7 Life-Changing Lessons I Learned From Surviving My 20s
My life changed dramatically in the last decade
Life changes with every new experience, and every new experience contribute greatly to your wisdom to live a better life.
When I was in my 20s, I won my district bodybuilding championship. Friends and family praised me, and I was literally in the air those days.
The power in my muscles and the attention I received made me arrogant, audacious, and sometimes annoying and senseless.
This senselessness puts me in dangerous situations most of the time. I would hurt people for my enjoyment. I would squeeze friends’ hands when we would shake. I didn’t care if it hurt them.
I thought power was everything I needed.
But then I entered my practical life and faced successive failures. Over the years, reading books and experiences and developing a new consciousness about life taught me life-changing lessons.
During my practical life, my failures taught me the best life lessons that I couldn’t have learned in school.
Here are the seven life-changing lessons from surviving my 20s.
1. An Early Failure is a Blessing Because You Have Time to Rise Again
After my graduation, I started a small business with a partner. My dreams of money and success were shattered by the early failures of my business.
However, learning from my first and early failures made me the person I am today. The failure taught me lessons. I learned skills and new experiences from it and applied those to my new ventures.
The sadness and the debt didn’t make me withdrawn but made me more resolute to aim for higher goals.
My failures provided ample experiences and skills for learning the ABC of business and the marketplace.
I studied the causes of my failures. I enlisted all the strategies that failed to work for me and analyzed them one by one.
Discarding what made me a failure earlier now made me a successful person.
2. You Aren’t Supposed to Achieve All Your Goals
In my 20s, I wanted to be a civil servant, a lecturer, an entrepreneur, a traveler, and follow many more goals. I worked for all these diverse goals at once. I was a student back then, and when I finished my education, I realized that working for these things and achieving them at once is impossible.
I burned the midnight oil to pursue all the directions in one go, but after a year or two, I realized that it’s better to choose one role first, settle down, and then pursue others.
This realization changed my mind. While settling down for a secure life, I have grown wiser and discovered that some of my goals were just boyhood wishes, and they weren’t so important.
Now at my thirty, I am happy I didn’t work for some of the goals further and focused my time on important others.
I don’t deny the importance of goals in life. Rather, goals are the driver for living a better life. But your goals should be realistic and well-thought-out, and check the relevance and importance of your goals in the long run.
I am happy I haven’t achieved some of my goals, and not achieving them makes me satisfied and fulfilled.
3. Some Friends Are Meant to Be Left Behind
Not every friend can go ahead with you. Some of them are meant to be left behind.
I had childhood friends who changed their behavior when we didn’t meet for a time because I had to go out for my studies. In the absence, they grew to be the persons I don’t want to be friends with anymore. But I am happy they left me gradually.
Or I can say we had different paths in life, and they are left behind.
And there are friends who you meet after decades, but they remain the same. They make you feel like nothing has changed and you haven’t lived apart for such a long time.
So, I have learned in my thirties that you can’t force a relationship to stay, and it has to move on when the time is right.
Some friends are there to stay in your life while others are left behind. Don’t bother about it. It’s natural.
4. People are All the same.
I have been to various places and have befriended people from diverse communities and family backgrounds.
I have lived very closely with people hailing from richer families and people from poorer sections of society.
Over the years, I learned that people worldwide are the same. They have the same aspirations, wants, needs, and ambitions.
Everyone wants to achieve a secure life, to have food, money, and a secure job. Everyone wants to be rich, no matter how rich their families are.
Every person wants to feel important and cool, even if they are so cool and important.
Each person I met secretly has anxieties and insecurities about his future. Humans are a lot common in many ways.
I have found that there are minute differences in humans worldwide, and these differences are the products of different cultures, geographies, and religions.
However, I learned that those who do good to others live a better life. Those who make others’ lives miserable are miserable themselves.
I have also learned to judge people not by who they are but by what they think and do.
5. The Best Life is in The Middle Way
Living for more than two decades, I have learned that the best way of living a satisfying and happy life is to take the middle way approach.
Spending a lot of money on a meaningless thing doesn’t make you important or cool. Neither saving the money at the cost of sacrificing your necessities doesn’t make you rich. It only makes your life miserable.
Both spending too much and too little are extreme ways of life.
One should spend according to the needs and the happiness it provides to you and others in your life.
Spending a lot doesn’t make you look rich. Eating in a five stars hotel every time doesn’t make you look rich. It only burdens your purse.
Dining in a street hotel has the same taste, or it may be even tastier if the person you are dining with is special.
So, I have learned that the best life can be found in a middle way by surviving my twenties. One should approach life in a more balanced way which is always the middle way — neither too much nor too little.
6. No One Cares Much About You
“You’ll stop worrying what others think about you when you realize how seldom they do.” — David Foster Wallace
We missed the best of our life by thinking that the world cares. In reality, no one cares about what you do and how you do it.
We are often held back by our thoughts from taking a step because we think about “what the world will say.”
The world is too busy in itself, and no one cares for others too much. If you fail to achieve something, the world will soon forget what you didn’t achieve.
Similarly, if you achieve a greater goal, the world may rejoice with you for a while (maybe no one even notices your achievements), but they forget you and your achievements when you get out of their sight.
So, it’s better not to think of the world too much. Just do what you want to do and live your life.
7. Humans are Not As Scary As You Think
This is a common feeling that you will worry about when you decide to go to another country or place outside your acquaintances.
I was also worried and scared about traveling to other places I had never been to. I thought about how people would behave, especially when traveling to another country.
But after traveling to many places, I learned that people are awesome everywhere.
I would suggest to a person in his 20s to find opportunities and travel as much as possible. No matter where you go, people will accept you with open hands and entertain you beyond your expectations.
You won’t believe how human beings are more open to people from other cultures.
Takeaways
Living in the 20s is awesome. You are ambitious, free, spirited, and goal-oriented.
While in the 20s, one has a lot of energy to spend on various things. Sometimes, we unwisely pursue goals that aren’t important to the people in our lives or us.
Sometimes, we fail to achieve goals that make us sad and angry.
But ultimately, we realize that it was better to have failed and not achieved certain goals.
Surviving my 20s, I have learned various life-changing lessons in life. A recap of what I have learned during my 20s and want others to learn from it:
- Early failure in life is a good omen because you are young and have time and opportunities to start again without regret.
- It isn’t necessary to achieve all goals you have wanted to achieve. Over time, you get this wisdom that it was good to have not achieved certain goals.
- Some friends are left behind because your paces aren’t the same. They might be too speedy to catch up or too lazy to stop. Some people are, by nature, not a good fit for friendship. Just leave them behind without regret.
- People all over the world pursue common things. They want success, love, money, and security. But above all, no matter how much a person is rich or secure, still they harbor insecurities and anxieties.
- Take a middle way approach to live a more satisfied and better life. Spending too much or too little on something only makes you miserable.
- The world isn’t free to notice you all the time. People don’t care what you do and how you do it unless it directly affects their lives. So, don’t care about people and live your life.
- The world is a beautiful place to travel. People from other countries and places aren’t scary but humans like you and me. They love to know and mingle with new people. So, travel as much as you can.
