is it just me or does it seem like every other broccoli had Zoomer these days is a millionaire no offense to gen Z I'm just poking a bit of fun but for real if you're paying any attention to the finance space at all on social media it may seem a lot like every other day there's a new young person who's a Deca millionaire you may have also seen a plethora of videos titled something along the lines of I wasted my 20s or things I wish I would have done in my 20s I should have taken
more cold showers I should have bought more rental properties I should have shipped more cheap products from Alibaba and you know what honestly it should have been a minimalist empty house house hacking biohacking keto dieting productivity maximizing speed reading podcast host jokes aside I don't think that's actually what most of these videos are saying but I thought that today I would throw my hat into the ring and basically say that I don't think that you are about to currently are or have wasted your 20s and I say this as a 29 year old who does
not feel like I have wasted my twenties despite not currently being a Deca millionaire in fact I don't see any portion of my life so far as wasted I actually look back upon it all pretty fondly despite making numerous horrendous mistakes despite experiencing extreme emotional pain and just overall probably a lot of very cringy moments and perhaps most painful of all many instances where I know that I did not give my 100 best effort and I fell short because of it so if social media has you feeling today as if you're just a Cheeto eating
bum maybe hang out with me for a moment and uh stick around for a little chat because I may have a different perspective to consider and if not well I'm afraid there's uh there's no refunds so this discussion I think is going to be heavily centered around two concepts success and happiness I think I would like to begin with success first and then I believe the conversation will naturally evolve its way towards happiness when somebody is talking about wasting their 20s it's usually because they're referring to some Metric of success that they didn't hit or
they didn't achieve as fast as they would have liked to but hang on a second what is success how should we Define that how would you define that for a lot of people it's probably a career oriented thing right maybe it's a monetary value maybe it's a job title maybe it's running your own business Etc but is that all success is probably not right you might have a desire for your appearance to look a certain way you might have a desire to have a certain quality or quantity of romantic Partners you might want your living
space to be a certain way you might want to have traveled to X number of destinations the list could go on and on the point is we can see that the list of things that we can categorize under the topic of success is virtually limitless meaning that each of us should be able to align ourselves with the different types of categories that we feel speak to us the most but do we do this I would ask you to ask yourself who's defining success for you is it you or someone else because I think that if
we allow somebody else to Define what success means then we will never be successful growing up I had a very hard time defining what success meant for myself and if you would allow me I'd like to tell you a bit of a story about how I was by most metrics I guess you could say a successful kid and I would like to focus on one example of that in this particular story like a lot of Northern Ontario Boys by the time I was basically able to walk my feet were put into ice skates and from
that moment forward I started playing hockey and so I started playing in this league I believe it was called Mickey Mouse I'm not sure if it's still called that anymore but that's basically the first League you play in when you start playing hockey as a very little kid and in this Mickey Mouse League I was a very naturally gifted player to the point where the league actually had to Institute a goal limit in games I think it was like three goals or something like that that one player could score per game so I would score
my three goals for the game and then I would basically have the puck in the other person in the other team's end and I'd be waiting for somebody else on my team to catch up so I could try and pass the puck to them and hopefully they would be able to score now all of this isn't to brag about how I was like a Chell worthy player a few years after I stopped my diaper the point is that at this time I did not feel successful why let's continue the story so we fast forward a
number of years and I'm trying out to play competitive hockey and after a couple of stressful rounds of tryouts I end up making the team and I even get to wear an A on my jersey so now there's no goal limits I'm surrounded by people who love playing hockey and who take the game very seriously and hey there's even some people who actually have aspirations of playing in the show one day I get to represent my hometown across the region and the in home games the stands would be packed with fans and in my community
hockey was kind of the center of it so being able to do this and represent your community it was kind of a big deal even a few of the girls that I thought were cute but I would never be able to say a single word of anything that resembled English to would come watch the games and as I'm sure all of you can remember remember at a very young age crushes are are a very serious life or death matter and yet despite all of this stuff that should have been awesome and amazing and it seemed
like everything was going in the right direction I still did not feel like a successful hockey player isn't this quite a conundrum we have here why why would this be the case the answer as it turns out was also in the stands at my hockey games no it wasn't the cute girls I had a crush on it was something else it was hockey parents you see for pretty much my entire hockey career I don't even think I really ever got the chance to ask myself if I even wanted to play hockey I remember an instance
where we were filling out our player profiles for the team and I had to fill out some personal information about myself and one of the questions was who's your favorite NHL team and who's your favorite player and I really struggled answering these questions because I didn't really watch much hockey I liked to play it I thought it was fun but I didn't love the sport so despite checking off most of the boxes as you'd want to be checked off as a successful young hockey player I just didn't feel that way that is until just this
year this year I started playing ball hockey in a league with some friends of mine and in the first season that I played with them we came second last and I don't even think I scored a single goal in the entire season it was a success our second season that just wrapped up we came first in the regular season and then placed second in the playoffs it was also a success for the first time in my life despite playing for a very long period of time I finally feel like a successful hockey player because I
and I alone defined exactly what that meant reflecting on my 20s I realized that this is a common theme and to me this is far more important than any material success I've achieved take photography for example when I first started doing it as a hobby I would post my photos on Instagram to be able to share them but I always thought it was a bit strange because you're looking at this photo on on a tiny phone screen and then a little box on the tiny phone screen it would be like looking at a famous painting
on your phone instead of actually going to the gallery to see it in person it's just not an ideal way to look at something so kind of out of frustration I set up a website that I put the photos that I was proud of on and this felt like success to me if you happen to also have artistic outlets and you kind of feel frustrated with the way social media works right now then maybe making yourself a website could be a nice thing to do for yourself the good news is setting up a website is
