A Story for Anyone Feeling Behind In Life
The early bird doesn’t always win.
This is a story for anybody who feels like they are behind in life. And it’s also a story for anyone who feels like they are too late, that the window of opportunity has closed for them.
In this story, I wanna give you two crucial reasons why it is almost certain that you are not too late to achieve your goals and whether this whole feeling of being behind is, in many cases, complete BS.
The early birds don’t win
Reason number one is that the early birds don’t always win.
I remember being 15 years old and trying to learn to skateboard for the first time. Specifically, I was trying to learn the kickflip and I just couldn’t get it.
I practiced for hours on end, but it just would not come to me. And meanwhile, all these kids who were 12, 13, 14 were easily getting it, which led me to have a thought that I’m sure you have had in the past as well,
“I wish I had started skateboarding when I was six years old. If I had done that, now I would have 10 years of experience under my belt or nine, I’m not so good at math and I would be basically a pro by now.”
I’m sure you’ve had that thought in the past and I’m sure you’ve had it for other disciplines. I’ve had it for a guitar as well.
I remember when I was learning to play barre chords, my fingers hurt so badly and I wished that I had just started playing guitar a few years earlier, so I’d be awesome now, right?
Meanwhile, I’m making no money and I’m getting eight bucks an hour to work in the IT department on campus.
So I remember finding his blog and kind of kicking myself thinking like,
“Why did I wait until I was 19 years old to start my website?
“I’m too late, this guy started when he was 14 years old.
“That’s when I should have started.”
But now that I’m 30 years old, now that I’ve gone through a lot more life experience, I don’t catch myself thinking this way anymore.
One of the reasons for that is it kind of, if you think about it, it’s like a reverse wishful thinking style of procrastination, like when we procrastinate, we put things off so our future selves have to deal with them.
And this way of thinking is just like putting it off onto our past selves, except for it doesn’t actually happen.
In either case, we don’t want our present selves to deal with the hard work required to get the results.
We just want the results themselves. But the other reason I don’t think this way anymore is I’ve realized over the years, that all the other little things I’ve been trying to do, little experiments and off shoots often come back and help me become even better at the main thing later on.
And I am not alone in this.
In fact, the book “Range” by David Epstein makes this its central argument. In this book, David Epstein argues that in many fields,
The top performers aren’t the people who started practicing when they were two years old.
In fact, it’s actually the people who got started a little bit later in life and spent their earlier years exploring and trying lots of different things.
The tennis champion Roger Federer is a great example. The book talks about how he didn’t get quite as early of a start as a lot of his peers and he spent his childhood playing lots of different sports, not just tennis.
But nonetheless, he came up and eventually became one of the greatest players of all time. And this happens in a lot of different fields.
People do some exploring when they’re younger, and eventually, they hone in on a field where they start to practice, start to be consistent, but they have this base of other experiences from their past that they’re able to draw upon to be more creative and more adaptable than the people who only worked in that single field since they were little kids.
Epstein also points out that there are two different kinds of learning environments, or maybe there’s a spectrum of learning environments with two different extremes, kind and wicked learning environments.
So in kind environments, feedback is almost immediate, and it’s usually perfect, as well.
In chess, for example, when you make a move, you get perfect feedback. There’s almost no hidden information.
Golf is also a great example and it’s worth noting that Tiger Woods is sort of the prototypical example of somebody who is a champion who started off really, really early on in their career.
But most fields are not like chess or golf. Most fields are bit more wicked. The feedback you get from them is often confusing, it’s often incomplete and the information available is also often incomplete, as well.
These are much more complex learning environments. And in these kinds of environments, people who have a diverse array of experiences are often much more adaptable.
And I’ve experienced the benefits of these little experiments and diverse experiences myself. With guitar, I remember taking a bit of time off to learn piano for a little bit.
And when I came back to guitar, I realized that learning piano actually changed the way that I look at the fretboard. It’s actually now much easier to look at the fretboard in ways to help me to build chords.
