20 Lessons I’ve Learned by My 20th Birthday

Today is my birthday! I’m not much of a holiday or birthday person but I figured I should do something for it. I’ve been reflecting a lot lately, so I figured assembling a list of 20 lessons I’ve learned by my 20th birthday would be a great way of celebrating my birthday. So here it is! Many of these are about finding what you want to spend your limited time and energy on, how to do so effectively, and how to not regret doing so. You might find thinking of the lessons through this lens is helpful. But a few disclaimers before we jump in:

1. These are not ranked by importance or anything. I just tried to sort them in a way to create some kind of narrative progression (if I were to give emphasis to some of the lessons, I would say 1, 2, 10, 12, 14, 18, 19 and 20 have impacted my life/actions the most).
2. I do not claim to live by all of these perfectly but these are all things I strive to live by.
3. I do not claim that any of these are profound. They are simply things that I found are impactful and find myself considering often.
4. I use success as a general term, interpret it in whatever way you would define you being successful.

Now with those out of the way, let’s get started.

1. Search for the important things

“The unexamined life is not worth living.” -Socrates

Making progress is a lot easier when you have the goal of making progress on something, and forming that goal is much easier when you acknowledge there is something to create a goal for. If I could force myself to put 30 productive minutes into anything each week, I would choose reflecting. Reflecting is how you guide your sails and identify what all the time and energy you’re putting in is for. With that being said, it’s not easy. There’s a reason I said force; I find reflecting to be quite difficult sometimes. Time spent on it can feel quite unproductive sometimes if you don’t have big revelations. But in the long run, it will always make a difference.

“The only real test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life.” -Naval Ravikant

Finding the important things can be one of two things: you can identify things that you should be doing that you currently are not and you can identify things you shouldn’t be doing that you currently are doing. Both of these are extremely important; you can only do so much, so you should focus on doing the good stuff and not doing the bad. It sounds simple but is hard to execute on. Identifying the things you should be doing takes critical thinking and foresight. Identifying the things you shouldn’t be doing takes introspection and humility to admit your mistake. Again, these are not easy, but trying to make progress without doing them is like trying to find a needle in a haystack with your eyes closed.

2. Take responsibility of the things you can control, disregard the rest

“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” -Reinhold Niebuhr

I know this is a cliche, but the list would not be complete without it and there is some nuance to it that I feel is often disregarded. I see many people who are too eager to say they cannot change things, but this will only eat at them, as I believe deep down they know it wasn’t totally out of their hands. This is why I phrased this lesson the way I did; I believe the default approach should be to assume you can affect the situation, but if it becomes clear you cannot, you should accept that. All of these other lessons would be useless if I spent my time on things I couldn’t control or didn’t spend time on the things I could control. Identify both and act accordingly.

3. The self is the thing you have control over

“It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.” -Epictetus

This lesson is pretty related to the last; it is much easier to change your habits than those of other people. And in all actuality, the best way to lead to change in others is typically by displaying the change you would like to see in yourself. People will be more likely to change their opinions or habits when they see what you reap from your actions rather than what you tell them they will reap.

“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.” -Rumi

This is not the only reason you should have control over yourself. There will be many times where your actions will not convince others of change, and so if that is your sole reason for doing so, you will become unmotivated and eventually quit. In all actions, you should find your why for doing it if you want to continue. I have found that any internal why will stand unwavering much longer than any other external why. There is so much variance with your interactions with others which will ultimately lead to second guessing if you cannot be confident with it in isolation.

4. Don’t expect change to be easy

“We cannot become what we want, by remaining what we are.” -Max DePree

Changing your behavior, your habits, or yourself in general is not going to be easy. Habits are habits because it is what you do by default; it takes energy and intention to do otherwise. If you want to behave differently, you are going to have to put this energy and intention into it for a while before it becomes the new habit. I believe it’s important to recognize the effort you will have to put in. If you don’t, every time you exert effort toward change, you will also have to exert effort to decide it’s worth it, as you hadn’t already acknowledged the effort and decided it was worth it.

