Your 20's are not the end of your life

I only have a couple more years of being in my 20’s. At the time of writing this I am 27 years old. I can tell you from my own experience, you are probably putting too much pressure on your twenties.

You are putting putting too much pressure on your twenties.

I put too much pressure on my twenties.

You look at guys like Chris Bumstead. 29 years old, 6x Mr Olympia, has multiple brands, has the the money, got the girl and now has the kid too. This guy is set up for life as long as he doesn’t do anything stupid. If you listened to the man talk, he’s not going to do anything stupid.

Just last night I was watching a video from the great Dan Koe. He tells me he reached millionaire status at 26 and here’s how you can too. Alright thanks Dan.

Oh and then there’s Iman Gadzhi. But let’s not go there.

If you didn’t feel behind before you probably do now.

There is a 99.999% chance this is not the first self improvement video you have watched. You probably have been watching self improvement for a while. You are watching the content, doing the habits

Going monk mode, ghost mode, you’re on the grind trying to improve your life. Great, but perhaps you feel guilty about how you are spending your time.

You secretly wish you could have more. Travel more. Go on more adventures. You’ll never be this young, healthy, energetic and free again, so you want to indulge in the delights of youth.

Who wants to be the 40 year old trying to live the life of the 20 year old. No one does. It’s weird.

But at the same time you know that if you don’t work hard for your future now, you need to work hard later. The hard work doesn’t go away. It just gets delayed. So if you don’t start now, you are going to be falling behind later in life.

From 20 to 26 I felt that inner conflict. I felt guilty when I was working and I felt guilty when I was going on adventures. Either way, no matter what I did I still I felt like I wasn’t doing and experiencing enough.

It creates this strange desire of wanting to compress my entire life into a 10 year period. Such that by the time I get 30, I feel like I have done enough and I have everything figured out.

Saying it aloud, it sounds like nonsense, doesn’t? But if you were honest with yourself, isn’t this what you are rushing towards? Isn’t what we are all trying to rush towards.

I think so.

The pressure you feel to get everything worked out in your 20’s is nonsense. I mentioned I felt this way between 20 and 26 — so what changed it in the last year.

The paths of life

Tim Urban - he is the writer and creator of the blog wait but why. He created this diagram of the paths of life.

Intuitively we all understand this, but it is useful to see it in visually.

Your life up to this point has been you walking along the green life path. Where the green lines intersects with the black lines are decisions you made.

When you decide to go a certain way, to take this path, to do that thing you also decide not to everything else open to you. Now those life paths are closed to you forever. We focus on the black lines. Fretting about if we made the right decisions? Will it work out.? What if it doesn’t? What else could i have done with my time?

Because of those black lines we forget about the all the paths still available to us in the future.

In our twenties it feels like the path we decide to take in the future is the path for the rest of our lives. How we feel often isn’t reality.

Mr Tim Urban draw this graphic like this for a good reason. Every day, every present moment this is what’s in front of you. At all times it’s still in your hands.

This is what got you to here but this is what’s in front of you … always.

Understanding the paths of life is useful because it puts it into perspective of what life actually looks like. It’s you navigating these paths. Making a series of small decisions in some direction that you have decided.

Every decision is a trade off. You are always sacrificing something.

How do you if you are making the right trade offs? Well you don’t. That’s what makes it scary. We put so much pressure on our twenties because we cannot reverse time and we only have 10 years so there isn’t room left for mistakes or wasted time.

I will come back to the idea of wasting time shortly.

You feel that way … I felt that way because I wouldn’t let go of this idea that needed to have everything in my life figure in my twenties. When I let that insane idea go and I extend the time horizon beyond my twenties into my thirties and forties that pressure and rush I felt has really subsided.

The best way to live out your 20’s in my humble opinion as a random guy on the internet is to wander purposefully.

Wander Purposefully

What does it mean to wander purposefully?

It means to set a goal that you are intentionally striving towards. In the process of moving in that direction you allow yourself to wander. To follow your instincts and curiosity. To experiment. To take risks. An ultimately, to obtain the small answers to the big questions in life.

That is what your twenties are:

It’s your opportunity to wander through the paths of life freely in the direction that you want. So what does this look like practically speaking.

High level direction

First you need to set the direction that you want to move in.

In my twenties my goals were:

• Get my degree and then

• Get the job that allowed me to play role of an inventor, and now

• To grow this YouTube channel

Seems very clear and directional doesn’t it? But when I zoom out I a little but more, I am doing all these other things like:

• trying new hobbies like body building, rock climbing, mauy thai, mountaineering

• learning new skills like cooking

• improving developmental skills like communications and charisma

• doing more of the good habits and less of the bad ones like more gratitude and less pornography

• learning more about whatever excites and interests me like psychology, physics, economics, politics and of course philosophy

• travelling and experiencing new cultures

• hanging out with the people I love

While degree, job and business let’s say has occupied so much of my free time. There’s has been plenty of time in the last seven years for purposeful wander.

What all of these activities has in common is self improvement.

Everything I have done in the last seven years has been self improvement. All of these things I am doing are either:

• Helping me understand myself better

• Helping me understand the world better

It’s my knowledge of myself and of the world that determines the highest peak that I can reach. You are the mountain. The mountain is you.

While I am aiming at the mountain peak in the distance, the time I spend wandering through the trees and getting lost where I am is never wasted time as long as I am learning more about myself and about the world because it’s those two things that can closer to the peak of the mountain.

Small answers to the big questions

When I stopped thinking about my 20’s as the decade to have everything figured out and started thinking about it as wandering purposefully, all that pressure once I felt disappeared. Now the time factor isn’t so important because I am trusting as long as learning about myself and the world no time is wasted.

