The Top 10 Life Lessons I Learned in My 20's

The most valuable lessons worth taking into my 30's.

If you’re like me, you live your life always needing to know what’s going to happen before it happens. You run through every possible scenario in your head to try and predict what will happen so that you’ll know how to react when it does.

Some call this planning.

I call this exhausting.

The anticipation is used to avoid disappointment or being caught off guard. It is meant to protect, but likely emphasizes all the things you didn’t know.

Lessons are learned in retrospect, after what happens happens.

You can’t anticipate them, but you can use them to guide your decisions moving forward.

Stepping into a new decade, I’m letting go of needing to know. I’ll use these lessons to help me deal with not knowing what’ll happen before it happens, while developing the confidence to know that I’ll know how to respond when whatever happens happens.

It worked when I reflected on lessons learned when I was 27, and hopefully it’ll work again with these 10.

Top 10 life lessons learned from my 20's.

1. Give to yourself first.

You can’t give time, energy or love if you are completely depleted. You can, however, give more than you think you can. And sometimes, giving generates more love and energy for yourself. Make sure you are giving to yourself, so that you can give generously to others. Self-care is of the utmost importance!

2. Gratitude has the power to transform your life.

Express gratitude every day. Practice being grateful. Acknowledge the things that you have, recognize the positives, be grateful and good things will start happening, like magic. This is #1 on my most effective 7-step morning routine — even while traveling. Writing it down makes it that much more powerful.

3. If you want to experience a different life, take a different action.

I was walking home one day, when I noticed a man sitting by the lake in a wheelchair. I was curious, but carried on. Then, I realized that if I went home as planned, I knew exactly how the rest of my night would go — same life as before. If I went back and said “Hi,” and had a conversation, my future suddenly would become unknown. I went back, and that conversation changed my life ever so slightly. I created so much joy for that homeless man by playing his favorite Beatles song, which he hadn’t heard in a year!

The compilation of little changes will lead to a very different life.

4. Storytelling is one of the most powerful human abilities we have.

Stories have the power to inspire, transform, and connect.

I used to be terrible at storytelling and I’d watch others effortlessly tell stories in awe, wishing I could do the same. Why? Because without this skill, I was missing out on the connection great storytellers created. I missed out on the influence those storytellers had…and I wanted that.

So I put aside my ego and went through the 6 stages of overcoming the fear of criticism and judgement. Then, I practiced, and practiced, and got better at storytelling. And with this developed skill, I built an audience of over 2.5k within a few months.

Share your story. If you don’t know how to tell it, learn. Figure out how to tell your story to yourself first. Writing it out helps. Then share it. Share it and let others share theirs with you too.

5. Growth = fear + action.

What is growth anyways? Growth is the expansion of self, broadened horizons of what you are capable of. When you fear something and do it anyways, you develop courage. That courage, along with an expanded tolerance of fear, will allow you to do more, see more, and be more.

6. The time to do something uncomfortable is always now.

Being uncomfortable doesn’t magically go away. It requires action. You have to work through the discomfort. And whether you do it now or later, it’ll be just as uncomfortable. So, just go for it. Everything will be okay.

7. You’ll always get what you’re committed to getting.

This lesson was a little more elusive than the others. I spent most of my life being busy. And I’d complain about not having enough time to do the things I said I wanted — hang out with friends, work out every day, finish projects, do fun things, go on adventures.

I said I wanted all those things, but it turned out I wasn’t committed to having any of them. I was committed to being busy. So I’d always be busy. Once I realized this and committed to what I wanted instead, the things I used to “have no time” for, became what I spent my time doing.

Commit to what you want and “the how” will figure itself out. Don’t let the “unknown how” prevent you from taking a step forward. Sometimes “the how” is just behind the next step.

8. The best thing you can do for yourself is get clear on what you want.

When you are clear on what you want, you’ll get it. Clarity is the access point to creating and living a life that fulfills you and delights you every day.

This is one of the hardest lessons, because distinguishing what you actually want amidst a world of opinions and what societal expectations make you think you want, is a confusing tangle that needs to be sorted through deep introspective reflection.

But once you do discover what you want with utmost clarity, and sometimes that means simply choosing what you are willing to commit to, any obstacle simply becomes a challenge to resolve, rather than an impossible limit to confine and stifle you.

9. Most of the time, all you have to do is ask. So ask.

Growing up, I was taught to never want things. There were things I got as a result of being good or things I got because I deserved them. Wanting things and asking for them, though, was always something I shouldn’t do.

I didn’t ask for a raise. If I deserved it, someone would have given it to me. And something so simple made me miss out on a lot. All because I was taught not to want, and not to ask.