“But we cannot sit and stare at our wounds forever.” -Haruki Murakami (1Q84)

5. Optimism makes progress easier

This is similar to the last lesson, in that it can help you stay motivated. There will be many times where you have to put in a considerable amount of effort towards something and there will be no immediate results. Being optimistic about the future will help you feel OK with committing this effort. If you believe that the future is doomed regardless, it will feel futile to try to do anything. Instead, if you believe that any effort you put in will be returned ten times over, it will feel easy to work toward long-term goals. Both of these become cyclic; if you put effort in, you will see results and believe results will come with future effort; if you don’t put in effort, you won’t see results and won’t believe results will come even if you try in the future. Which leads us into lesson number 6.

6. Be aware of cycles

Cycles can be the most powerful things in your life, but they can also become immensely destructive. By cycles I mean habits or situations that become self-fulfilling or lead to you being more likely to be in that same situation again. By definition, it is more difficult to get in and out of them than it is to stay within them. Thus, it’s incredibly important to be aware of the cycles in your life so that you can use the limited amount of energy you have to put yourself in a place in which less energy is required to do the best thing in the future.

Most cycles that we have control over can be categorized into mental thoughts/expectations and habits. Mental thoughts/expectations were already discussed in the previous lesson so I will focus on habits here. In What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Haruki Murakami mentions how he never takes two days off in a row from running. This idea is also discussed in Atomic Habits by James Clear; missing one day is a mistake, missing two days is the start of a new habit.

Even if you don’t want to do something that second day, it’ll only be more difficult the third day if you don’t today. Similarly, if you’re trying to stop a habit, it’ll be more difficult to stop tomorrow if you do it again today, as you’ll just have one more instance of engraining that habit within yourself. As a result, it is hugely beneficial to be aware of these cycles so that you can more easily identify the easiest time and place to start and stop them. This does not necessarily make it easy, but it will always make it easier.

7. Consistency is key

“The thousand times that he had proved it meant nothing. Now he was proving it again. Each time was a new time.” -Ernest Hemingway (The Old Man and the Sea)

While cycles are extremely important and impactful, it is not always sufficient to be reliant on them. There will always be unforeseen situations that will counteract the cycle’s power to continue automatically. In these moments you have to be the one to act in a way that continues the healthy cycles. Being a considerate and calm-mannered person is something that you can practice and will eventually become more automatic to you. But there will be moments that test you and make you want to break; it is crucial that you continue to exhibit the good behavior even when it is difficult.

Usually the times in which something is most difficult are also when it is most impactful for you to be consistent. In this example, you least want to be considerate or calm-mannered when you believe someone has slighted you or acted in opposition to your wellbeing. If you crack in these moments, this will only lead to more turmoil for you and possibly the relationship in which this situation is arising. Instead, if you remain calm, this will usually lead to that initial issue arising less often.

“Consistency doesn’t guarantee you’re gonna be successful. Not being consistent will guarantee you won’t reach success.” -Chris Williamson

8. Assume ignorance before malice when possible

I believe on average people are good and so most slights are a result of ignorance rather than actual malice. Everyone makes mistakes, including you and me. It is easier to move past other people’s mistakes when you can identify them as mistakes and do not try to find deeper reasons for them, that usually do not exist. It is important to mention though that sometimes people are acting out of malice and it is sometimes necessary to recognize this malice in order to protect yourself. However, I believe this is much less common in the case of strangers or people you are not very close with, and as a result, it is on net better to assume ignorance rather than malice by default. Resisting the judgement also makes it easier to learn lessons from these mistakes, as you are using less energy judging the other person’s motives and instead can analyze and learn from their actions.

“I have learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to those teachers.” -Khalil Gibran

9. Be aware of your biases

Your brain does so much on a day to day basis; it is truly incredible. It is only able to do this because of the simplifications and assumptions it makes about things. For most things, these do no harm and allow you to use less energy on simple tasks and ultimately get more done. However, there are also many situations in which this can get dangerous. These simplifications and assumptions are not always true and can lead to large mistakes if not kept in check.

