With age comes wisdom, the ability to make good decisions based on knowledge, experience and insight. You’re able to distill the core drivers and let go of the fluff and the ever present distractions. What would be the one piece of advice you would want your younger self, starting out with their career, to be absolutely clear about?
Young people are notoriously resistant to good counsel. They think they know enough to reach the top on their own. Why would they not? After all, they are smarter than their parents, right? There is no way they’re going to make those stupid mistakes others around them made. Fast forward some twenty years and their tone is markedly different. “Only if I had known this and that, my life would have turned out so much better,” they say. They realize they wasted a lot of valuable time and resources focusing on the “wrong” things. But why?
Your life can be reduced to this one statement: the freedom to spend your time doing what matters most to you. The three variables are freedom, time and what matters (purpose). To a young mind, the shiniest of the three is freedom. What typically gives the most freedom? Money … and lots of it! The deep bank account provides the freedom to explore, to do all those things the parents wouldn’t allow them to do. He can have all the sex he wants, drive the dream car his parents couldn’t afford and accumulate the toys that make him the envy of his peers. Social media becomes a constant companion who broadcasts his dream life to the world. What could be better than this?
Is it all about the pursuit of happiness?
To your young self, this is the stuff dreams are made of. That is, until you realize that the happiness that things bring is short-lived. Not only that but it can become addictive. Once you get used to the latest shiny object, the excitement wears off and you just have to get an even shinier one to keep that high.
That brings us to the key question: is life really about the pursuit of happiness? Remember the three variables, freedom, time and what matters? Time is the unique of the lot. First, it is a constant. That is the scientific way of saying it affects everybody equally. We all have twenty four hours a day even though some people get more done in that same period. They use a secret weapon, but that is for another post. Second, time is finite. Once it’s gone, it’s gone forever. As a young person, though, you believe you have it in abundance and that means you put little value on it.
Studies say the most common regret people have at the end of their lives is this: “I wished I had the courage to pursue the dreams that were important to me.” That means the third variable, what matters, is arguably the most important of the three. It is your Stella Polaris, your North Star, your point of reference.
What should your top priority be?
The question then is, “Which should you spend your time pursuing, the freedom or what matters most to you?” In a way, this is a non-sensical question. The two are not mutually exclusive. It is not whether one is more important than the other. It is an issue of sequencing, which should come first.
The happiest people are the ones who spend most of their time doing what matters most to them. This is tied to what they believe they were born to do. It is what they believe their life purpose is.
To paraphrase sociologist Martha Back, “When you feel like dancing, resting can feel like doing hard labor.”
A lot of people start the journey of their lives with their priorities flipped the wrong way around. It seems logical that pursuing financial freedom should come first because it would allow you to do what excites you the most. The problem with that belief is that the adventure towards financial freedom is much more convoluted than it appears. It’s going to take you very long to accomplish. You wake up some thirty years later still not financially independent and wonder, “Where did my life go?” Your life is your time.
Lao Tzu, a Chinese philosopher, is credited with the statement, “The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.” I think that statement is incomplete. My version is, “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a clear picture of the destination, then only should you take the first step.” So many have been taking first steps to places they didn’t like. The first step is important but it is the clarity of the destination that is even more critical.
And we’re back to the question raised at the beginning, “What is the one core advice you’d give your twenty-one-year old self? Yes, I have found that most people struggle to reduce everything to just one piece of advice. But that is the assignment and that’s what you have to do. Not two or three pieces of advice but just one! What will it be? Okay, let’s make it easier. Can you do it in one sentence? But it mustn’t be a monster paragraph of a sentence. Deal?
Mine is this: Find out why you were born and build Money Trees (assets) to fund the adventure of making it happen.
Conclusion.
If you fully believe in a cause, you will do whatever it takes to make it happen. By definition, a cause is bigger than you. It is your contribution to your ecosystem, the world around you. Even if you’re a young idealistic person, you’ll quickly figure out the importance of strategic partnerships and that you need to transform into a warrior who will grow to become the best version of themselves.
The adventure is going to force you to undergo a process of metamorphosis. It is less about acquiring this or that shiny object or being liked by peers. It is more about your identity, transforming into your best possible self. The only way that happens is from the inside out, not from the outside in. The accompanying video (https://youtu.be/rg49LBYTiVw) elaborates on the often misunderstood immense power of becoming (identity).