisions everyday things around your life you know the

micro decisions that you make every single day what do i have for lunch a salad or a bucket of oil that i drink through a silly straw what am i gonna do take my dogs for a walk or scroll on my phone and get sad should i call my mom or my dealer you get the idea even more so than the big decisions these little choices add up and form your life seven wherever you go there you are you ready to get real i'd turn my chair around and sit like a cool substitute teacher if

i could but i can't it's got arms so for most of my 20s i ran i ran from myself i had a bit of excess money from things and i i traveled a lot with that i go overseas a lot i did so many drugs i tried to throw myself into a career i didn't like i pretty much spent every waking moment distracted and it's because on some level i was scared of staring at myself you know the thing that you meant to do in meditation that and that is because and this is something i

think defines a lot of people's 20s but i had unaddressed trauma from my childhood and i needed to process it there was a time when i would have been 28 and my mum pried about something something which had happened to me when i was younger which i didn't even know she knew about i think we were talking about a person that she had listened to this interview of this guy who had been sexually abused when he was younger and then went on to live this fantastic life and his wife was his rock and you know

he was this entertainer and had a good life and what i didn't realize is that she was drawing a parallel to me and then she just turned the conversation he goes oh a bit like this and in my head that was a secret and my plan was to keep it a secret until i died but in that moment my mom kind of set me free and helped me i guess get out the fact that i've been sexually abused sexually abused as a child later that day felicity came home and i told her and i thought

that she was going to be disgusted with me and leave me which is so wrong and she didn't and she was just full of love because i was able to admit that i think i started processing all the other stuff that was probably the worst of all the trauma there's still like a bunch of other stuff you know everyone's got their freaking closet right but what i was able to do was to look at myself and kind of be still and it just changed who i am it made me more honest made me a better

person i don't know it was cool there's a really cool lewis house quote on this one where he goes you're only as sick as your secrets and damn that is so damn true so yeah that's my list thank you very much for watching i hope you got something out of that if you are past your 20s and you want to leave some advice chuck some in the comments if you're in your 20s and you've got something out of that let me know in any case good luck with what is going to be inevitably a chaotic

decade and other than that have a lovely day catch [Music]