My uncle gave me a copy of Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman as a graduation present. This book is what enlightened me on what processes each of our brains are going through on a daily basis and what side effects these processes can have. One of the biases discussed in the book is the halo effect. The halo effect is a cognitive bias where a single trait can lead to you changing your perspective of someone as a whole, even when the topics are completely unrelated.

For example, someone was rude to you and now you will be less trusting of their professional opinion on something, even though these two situations are completely uncorrelated. The reverse is also true. If someone is nice to you, you might be more trusting of what they have to say about a topic, even if there is no reason to believe they are actually knowledgeable on that topic.

“This is the essence of intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.” -Daniel Kahneman (Thinking Fast and Slow)

This can be explained by the above quote: it might be hard to assess whether you should trust someone on a given topic, but it’s quite easy to figure out if you like them. So sometimes, you will answer the first question by substituting the second question without realizing it. Your brain has learned to do this because for a lot of things these questions are correlated (e.g., Do I want to hang out with this person? → Do I like this person?) and it can save you energy. Unfortunately, it isn’t very good at figuring out when these questions are actually correlated, so you have to be the one to keep it in check.

Since I became aware of this bias, I have been able to better understand so much of the illogical things people do. Nearly all illogical behavior arises from biases; if you are able to become conscious of these biases, you can mitigate the illogical behavior. For example, I have quotes in this blog post from people who I disagree with on major topics, but I don’t believe that should discredit the good things they have to say. You will have so many more resources to learn from when you stop yourself from ignoring these resources for invalid reasons.

10. Be so confident, it seems delusional

“The most successful people I know believe in themselves almost to the point of delusion.” -Sam Altman

Now that we have discussed some of the things I believe have a large impact on our life and success, we can go over what I believe is one of the main things that differentiates me from other people: confidence. I believe confidence is one of the most impactful traits a person can have. If I have not already made it clear, I believe a person’s mentality is usually self-fulfilling.

“I will either find a way, or I will make one.” -Hannibal Barca

If you want impressive accomplishments, you will need to do difficult things. If you are spending energy on trying to figure out if you can do something, you have less energy for the actual doing. Being confident can help you preserve this energy for the productive work toward something. It will also make it easier to keep going when failures or set-backs do occur, similar to optimism in lesson 5.

“The impossible happens to those who try” -Alexander the Great

Before we move on though, I should emphasize that this is a very difficult line to walk. It is very easy to go too far with this, something I have done at many points in my life. To help define this line, I will discuss some very important caveats in the next few lessons.

11. Assume you don’t know the right answer

“Despite my willingness to understand, I just couldn’t accept such arrogant certainty.” -Albert Camus (The Stranger)

While I believe it is important to be confident about the final goal, I think it’s crucial to not be set on every step towards that goal. Roger Federer had a match win rate of nearly 80% but a point win rate of only 54%. This is a good analogy for most things, you don’t have to do every small step correct to succeed in the overall task. Even the most successful people do not succeed with every step, instead they realize when they made a mistake and work toward finding the correct solution. They perform loss-prevention from the mistakes and leverage the successes.

“We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.” -Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace)

The best way to do this is to not be overly confident on everything. In my mind, I view this as assuming I don’t have the right answer. This goes beyond not assuming you have the correct answer; it is about actively assuming you are wrong. You already have a subconscious bias to believe you are correct. In order to be truly balanced, you have to counteract this subconscious bias by consciously believing you are wrong. Once you are truly balanced, you will be more able to perform loss-prevention from the mistakes and leverage the successes.

“It’s only because of their stupidity that they’re able to be so sure of themselves.” -Franz Kafka (The Trial)

It is much easier to gain wisdom and knowledge when you are actively looking for it, and oftentimes the best places to search for it are in other people. There is a reason this post has so many quotes: others have already said some of these things more eloquently than I can. It would be a mistake to not recognize that.

12. Don’t look up to anyone, don’t look down on anyone

As a corollary of lessons 11 and 9, I believe people are too eager to give extreme levels of trust or distrust into people. People’s competencies on separate topics are poorly correlated, so it is dangerous to make global statements about people. As a result, I have long believed you should not look up to anyone nor look down on anyone. Doing so, in either direction, gives bias too much influence over your perception. It is ok to trust or distrust individual people on individual topics that they have displayed competency/lack of competency in, but try your best to not make encompassing assessments of people.

