1. Fail early, fail often, time is on your side.
When you're young, you have nothing to tie you down. You don't have major financial obligations that you'll have in adulthood: mortgage payments, car payments, daycare, life insurance and so on and so on. This is the time when you risk the least by taking some long-shots! With the failures you experience now, will set you up for success down the line. Learn fast, learn often, they're what will get you safely into your 30s.
2. You can't force anyone to like to you.
There are two types of friends in life, the ones where you can go months without speaking and come back like nothing has changed. Then there's the kind where you go away for a week, and EVERYTHING has changed. Since I've joined the army, I've had the chance to meet a lot of new people, but unfortunately, it means I've left a lot of people as well. What I've found is, you cannot force a friendship from anyone. Not everyone's going to like you. Either it's there, or it isn't. What I've also found is you can rarely predict who will be those friends that do stick around.
I left Minnesota in February of 2013 and came back for a GOOD amount of time for the first time in September 2014. Many of the people I was closest to in the early 20s, didn't have the time of day, but the ones who, when I went into the friendship were more "casual acquaintances" slowly became the friends I could also call my family. It's not that the first bunch are bad people, it's just how life goes. We all change, we all grow and it's how it is.
But what I've learned in my 20s is it doesn't always work that way all the time. Sure it's great to have something to work for. After all, I'm the queen of setting goals and beating myself up if I don't achieve them. Early on, I sat down and wrote a list of goals I wanted to achieve by my 30s. The biggest was the military. While I achieved my biggest, I've basically skipped all the rest. I have yet to get to Europe, I sure don't have a family of my own. I don't make 6 figures and I'm still super unathletic. As I've grown, I realized that the goals I set were not toally importnant to me, but rather what society said I should have by my 30s. I'm not ready to be a mom yet, but Europe is still on my to-do, ASAP list!
I'm firmly convinced that the whole point of goals is 80% to get us off our asses and 20% to hit some benchmark. The value in any endeavor almost always comes from the process of failing and trying, not in achieving.
4. No know actually KNOWS what they're doing.
There's a lot of pressure on kids in high school and college to know exactly what you want to do for the rest of their lives. Starts with choosing a college, then a career, then landing that amazing job! It's like they're supposed to have a clear path right out of the gate to climb that ladder and getting to the top as soon as possible. Then once that's set, you're supposed to get married, have the pefect two and a half children, drive your mini van and be happy, right?
However, if at any point in the process, you don't know what you're doing or you get distracted or if you fail a few times, you're made to feel like you're a screw up and your entire life will be spend on a corner panhandling and drinking vodka at 8am in a park bench somewhere.
But the truth is, almost nobody has any idea what they're doing in their 20s, and I'm fairly certain that it will continue on into my 30s. Out of all the people I've had the chance to keep in touch with from high school, I can't think of more than 10 who've had their life set since high school. I've known people who have changed jobs, careers, families, sexual orientation, hobbies, and so on.
I rarely had any clue what I was doing. I've had people ask how it is I ended up here, and how I decided on my career. Truth is, it was luck. I don't know if this will be my life for the next 20 years like I'm planning, but I do know that I've found something I enjoy doing, and in the meantime, I'm damn near decent.
5. Most people in the world are all looking for the same thing.
In hindsight, my 20s have been pretty great. I've gone interesting places, met some crazy people people. I've met people from all over the world with a thousand different view points.
What I've discovered is that from an outsider looking in is people are basically the same. Everyone spends most of their time worrying about food, money, their job and family, even people who are rich and well off. Everyone wants to look cool and feel important, even the ones who are already "cool" and "important." Everyone is proud of where they come from (epically those who hail from the great state of Minnesota!) Everyone has insecurities and anxieties, regardless of how successful they are. Everybody is afraid of failure and looking stupid. Everyone loves their friends and family yet also gets the most irritated by them.
Humans are, by and large, the same. It's just the details that varry. Most of the differences that we have that we say are important, are merely byproducts of where we're from and how we were raised.
I've learned to judge people not by who they are (or claim who they are) but by what they do. Some of the kindest and most gracious people I've met were people who did not have to be kind or gracious to me. Some of the most obnoxious asshats have been people who had no business being obnoxious asshats. The world makes all kinds. And you don't know who you're dealing with until you spend enough time with a person to see what they do, not what they look like, or where they're from, how they vote, or anything like that. People are people.