I’m either winning or i am learning.

I will give you a pretty relevant example in my life right now. YouTube.

YouTube has been the most mentally draining and exhausting endeavour I have encountered in my life so far. Up until very recently I felt like I have been wasting a lot of time — pouring thousands of hours in something that isn’t going anywhere. As I was brainstorming ideas for this video, I realise that even if YouTube doesn’t work out and I need to move on. None of the time I spent on this channel is wasted because I have learnt so much about my life and the world thought the process of making these videos.

I have faith that whatever I decide to do after YouTube, my experience here doing this has equipped me well for whatever else may be next.

I am getting small answers to the big questions of life. Naval Ravikant identified the four big questions you need to answer in your life.

• Who are you?

• What you do?

• Where you are?

• Who we are with?

Purposeful wandering is how you get the small answers or the feedback to these questions. These are not questions you can put on timeline on. Your answers to these questions may change as you change.

It may take you 3, 5, 10, 15, 20 years of wandering purposefully before you get enough feedback for these questions. In my book that is fine — provided you are learning about yourself and the world.

Let me be very clear here.

This is not an excuse to be lazy, undisciplined and waste your time hoping for something to click. You need to be out there trying new things, taking risks, learning and wandering. If you do nothing, nothing will happen and you will waste your life.

I feel like I am behind Dan Koe and CBUM because I am in every metric, particularly these questions.

CBUM knew very early in his life that he was born to be a pro body builder. That is who CBUM is. As far I can tell there is no dissonance in his identify. He found that one thing and went all in on it, no matter the sacrifices. He did what it takes to be a champion and became the best ever. He was able to build brands around who he is as a person that granted him financial freedom. He experimented with where he lives. Chris took great care it seems with who he brings into his life.

If Chris didn’t have the genetics for body building CBUM would not exist. Chris would probably still be a champion in some field but the path to get to that level of success would have been drastically different.

Dan Koe realised very early in his life that everyone around him just seem so sad. Mostly because of their job. He knew the 9 to 5 life — doing work he doesn’t care about for someone he doesn’t care about was not for him. So he wandered purposefully through a bunch of online business: web design, copywriting, drop shipping. But nothing worked. Then he gave writing high impact content a go. Something he had a particular interest and skillset to do. He started out on twitter and then branched to other platforms as well as he started to gain more traction. He built the identity of being a generalist and now teaches the one person business model online. Millionaire at 26.

I compare myself to dan koe in particular because I think if dan can do it then so can I. He is showing me what is possible. That is motivating. But I try not compare my timeline to his because he’s story and wandering is different to my story and wandering so of course the timelines will be different. That’s ok. I’m 27 and I am not a millionaire yet and that’s ok.

Wander purposefully and have faith you will get the right small answer to the big questions as you extend the time horizon.

Vision and anti vision

Wandering is difficult. At times it can be scary. Sometimes you are not sure if you are going in the right direction or what the feedback you are getting actually means.

Having a high level goal of understanding yourself and the world better does provide perspective on what you are trying to do. Having a vision of the future reveal what improving yourself will get you. This is about what you want out of life.

Think about:

• The lifestyle you want to live. Nothing crazy, just the average day. What does that look like? I made a video covering this which i will link up here somewhere.

• What do you need to do and experience within the next 10 years for this current version of yourself to respect the future you.

These are the things you are aiming at that actually matter to you. This is what is essential to you. You should write these things down somewhere and read them regularly to remind of the direction you are wandering towards.

However what you want is just one side of it. You also should consider what you do not want.

You might have heard of the rat in a tube experiment in other videos, but i want to include it here in case you haven’t and it is fascinating.

The researcher put a rat in a tube and wafted the smell of cheese into the front of the tube. When the rat smelt the cheese, he begian to pull. There was an instrument measuring how hard the rat is pulling. The researchers repeated the experiment but this time wafted the smell of a cat into the rear of the tube. The rat pulled twice as hard.

Sometimes you don’t just want to move towards what you want, you want to move away from something you don’t want.

You need an anti vision — what you don’t want in your future.

For me it would be living the same day in and out. Doing work I don’t care about for people I don’t care about. Not having enough finances to live freely. Not having friends and family around me. Worst of all knowing I could have done better. I want to avoid that future at all costs.

Write down your antivision.

Decision making principles for life

One of the fundamental problems you face in your twenty’s is making decisions. All decisions are a trade off. When you decide to do one thing also decide to not do anything else.

Sometimes the questions isn’t what do I want to do, It’s what do I hate least.

For example when I was in the process of deciding to move to Adelaide, I didn’t want to leave my dad and my dogs. But I knew I would regret not experiencing moving to a new city by myself more than leaving.

When it comes to tough decisions like these it’s important to pick your regrets. When you look back on what you decided, what are you going to regret least.

So the answer was clear, it was time to have a new adventure.

It is also useful to understand that there are two types of decisions. Jeff Bezos calls them one way doors and two way doors.

• Two way doors are decisions where you can walk through and the come back later. These are reversible. My move to Adelaide was a two way door. The outcome doesn’t really matter in the scheme of things because I could always go back home. The door was open at my old job too. If things didn’t work out here it would have been easy to reverse the decision.

• One way doors are non reversible. Once you walk through them there’s no going back. These require careful consideration and should not be taken lightly.

Fortunately near all decisions are two way doors. They can be reversible. Even things that seem risky like moving to a new city or country are usually two way doors. Learning that new skill, starting that business, putting yourself out of your comfort zone are all two way doors. There’s a lot less at stake than you think. So take risks in your twenties because they are reversible.

That’ all for today.

Appreciate you.

Josh