“A person who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter, is not a nice person.” -Dave Barry

When I started focusing on this, I realized that most everyone in my life had roughly the same level of credibility when accounting for all possible fields. I have found very few people who I think are incredibly knowledgeable about everything from physics to music to philosophy to climbing. That is ok, you can find people that are knowledgeable about each individual field. But you should not idolize someone because they are great at one category, nor vilify someone for not understanding another field. In the end, you will likely find that most everyone is quite equal and should be treated and thought of as such.

13. Focus on your life and your goals

“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.” -Friedrich Nietzsche

This lesson is quite related to the first lesson of finding the important things; the important things for you are often quite different than the important things for other people. So if you are too focused on other people’s goals, you will get distracted from what’s important to you. Furthermore, oftentimes what you are doing won’t make sense to someone else; sometimes, it is worth trying to explain your rationale, other times it is unimportant to do so. In either case, it is not necessary for you to change your actions or goals to reflect what someone else cares about.

“Maybe your garden isn’t growing because every time a flower grows you cut it to prove to someone that you’re a gardener.”

14. You don’t have to expect the same of others as you expect from yourself

“Know all the theories, master all the techniques, but as you touch a human soul, be just another human soul.” -C.G. Jung

This lesson is one that is very important to me, as some of my greatest hardships and difficulties came from not understanding this earlier in life. Per the last lesson, you should be able to care about things independent of how other people view them. But the inverse is also true, other people should be able to freely care or not care about things, regardless of the value you give to these things.

In middle school, competition math was very important to me. I spent a lot of time studying and I cared greatly about improving and placing well. I don’t think there is anything wrong with this. However, I made one crucial mistake: I began judging other people based on their math skills. This led to me becoming very arrogant in general. I attributed some of my self-worth to how good I was at math and so I judged others the same, and since I was good at math compared to others I got the idea that I was better than them.

This might sound silly, which it is to some extent, but I believe this happens in very subtle ways that can have large influence over your perspective without you realizing it. If you are going to be comfortable allowing yourself to decide your values independent of others, you cannot judge others when they don’t live up to those same values.

15. Be cognizant of others

One of humanity’s greatest biases is only paying attention to themselves. As a result, people have gotten used to people not paying attention to them. This provides a great opportunity for having large impact with little effort. If you go against this bias, people will appreciate it. If you are paying attention, there are so many hints about what the people close to you are going through. Be on the lookout for these hints and act accordingly when you find them.

This does not take much energy, but the people around you will be very appreciative. They are not used to people being cognizant; so when you are, it stands out. This will also usually lead to them being more cognizant of you in the future and valuing their relationships with you more. Though I should mention that I don’t think this incentive should be your sole reason for building this habit.

16. Don’t make slights against other people

I know this may seem obvious, but I believe the contrary has become widely normalized in our society. Humor at other people’s expense is such a common occurrence, despite the harm it does. I became most aware of this when reflecting on spending time with my friend Sathya. Sathya is one of the most enjoyable people to be around. So much so that oftentimes when other friends of mine meet Sathya, they mention to me how great he is.

While reflecting on this, I found what I believe to be what makes him so enjoyable to be around: he never says anything at another person’s expense. As a result, basically everyone enjoys being around him, as no one feels hurt or insulted by the things he says. Ever since I noticed this, I have put great effort into trying to form this habit. Though it is quite difficult; as once you become more aware of it, you will see how common it is for people to make slights against others. This has become normalized as “humor” but still poses the same threats of making people feel uncomfortable or insulted. Thus, when you stop yourself from making these kinds of comments, people will ultimately feel more comfortable around you and enjoy the time spent together more.

17. When in doubt, be authentic

“He wanted to live life so intensely that he could die at any moment without regrets.” -Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (The Life of a Stupid Man)

No matter what system you use for deciding your actions, there will be times where you don’t have a clear answer of what to do. I have found the best default to be being authentic. As much as I hate to admit it, sometimes being authentic isn’t the best thing to do. But I do believe it is the best default course of action. It is important to have a default decision, as it is the best way to prevent regret. And for all the options of default actions, I find that authenticity generalizes the best to all situations and, therefore, is nearly always a fine-enough course of action.