exceedingly easy today thanks to the sponsor of today's video hostinger hostinger is a one-step shop to get your website up and running with no experience required and at a very low cost that's because they cover the three main things you need for a website they register a domain for you aka the website name they host the website for you and finally they have an in-house website builder which is super easy to use it features nice templates you can drag and drop to design on no coding required but they also integrate with WordPress if you're a
little bit more Savvy and want to go that route I know when I first built my web site I used I think like three different Services I used one to register the domain I used another one to host and then I used another one to build the website so it was overly complicated and it just didn't need to be that headache it would have been so much easier to just use something like hostinger where you can just do it all in one and they also have helpful tutorials to help you with every step of the
way to take a stab at your own website to Showcase your work you can head to the link in my description to get access to a limited time deal for additional money off an annual plan and then from there you can select the plan that best suits your needs if I were doing another website I would probably choose the WordPress hosting plan and go that route since WordPress is a pretty robust platform to design on while hostinger can handle all the back-end stuff while being integrated into WordPress nicely and so with all that said thank
you so much to hostinger for sponsoring this video by the way like I said my photography website is several years old at this point don't judge me on it I haven't updated it in a long time I actually have a different photography project in the works right now one that I think is going to be purely physical that I'm really enjoying thinking about and starting to work on again because it meets my own definition of success when it comes to photography so I think the thread I want to pull on from that whole discussion of
figuring out what success means to you is that I think your 20s are an excellent period for self-discovery how can you possibly have wasted your 20s if you look back on them and say damn I really messed that up or geez I should have done this instead I actually see that as a good thing because it means the person that you are today is looking back on that and realizing that you've changed you've grown you have have a better idea of what is important to you today I can lay out clearly a series of things
that are very important values to me and all my goals are oriented towards those values I've mentioned them a few times in the past but I'll mention them again briefly here so basically they rest on three pillars the first of those being Independence which is composed of financial Independence and mental Independence the second pillar being Vitality which is composed of physical and mental health but more than that even it's composed of having a good and proper energy flow within my body as woo-woo as that sounds and third and final pillar is meaning which is exploring
the questions of who I am what the universe is and what is my place in it but if you ask me to Define this even just a few years ago I wouldn't have been able to or at least nowhere near as clearly so how can we expect to proceed forward in the exact right direction when we're in our 20s if we don't even have the right map or a map at all this thought just came to me right now actually so I'm going to add this in here and that's that your 20s might actually be
an extremely powerful time because of the fact that it may be the first time in your life that outside voices are starting to dissipate from your life you've maybe left your parents house you've exited the school system you've you've left a lot of the guard rails that are set up in society to basically put you together according to the manufacturer's instructions and if you can allow yourself to experience that silence perhaps for the first time in your life maybe you can get a taste of what it's like to actually listen to yourself This was in
my 20s the first time I actually understood what intuition meant or to listen to and follow your heart I thought these were just nice phrases before but then I actually experienced and began to develop that ability I think not only does this come from silencing outside voices but it may also come from a specific type of knowledge and if you remember we talked about in a previous video the difference between first-hand knowledge and second-hand knowledge and of course the only way to acquire that special type of knowledge first-hand knowledge is through experiencing things I remember
that I used to get into big arguments with my parents when I was younger because as any parent would they tried to prevent me from doing the wrong things they tried to prevent me from getting into trouble and I tried to argue with them and explain that in my mind getting into trouble was actually essential to my development because how would I know the difference between right and wrong if I don't experience it for myself how can I know what the Moon looks like if I've never been allowed out into the night to experience for
myself sure somebody can tell me what the Moon looks like but does that really mean I understand what the Moon looks like it reminds me of so many of the tests I would take back when I was in school I mean multiple choice tests they're such a joke they literally give you the answer and so what I would do to study for them is I would flip through the textbook pretty quickly to look at every single bolded word in in all the chapters memorize the definition under the bolded word and then on the test I
would just look for that definition and be like well that's obviously the answer so I got great marks I did great on on tests like that but does that mean that I understood the material oh not at all that is a case of pure second hand knowledge in the same way somebody can tell you all the right things to do in your 20s and you can memorize them you can write them down you can stick it on a wall and look at it every single day but are you actually going to understand those things without
going through and just fumbling through life yourself how can you know you want to be successful if you don't even understand what that means for yourself how can you know that you want to achieve a certain amount of money and that this is going to make your life better in some way if you've never actually had that much money and perhaps most importantly how do you know if you achieved everything you ever wanted that you would be in a better mental state than you are today if you think your 20s have been wasted I would
suggest to you that your 30s your 40s and maybe even the rest of your life will be wasted as well because you may be fixated on the destination a destination which will inevitably reveal itself to be a carrot strung to a stick just beyond the tip of your nose and this carrot it doesn't get any closer and the whole time you've been staring at this carrot you've missed everything going on around you when all is said and done when we are at the end of our time here I would think that we would realize that
everything along the way was actually the carrot whole time the moment I stopped playing hockey for the arena stopped shooting photography for Instagram and stopped waiting to become financially independent in order to be free was the moment I became successful and every moment up until that point was not a waste it was a Winding kaleidoscopic Trail that ultimately made me and I would walk it again in a heartbeat
