I remember the realization flowing through me like a swig of hot coffee. After my 20th Birthday had arrived and left with little fanfare, I remember sitting on the couch and mulling over the fact that I had been alive on Planet Earth for two decades. (It would be another five years before I would realize what I wish I knew before I turned twenty).
Twenty seemed scary. When you broke it down, two decades measured…
Twenty years…
7,300 days…
175,200 hours…
…you get the idea.
It felt like both a blip in time and an eternity. I remember how long the summers used to feel when I was in elementary school. The days and weeks leading up to the next school-year used to feel like mini-epochs in and of themselves; the same emotions came with winter-breaks and long road-trips to visit extended family. Now that I had graduated high-school and was moving through college, things felt like they were happening too fast.
After all, hadn’t I been a junior in college just a couple of years ago? What about middle-school? Three years of middle-school had felt longer than all four years of high-school (then again, it is middle-school, where various physiological and psychological-torture-devices become second-nature to the experience).
A junior year in college now approached and it contained classes that would require a greater work-output. I had to start getting my life together and think about putting together a career, right?
After all, once you hit your early-20’s, you were supposed to have all your ducks in a row, right?
Right?
Guys?
Anyone?
The sound you hear is a live-studio-audience laughing with some drunk crickets chirping away at the sheer delusion of the statement above. The amount of people living in the 21st-Century who have their lives figured out by 21 can probably be counted on one-hand. Even the rare sub-species of genius-entrepreneur-who-created-a-huge-company-before-he-turned-twenty-five didn’t know exactly where they were going from the outset.
Sure, they may have had an outline and some goals for themselves to follow but their lives didn’t amount to an antique shop showcasing the finest wares in finance, fashion, healthy-eating, relationships, decision-making, and fitness. Of course, we don’t know this when looking at the highlight reels of their social media feeds—but that’s mostly what social-media feeds are: highlight reels.
But 20-year-old-me didn’t know that at the time. 20-year-old me was about to suffer an existential crisis on the level of a rejected Frederick-Nietzsche-biopic. When I scrolled through the social media feeds of my friends—and people I didn’t even know in real-life—they looked like they had it all together.
They were out having fun, traveling to exotic places, getting on the honor roll, and conquering life with every Facebook and Twitter post they could muster.
When we’re young, inexperienced with the real-world, and prone to negative peer-pressure—whether it’s from friends or family—we don’t think as clearly as we should. We spend a lot of time measuring ourselves against those who aren’t even on the same path as us. If you’re in school to become a certified teacher, you shouldn’t be comparing yourself against a hedge-fund-manager; they are two different jobs requiring two different sets of skills.
Because of this—or perhaps in spite of this—I soon learned that I was losing a battle not only in happiness but in enjoying the moment as well.
These are the three biggest things containing what I wish I knew before I turned twenty.
1. You Are Still (Relatively) Young.
I know it doesn’t feel like it.
I know it didn’t when I turned 20.
I figured once you reached life’s third decade, you were already supposed to have the trappings of an adult; loud music didn’t sound nearly as good as it used to and you were supposed to tell kids to get off your lawn (or foyer, if you lived in an apartment instead of the suburbs). Even more troubling was my mind starting to become inundated with stories of other highly-successful people in their early 20’s already becoming millionaires or ‘creating the next big thing.’
Every television show or movie I watched had people under the age of 25 living in condominiums that probably would cost upwards of several million dollars…but they were always presented as a ‘crappy apartment.’
If that was a ‘crappy apartment,’ then what was I doing wrong?
You’re never supposed to read what you see on TV and film as real-life but when you’re in the late stages of adolescence, you tend not to think rationally 100% of the time.
As far as I was concerned, the ‘fun years’ of my life were drawing to a close and ‘boring adulthood’ was lurking right behind them.
I was wrong in both regards.
Not only is being in your early twenties still considered young but you’re barely a few years away from being considered a teenager. You’re still technically in the very last stage of adolescence–and there’s plenty of scientific data to back up this claim.
2. You Still Have Time to Figure Out What You Want To Do.
During my time in college, I pursued a history-degree with the intent of becoming a teacher at the secondary-school or graduate-level. I figured I would get my B.A. and a teaching certificate and that would be that. After all, those who can’t do end up teaching, right? Much to my dismay, I realized I didn’t want to be a history teacher during my senior year of college.
While I liked history as a hobby, a school or university-setting wouldn’t offer a dynamic-working-environment or much room to grow beyond the profession. I had the utmost respect and admiration for those who chose teaching as a career but I soon realized it wasn’t for me.
Despite sticking with and getting my degree anyway, part of me felt like I’d now achieved a useless degree—despite plenty of companies hiring based on the qualification of obtaining a degree. Any degree. Just because I didn’t end up going into law, archiving, or teaching, didn’t mean my degree was useless. Showing that I was able to achieve a degree in at least something was still better than applying to jobs with no degree.
(Eventually, I would decide that I wanted to set things in motion to be able to work for myself. That is another story for another day).
After reaching twenty-three, I realized that having everything figured out at this age was ludicrous! There were too many variables! There were too many places I wanted to go and too many things I wanted to try. The fact that I hadn’t reached middle age yet meant that I still had time to get things to work out the way I wanted them to.
This same realization applies for everyone else who has yet to reach the big 2-0!
3. Everybody Is On A Different Path Than You Are.
None of us go through the exact same life story or ambitions. Not all of us want to create a business, work for ourselves, or realize a dream like writing a book, painting a canvass, or making a movie. Some people really can utilize their own strengths and achieve lasting happiness by working in an office building and watching sports on the weekends. Spoiler alert: we are all different.
And we all have a different path to get to where we want to be.
If somebody ‘made it’ earlier than you did, then that’s their business. That’s not a knock on you, or putting what you didn’t do on a pedestal, that is a piece of their life and their life alone. Some guy putting a team together to create smart agricultural systems in Peoria, Illinois has nothing to do with the woman trying to start a drop-shipping-business out of her apartment in Wilmington, Delaware.
When you realize somebody else’s accomplishments is not a slight against your own, it becomes easier to start planning your own journey ahead. A lot of life coaches and motivational speakers talk about cutting out toxic friends and family but what we tell ourselves can be equally damaging.
Use somebody’s else’s drive as inspiration to fuel your own…
…not as a deterrent.
Conclusion.
I will admit one thing; a lot of this can read like basic, bottom-of-the-barrel-self-help-material. Many are tired of daytime-talk-show-material being turned into an industry where so-called self-help-gurus are sending letters out into the void that basically read ‘be yourself,’ or ‘do good things and money will follow.’
It’s even important for me to remember this as I try to keep these articles rooted in my perspective of what I felt during the years of eighteen, nineteen, and twenty. It’s easy to look back and laugh now but during those years, the realization that I was getting a major in something that wasn’t necessarily going to be my career terrified me at the time.
It wasn’t until I found a stable sales-job where I started to feel like I was heading in the right direction; this didn’t happen until my mid-20’s.
You don’t have to have your whole life figured out before you graduate college—if you even go to college.
Now is the time to take risks, try new experiences, and start figuring out what really drives you to create a better world…
…not just for yourself but for everyone else.
Knowing this would’ve saved me a ton of existential heartache.
And it will save those of you under twenty as well.
—
Let’s crush our dreams together,
—SC.