18. Communication solves problems and resolves excuses

When there is an issue, there is almost always someone to talk with to work through it. Sometimes this is a person involved, other times this is just someone knowledgeable or wise about the topic. In both situations, it will be immensely helpful in trying to find solutions. Additionally, there are many times when you are making excuses for not doing something. Once you start communicating, these excuses stop being excuses as they either get resolved or are shown to be valid reasons for not doing something. Both are valuable, because even if you are unable to solve the initial issue, you will be able to greatly decrease the amount of regret you may have later about the situation if you are able to get rid of these excuses.

19. You can have anything, but not everything

I hope through these lessons you have realized the great amount of control you can have over your life. So much so that you can basically get or achieve anything. However, this does not come without sacrifice. To work toward something, you must give up another goal. I often repeat this lesson to myself. In my mind, not believing in both parts is a huge mistake. I find it very disheartening to feel like you can not achieve or influence something. Thus, I believe it’s crucial that you believe you can do great things, because, as discussed before, if you don’t believe you can do it, you probably can’t. But it’s also important to acknowledge the choices you are deciding to forgo in order to pursue another. If you aren’t honest with yourself initially, you may grow to regret your decision as you did not consider all of the context in which you made the decision. Lesson one tells us to find the important things, but you will find much difficulty in finding these if you are not honest about the true outcomes of them.

20. Be okay with making mistakes

“If you don’t fail, you don’t succeed.” -Robert Kiyosaki

And most importantly of all, be okay with making mistakes. If you do not learn to be ok with making mistakes, you will never do anything of importance. Doing important things is not easy and requires iterating on failures. I am aware that my opinion on these lessons will change, and I might even regret some of the things I write in this post. But if I could not accept that, this post wouldn’t even exist.

“The world rewards those who are willing to be bad at something long enough to become great at it.”

You won’t always be great at things. In fact, usually, to get great at something you have to be really bad at it and then kinda bad at it and then decent and then good and then you can become great at it. Each step of which requires learning from failures, if you are too scared of these failures, you won’t be able to learn these lessons.

“To get something you never had, you have to do something you never did.” -Denzel Washington

Furthermore, don’t be scared to be the one to initiate. Be the first one to introduce yourself. Ask that person out. Apply for that position which you don’t think you’re qualified for. Seek rejection. Sometimes you’ll get rejected, and that’s okay. But way more often than you probably expect, it will go well.

I heard an interesting idea the other day: everyone wants you to succeed. The person interviewing you for that job wants you to be great for the position so they don’t have to keep searching for someone. Same with going on a date: the other person wants you to be the perfect partner so they don’t have to keep looking. People want you to succeed, so go out and try to succeed.

“If you don’t fail, you’re not even trying.” -Denzel Washington

You grow and learn when you are at your limit and the only way to find your limit is to go beyond it once in a while. I know it isn’t fun to fail, but you have to learn how to do it. Your future self will thank you over and over if you do.

“How you gonna knock somebody down for actually trying to do something? Since when was it becoming not cool to try?” -A$AP Rocky

Why I wrote this

This last semester has been quite difficult. There has been a lot going on, both academically and personally. Additionally, I have been thinking about the future quite a bit. It has been very stressful, and in stressful times, we must rely on what we have learned to help guide us through. As a result, I’ve been thinking a lot about what I find important to me and ways in which I try to identify the best way forward. As a result, I’ve become much more mindful of these lessons lately and thought it would be beneficial to discuss them in a blog post.

Final Remarks

I would like to reemphasize that these are not the most important, nor the most profound lessons. They are simply lessons that I think about and believe could be beneficial to the average person. If you’d like to discuss any of them further or if you disagree with some of them, I’d love to discuss. Please reach out.

I would also like to thank Sebastian Prasanna and Ronaldo Lee for their help brainstorming and iterating on this post.

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