Being in my early 20s, here is what matters to me and what I want to do in life
On new years eve this year when 2016 shifted away and 2017 arrived, I sat on a friend’s balcony in Berlin-Friedrichshain, looked in the sky full of fireworks and asked myself, what is important to me in life. I was thinking, let me finish that thought, then I’ll go back inside. Being in the early-20s I have the feeling of being able to achieve anything, so I just had to find out, what do I want to be, what matters to me in my life.
I remembered a story I read a while ago which says, think about the day of your funeral. There will be your wife, your best friend, a colleague and your children giving a speech about how they perceived you and what person you have been to them. What do you want these people to say about you?
I thought before I can answer this question I had to find out, what matters to me and after a while I asked a good friend on that night which I already know since I was a child what he thinks is important to him. And his answer was friendship.
Over the past months I asked many other friends what they want to achieve in life and the answers where quite different. Some friends told me they want to be independent or even live completely autarkic, others said they want to grow a happy family and focus on that, one friend told me he wants to travel to every single country in the world at least once, others have a certain career dream or want to leave every place better than they found it.
A few weeks later I met Kipp Bradford from the MIT Media Lab and he said to me, we shouldn’t think of needs. People just have things they value. I thought about this saying for quite a while and I thought before defining my personal mission I want to find out what do I value most.
When looking around for what people value than there are many quite common answers: health, trustworthiness, passion, independence, …
For my answer to this question at my current age I want to quote Gandalf here:
All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.
When thinking about what I value and what I want to do in life I think about my life as the days that I have left till I am 80 years old. From today, there are 20.600 days left. So what do I want to do with this time?
First of all I have one tool to master this life and that is my body. It is the best tool that was given to me and I cannot exchange this. So I want to make sure this stays intact and working and that I do not damage this. So in order to use the given time best, I have to make sure my body stays healthy.
Another tool in our economy is money. I know money can bring many many bad things from corruption to vanity, from greed to envy — but you can also do many good things with it like helping others, making great experiences, traveling and living with less worries. So I think a good job to earn “enough” is also important, but I only see it as a tool in life (and that somehow defines “enough”).
But health and money doesn’t make you happy or make an impact in your life, they are only tools that make things easier sometimes. With these tools I want to focus on two things in the next years of my life: education and helping others.
Being in the early 20s is a great age for education. During school you are learning how to navigate in life and how our economy works. It is also a good time to find out what you’re passionate about. I found my passion in technology. The possibilities what you can do with technology are stunning and get me up early everyday. After school the time in university is great because you can fully focus on learning the top notch research on this area. You can understand the magnitudes of you studies and find a specialisation. School and studying is also the time in life where you are naturally surrounded by dozens of people who can become friends with quite easily.
After the university comes a time of endless possibilities and very few responsibilities. I think these things change when having children. So there is this timeframe of maybe 5–12 years of being able to do nearly anything coming up after university. I want to spend this time with the focus on three things:
- Be open-minded and spend valuable time with the people that matter to me, help them, learn from them, and get inspirations from their life
- Educate myself by reading books, push a career path where I wake up every morning with drive and passion
- Travel the world and learn more about all these different cultures and mindsets out there
These are the things that I value and when making decisions I want to align them with my focus in the next years before founding a family with Krissi.
And one thing that I do not value is possession. So I want to reduce my belongings and want to adopt a more minimal lifestyle to focus on people and knowledge instead of objects. But this is another story.