When I learned about the power of a request, I started practicing it to see if it was real. I started asking for things I wanted — even trivial things, simply to ask.

Like when I went to Vegas with my friends to celebrate our 30th birthdays. The 7 of us wanted jello shots, and we found a deal — 3 for $5. No one wanted to take 2 shots, so getting 3 rounds didn’t make sense. But we all wanted one, so 2 rounds wasn’t enough. What we wanted, was 7 jello shots. So I asked. “Hi, I see you have a deal to get 3 for $5. We need 7. Can we buy two rounds and get one jello shot free?” … “Sure, why not.” And we paid $10 and got 7 jello shots.

Since learning this lesson, I’ve asked for a raise, I’ve asked for a promotion, I’ve asked for lots of things I never would have gotten if I hadn’t asked.

Always ask. You just might get what you want.

10. Things hardly ever go according to plan.

I still remember when I was 19, about to turn 20. I tried to imagine and semi-predict what this next decade might bring me. After all, my 20’s would be a chapter of stepping into adulthood.

“I’ll probably go to college, graduate when I’m 21, get my first job, work my way up, fall in love when I’m 27, get married when I’m 29…”

That was the plan.

Well, what they say turns out to be true. Things rarely go according to plan.

And here’s what actually happened in my 20's…

I went to college, got a marketing internship that turned into a job, left everything in LA to pursue an entertainment career in Korea, hosted shows, did commercials, taught English to clients from kindergarteners to CEOs, moved back to LA, helped build and scale a startup, coached hundreds of students who got accepted to their dream schools, traveled the world while living out of a suitcase for a year, met amazing people along the way, learned a lot about love, changed lives through coaching, discovered who I was and who I want to be, got clear on what I want… got what I want and more, worked at a tech startup, built an audience as a writer, started a food blog, created a short-lived podcast, officiated weddings, made some really great friends, registered an LLC, got a dream job, had a dream apartment, started a community project to help the homeless, built incredible relationships with people I really care about…

And just like that — my adolescent formative years were behind me as I hit the tipping point of true adulthood, acceptance, and responsibility.

The quicker you accept what is, as the changes come, the quicker you’ll adapt, move on and create something new. I’m not saying don’t have a plan. I’m just saying don’t expect everything to go exactly as you planned.

Speaking of things not going according to plan…I planned for this to be a “30 lessons learned in 30 years of life.” But as I wrote it, circumstances changed (aka I ran out of time to spend on this because other things I wanted to spend my time on came up). And you know what, THAT’S OKAY. See what I did there?

Here are the other 20 that didn’t make the fully-written out cut:

1. Exercise is so important.
2. Home is a sanctuary. It needs to be a place you feel comfortable in. At peace.
3. Most of the things that hold us back are defense mechanisms our brains use to prevent us from being vulnerable. Being vulnerable does not guarantee you’ll get hurt. Not being vulnerable does guarantee you won’t make deep and meaningful connections.
4. The two things most people would do if they only had 30 days left to live are spend time with loved ones and travel. You never know your time — spend more of it with loved ones and travel more.
5. Surfing is fun. Surfing with friends is more fun.
6. You’ll get what you believe you deserve. If you believed you deserved more, you wouldn’t tolerate anything less.
7. Joy creates hope. Where there is joy, there is no despair — those can’t exist at the same time.
8. Life is just one big opportunity to experience things. Human condition > human race. First one there’s… in a coffin 6 feet under.
9. We all have a lot more in common with each other than we think. And once we start to see ourselves in others, we start rooting for everyone to win and any sense of comparison or jealousy melts away.
10. You can love someone and not be with them. Love is a choice and the strongest relationships are the ones where you choose your loved one every single day. You can choose to love someone unconditionally. If you want to believe in it, you can choose to.
11. Wear sunblock. The sun is hot and fiercely relentless in its UV rays.
12. Food brings people together.
13. Radical acceptance is the key to peace.
14. Always do your best. Always.
15. Communication and commitment is the key to getting what you want.
16. Structure creates freedom. Spontaneity can still exist within the structures that you know will bring you happiness. (Thank you, Richelle!)
17. Focus on how you could make something happen, rather than why you can’t. This requires committing to what you want to happen.
18. It’s cool to be yourself. People will accept you as you are.
19. Family and friends make life worth living.
20. Always be present. In the digital world, it’s difficult, but all the more important.

Photo by Johannes W on Unsplash

👏 if you enjoyed this, found it helpful, or recently had a birthday (and happy birthday to you too!)!