That was pretty tough for me in the past. And with business, with content creation, all these little different things I’ve done in the past, like dabbling with website development or dabbling with graphic design, all these different things have come and made me a better content creator overall.
So if you feel like you’re kind of behind in life, I think there’s a better question to ask yourself, which is,
“Am I constantly learning?”
“Am I constantly pushing myself forward in interesting directions?”
Because if you are, it’s very possible that what you’re doing right now is going to loop back around later on and help you with the next thing.
It might take a bit longer than you want it to, but it doesn’t mean that you’re wasting your time.
The Term Late is Relative
Reason number two that you are probably not behind in life is that the term late is kind of relative, isn’t it?
See, I think a lot of the anxiety that we feel around being late or feeling behind in life is this idea that the window of opportunity has closed for us, but in many cases, that absolutely isn’t true.
Jimmy is a perfect example of that.
“32 broke washing dishes living with mom and dad, 42 running a successful art business, making millions of dollars.”
So really, it just takes a lot of consistency and patience.
Steve Carell is also a great example.
He didn’t get his first big break, “The Office,” until he was 43 years old in 2005. Before then his career really hadn’t taken off at all. And the common thread between these two people is that they were consistent and they put an effort for a very long period of time, which eventually did pay off.
Jimmy has another post on his Instagram talking about how he started being serious about art all the way back when he was 20. And if you dig into Steve Carell’s career, you’ll find that back in the late 1980s, he was acting for a traveling children’s theater troop.
So they both put in a ton of effort and they were patient, and eventually, it did pay off. Now, in addition to that patience and that consistency, there are two mega important habits that you need to practice in order to make sure that late doesn’t turn into never for whatever it is that you wanna do.
The first is to simply take care of yourself, because while it’s true that we are all going to age, how gracefully you age is almost entirely dependent on your habits, how well you take care of yourself.
We’ve all seen people in their 40s who look and act like they’re in their 60s, and vice versa, we’ve also seen people in their 60s who look and act much younger, they’re a lot more energetic, much more exuberant, much more mentally sharp.
Think about it, if the habits you adopt today add 10 additional happy, healthy years to your life, then what the heck does late mean anyway?
If I’m gonna live 10 more years because I have great health habits, that’s 10 more years I can spend playing the guitar, doing whatever it is that I want to do.
And in that case, late really doesn’t mean anything. So seriously, try to take care of yourself. I think about this a lot more now that I’m 30 and it’s gonna be more and more important as I get older.
And the same is true for you. Make sure you’re getting eight hours of sleep at night. Make sure that you are dialing in your diet, making sure that it is balanced, and ideally, get some exercise every day, as well.
Beginners mind
The second mega important habit to practice Beginners mind is something called beginner’s mind.
This is a concept from Zen Buddhism. The way I originally read about it in a book from Mark Benioff, the CEO of salesforce.com, and essentially, beginner’s mind means going into new experiences and trying to drop your preconceived notions.
You wanna listen actively and assume that you always have something new to learn from every new experience.
And we all know people who got through school, they got their job, they get comfortable, and they sort of drop this.
They kind of think that they already know everything and they become much more part-headed.
And once you become like this, you become much less adaptable and your doors really do truly close. But people who practice beginner’s mind, people who are always open to learn from new experiences and from new people, they are much more able to adapt and to learn new things and to progress all the way through their lives.
So yes, it is true that you cannot get back any of the time that has already passed.
None of us can do that, but it doesn’t mean that you are too late. It doesn’t mean that the doors of opportunity have closed on you, and you would be insanely surprised at what you can do by adopting beginner’s mind and practicing it for the rest of your life, by taking care of yourself, and by consistently putting an effort into what it is that you wanna do for a long period of time.
There’s this fantastic visualization by Jack Butcher that I wanna show you here, because it is very possible that you are right here at the This is pointless stage, and you just need to put in a bit more effort.