6. The universe does not care about you
This thought is rather an intimidating one. The idea that "no one cares about me" once taking word for word, thought by thought, is actually very liberating. The best quote I've heard in a long time is "You'll stop worrying what others think about you, when you realize how seldom they do." Everything we do will one day be forgotten. It'll be as if we were never here. The world WILL someday forget about us, like we were never here. Just like this moment in time, nobody cares what you actually say or do with your life.
You might think this sounds mean or wrong, but take a second, look at your Facebook. How many of these people do you think about on a daily basis? Odds are, not many. What makes you think they think of you you? This is actually good news. It means you can get away with a lot of stupid shit and people will forget and forgive for it. What it boils down to, is there is NO reason you shouldn't be that person you want to be. Be who you really are, because no body cares.
7. Life is full of extremes, learn to be moderate.
I think my life got 350% better once I realized the internet, television, newspapers and people are so extreme on everything! It's exhausting!!! It's good to be passionate, yes, but if you're extreme it makes you filled with dismay for the people who aren't. I'm not passionate about being a mother, and there are some who look down on me for that. I look at it as mere biological fact that, to keep the world going we need to have children. Yes, having kids is great, wonderful even, but my life will not revolve around it. I look at politics as a waste of time now. We all fight and NOTHING will get down in my next 30 years. However, it's a necessary evil. I will fight for what I believe, I'll always fight for those less fortunate, but I'll also support our military 100%. It's important to sometimes retreat to that quiet 90% of life that isn't extreme and remind oneself: life is simple, people are good, and the canyons that appear to separate us are often just cracks
8. It's the little things that make the big things.
So often we see everyone's success and forget about what it took to get there. I remember reading an article featuring one of the co-founders of Facebook. The interviewer asked what it felt like to be part of an overnight success like Facebook. And I remember the guy saying "if by overnight you mean staying up and coding all night, everynight for six years straight, then it felt tiring and stressful."
We always assume things just happen how they are. As outsiders we see the final success and we never see the failures that go into the process. We think our one big idea will change the world and that's that. What we fail to realize is that one big idea is made up of hundreds of small ideas and failures. To be a success we need to maintain and hold onto these small steps. Success does not happen over night....welcome to life!
9. The world, in general, is a good place.
There are bad people in Afghanistan and Iraq. There are bad people in Europe. There are bad people in the United States of America. There are bad cops, there are bad teachers, there are bad business men. We see this because the news tells us to see this. However, the world is a good place. The firefighter who risks his life to run into a burning building to save a child. The cop who puts himself in harms way to help an elderly man. The teacher who risks their career to stop abuse in a family. The person who spends their Saturday at a homeless shelter serving meals. The person who sits with the elderly and listens to their stories from their past. You can think every arab is out to kill you. You can think every Mexican is lazy and mooching off the government. You can think every soldier is a baby killer. You can think every republican is selfish and that every democrat is a hippie. The truth is, you're wrong. People are people. In the end, we care for each other, we love each other, we look out for each other. It doesn't matter where you're from, but who you are. If you open your heart, your mind and your eyes, you too will see the beauty everywhere, and the love we all have for each other.
10. Finally, time is short, don't take for granted a second.
This doesn't mean to not have your lazy days and sit around. However it does mean to appreciate them. The fact is, to survive in this world you need to work, and work consists of business meetings and doing things you don't want to do and generally being pissed that you're there. But when you're feeling like that, think of the people who are sitting on the curb side, wondering where their next meal will come from. When you drive by that person, help. Give them a loaf of bread. When you're sitting in front of your computer looking at what everyone on Facebook has that you don't, turn off your computer, go outside and thank the lord for all your blessings, for the people who love you everyday. Don't look at life as something you simply have to get through, because people, we all come out the same way...we don't get out alive. So those little moments you can look around and be thankful for that exact moment in time, life is successful. In every situation, look for that silver lining.
In 20 years of life, there have been a lot of ups and a lot of downs. So for those just starting off in their 20s, enjoy every day and know that each moment is a time to learn, love, grow and start building who you're going to become.
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