What I’ve learned from my early and mid twenties

I’ve previously written about what I’ve learned from idling and wasting my teenage years. In this piece, I want to recall my early twenties and reflect on what I’ve done for my future.

Looking back now, I’ve started making productive steps to improve my life — actively, without external forces —only in my mid twenties. Sure, I started thinking of my future, making tiny baby steps during my early twenties. But the real action only started taking place when I was about 24, probably.

There were many lessons I’ve learned along the way but I want to zoom into three main ones. They shaped my mindset and direction, and I want to make use of this as a self-reflection. Hopefully this will help you as well.

1. Only thinking about doing is as good as not doing anything at all

I’ve realised that I did a lot of thinking about my life and how it could turn out to be. I thought about the many possibilities. I thought about the many outcomes. But I did not act. That was the key problem.

Most of us feel accomplished — at least myself — when we think about our future. It makes us feel like we care and it (our future) crossed our mind. The truth is, nothing is going to happen if we don’t take action. We need to act.

Oftentimes, friends or acquaintances would ask questions like, “Hey, what do you intend to do in the future?” A typical response would be, “Oh, I’ve thought about doing this and that but haven’t gotten down to it.” An unhealthy response you’d get in return is something like, “Wow, yeah. It takes a lot of effort and time to get down to it. But it’s great that you have plans.”

Wait a moment. If it really “takes a lot of effort and time”, why haven’t you started doing anything to achieve it?

For me, it was much more convenient just thinking or planning something. That’s because if you haven’t started, no one is going to ask you about the progress — there’s no progress to begin with. If you don’t have to talk about progress, no one is going to judge you.

Ah. So that’s it. I was afraid of getting judged for things that I’ve just started working on. That’s because almost everything in its infancy stage are mostly incomplete, unimpressive, simple, basic, mediocre. All of those I — and most people — do not want to be associated with.

We all want to be great people. But we are just so lazy to do anything. That’s the fact for myself, at least. We want many good things to happen to us. We want to succeed in life.

But ironically, we dislike to take action. We dislike many things that require effort. Thinking and not acting is as good as inaction.

2. Effort and action are the only fuels for propelling anything forward

I’ve learned that effort and action have to work hand in hand for anything to happen. Be it improvement in your personal development, or relationships in life, or career advancement.

If you want to improve and grow, you have to put in the time and effort, and take action.

Even talented people have to put in effort and take action if they ever want to succeed. I’ve read books like Carol Dweck’s Mindset and Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, all of which showed that talent is not enough.

Dr. Dweck explained the growth mindset, a mentality we need to have if we want to be grow and improve. The opposite — fixed mindset — is a mentality most of us in the modern age are plagued by.

We often engage in unhealthy comparisons and often think that abilities are fixed — they can’t be improved. The fixed mindset says, it’s either we’re born with it, or we’re not. There is no way we can ever get better than we already are.

Therefore, we dislike taking action because it requires effort. But in Dweck and Gladwell’s books, they both showed research and compelling arguments about how talents won’t get us far.

Sure, talents give us a headstart but without effort and action, there’s no way we can get to the finish line.

3. No one other than myself cares about my own life

We are all in this race to happiness, success, wealth… and the list just goes on. We might be all in this together but no one is going to care about you. They will be caring about themselves first.

I used to have this naive thought about how friends and family members will always be there to help you. But I soon realised I was the only one caring about my own life. I’m not saying there isn’t anyone there for me, but if anything, I can and should only depend on myself.

If I were to do anything with the expectation that someone will always be there to cover me, shit happens and I’m the only one to get screwed over. Who can I blame? Only myself for not taking responsibility for my own life.

The moment I started taking responsibility for my own life and depend on no one except myself, I started seeing myself grow. When you only have yourself to depend on, you force yourself to jump into everything with full effort.

Because you know if you want to succeed, you will have to give it your best shot. Inevitably, you will still fail nonetheless. No one is able to constantly succeed at their first try. It’s going to take a lot of time, effort, determination and perseverence to ultimately achieve some form of success.

And I’ve learned that if you want anything, you have to depend on yourself. When shit happens, blame yourself. Pick yourself up and learn from it.

I would like to think I’m on the quest to understand myself better through these collective of “What I’ve learned from…” articles. I believe self-awareness leads to self-improvement, which leads to action and certainly and inevitably to failures. But only with failure, would I be introduced to success.

“Failure introduces you to success.” — Billionaire P.A. from Wealthy Minds Online