Buy some Bitcoin.........😂 Just joking. Actually, I am not entirely joking because imagine buying Bitcoin when it was still sooo cheap and holding on to it until today. I would have retired already by now and just enjoy my life. That would probably be one of the best financial decisions I could ever have made and of course i would also tell my younger self to join the Hive ecosystem much earlier than I did. This is also one of my biggest regrets, i really wish id joined this platform much sooner but these are just a few of the practical things I would mention. There are more important things I would want to discuss with the younger version of myself beyond just the financial.
Firstly I would tell him to be bold, be bold enough to try things even when he is uncertain about how they will turn out. I have come to realise that fear and uncertainty have probably cost me more opportunities than actual failure ever has. There have been situations where I wanted to do something, take a particular step, approach someone or let say explore an opportunity or venture into something unfamiliar but I allowed the possibility of things going wrong to stop me and the funny thing is that most of the time, nothing particularly terrible would have happened if I had simply tried. Perhaps things would not have worked out, perhaps I would have made mistakes but at least I would have known. Instead, I sometimes chose to remain where I was, in my comfort zone and ive im left wondering what might have happened if I had taken the chance.
I think this is one of the realizations that come with growing older. When you are younger, you might think that you need to have everything figured out before taking a particular step and once you take that step everything will assuredly align as it is in your head and like in your head you want to be certain that you will succeed and that everything will work according to plan but life rarely offers that kind of assurance.
For instance, there might be an opportunity to start something new but you begin thinking about all the things that could go wrong. What if I fail? and what if this or that happens? and before you know it, you have spent so much time considering the possibilities of failure that the opportunity ends up passing you by. Someone else takes the same chance, makes mistakes along the way, learns from them and eventually gets somewhere. I am not saying every opportunity is worth pursuing or that we should throw caution to the wind. There is a difference between being bold and making careless decisions. However, I think there are times when we use the need to be careful as an excuse for avoiding things that simply make us uncomfortable.
Another thing I would tell my younger self is not to spend too much time worrying about what other people think. I think i sometimes give other people's opinions far more importance than they deserve because at the end of the day, i am the one who has to live with the decisions i make, not the people whose opinions i was so concerned about.
Of course, these are things I cannot go back and change. These are opportunities that have passed, the decisions have already been made and for me that is probably one of the most uncomfortable realities of growing older. You begin to understand that time is not something you can negotiate with. You are 20 years old just yesterday and now you are 50 or 40 years old. Life is fickle but, I don't think that means everything is lost. One thing I am learning is that i can always forge ahead. As long as tomorrow will come and our lives are spared, we can always make tomorrow a better day. Its never over until it is over. Perhaps I cannot go back and make the decisions I should have made five or ten years ago, but I can make better decisions today.