My 20th birthday, I got drunk and peed on some old ladies’ front lawn. A cop saw me and stopped me. Fortunately, I talked my way out of going to jail that night. I already had an arrest record, but he didn’t bother to check. My 20s started out with a bang.
At the time, I was aimless. I had just dropped out of music school and cut my long, tangly hair. I wanted to move out of Texas but didn’t know how or where. I would sometimes lecture people about the spiritual aspect of consciousness and had a number of half-baked ideas about the theory of relativity and whether the universe actually existed or not.
I was smart and audacious and arrogant and really annoying.
Three days from now, I will be turning 30 years old. I will be in Las Vegas and probably completely out of my mind when it happens. But I’m happy to report that I’m far more responsible and far less pretentious these days. I’ve changed a lot in these 10 years. I don’t get arrested anymore and I don’t pee on people’s lawns anymore. I’ve built businesses, been around the world multiple times, and managed to create a career for myself as a writer — something I never could have predicted.
In our instant gratification culture, it’s easy to forget that most personal change does not occur as a single static event in time, but rather as a long, gradual evolution where we’re hardly aware of it as it’s happening. We rarely wake up one day and suddenly notice wild, life-altering changes in ourselves. No, our identities slowly shift, like sea sand getting pushed around by the ocean, slowly accumulating into new contours and forms over the passage of time.
It’s only when we stop years or decades later and look back that we can notice all of the dramatic changes that have taken place. My 20s certainly were dramatic. Here are some of the things I learned:
Chances are you aren’t strapped by all of the financial responsibilities that come with later adulthood: mortgage payments, car payments, daycare for your kids, life insurance and so on. This is the time in your life where you have the least amount to lose by taking some long-shot risks, so you should take them. Because it’s the disastrous failures of these years — that crazy love affair with the Taiwanese dancer that made your mother lose her hair, or the entrepreneurial joint venture some guy in Starbucks talked you into that turned out to be an elaborate pyramid scheme — it’s these failures that will set you up for your life successes down the line. They are the best lessons of your life. Get learning.
I’ve spent the majority of the last five years living in a number of different countries. Unfortunately, that means that I’ve left a lot of friends behind in various places. What I’ve discovered over this time is that you can’t force a friendship with someone. Either it’s there or it’s not, and whatever “it” is, is so ephemeral and magical that neither one of you could even name it if you tried to. You both just know.
What I’ve also found is that you can rarely predict which friends will stick with you and which ones won’t. I left Boston in the Fall of 2009 and came back eight months later to spend the Summer of 2010 there. Many of the people I was closest to when I left could hardly even be bothered to call me back when I returned. Yet, some of my more casual acquaintances slowly became the closest friends in my life. It’s not that those other people were bad people or bad friends. It’s nobody fault. It’s just life.
But in my 20s I’ve learned that life doesn’t actually work that way all the time. Sure, it’s nice to always have goals and have something to work towards, but I’ve found that actually attaining all of those goals is beside the point.
When I was 24, I sat down and wrote down a list of goals I wanted to accomplish by my 30th birthday. The goals were ambitious and I took this list very seriously, at least for the first few years. Today, I’ve accomplished about 1/3 of those goals. I’ve made significant progress on another 1/3. And I’ve basically done nothing about the last 1/3.
But I’m actually really happy about them. As I’ve grown, I’ve discovered that some of the life goals I set for myself were not things I actually wanted, and setting those goals taught me what was not important to me in my life. With some other goals, while I didn’t attain them, the act of working towards them for the past six years has taught me so much that I’m still pleased with the outcome anyway.
I’m firmly convinced that the whole point of goals is 80% to get us off our asses and 20% to hit some arbitrary benchmark. The value in any endeavor almost always comes from the process of failing and trying, not in achieving.
But the truth is, almost nobody has any idea what they’re doing in their 20s, and I’m fairly certain that continues further into adulthood. Everyone is just working off of their current best guess.
Out of the dozens of people I’ve kept in touch with from high school and college (and by “keep in touch” I really mean “stalked on Facebook”), I can’t think of more than a couple that have not changed jobs, careers, industry, families, sexual orientation or who their favorite power ranger is at least once in their 20s. For example, good friend of mine was dead-set when he was 23 of climbing the corporate hierarchy in his industry. He had a big head-start and was already kicking ass and making good money. Last year, at age 28, he just went and bailed. Another friend of mine went from the Navy to selling surf equipment, to getting a masters in education. Another friend of mine just picked up and took her career to Hong Kong. Another friend stopped working as an environmental scientist and is now a DJ.
I rarely had any clue what I was doing. I get emails all the time from people wanting to know how I built my business, when I decided to become a writer, what my initial business plan was. The truth is I never knew any of those things. They just happened. I paid attention to opportunities and acted on them. Most of those opportunities failed drastically. But I was young and could afford those failures. Eventually, I was fortunate enough to work my way to do something I liked and do it well.
