What I Wish I Knew When I Was Younger
Life doesn't become any easier, we must become stronger - physically, mentally and emotionally.
Here’s the classic story: Graduate high school, maybe go to college and get a degree, find a job, maybe you marry – maybe you don’t, retire in your 60’s and hopefully live longer in retirement than you did working.
Problem with that story is that you spend 40+ years of your life working to hopefully have 20 years of retirement, maybe more. That sucks. Here is what I have learned along the way that I wish I knew when I was younger – would I have listened to myself is a whole other question, probably not!
There will always be something that needs to be done but only so much you really need to do.
Foucs on Health, Love, Peace and Wealth. The rest is just noise.
HEALTH – Devlop healthy eating choices and exercise regularaly. Avoid fried, processed and fast food. Get some cardio, strength and flexibilty training on the regular and be consistent. Hardest part about this is staying consistent in both eating healthy and exercising. Do the best you can, don’t get discourged and make it your highest priority. Set yourself up for sucess – find quick and easy meals that are healthy and become your go to. Start with a few and build up your cooking skills.
LOVE – You could have health, peace and wealth but without love it would be a miserable road to follow. Love for yourself and love for others is one, if not the most important thing in life. Listen to the way you talk to yourself – are you pepping yourself up or putting yourself down? Give yourself a pep talk when facing an obstacle and go easy on yourself when things don’t go right. Stay connected to your family and friends by making time and being there for them. Learn to accept and forgive, sometimes not for them but for you.
PEACE – Finding peace in life may not seem like a big struggle when you are young, or maybe it is. We all face different obstacles and hurdles in life – maybe we address them, bury them down inside or avoid them. Whatever we do there are things we can utilize to help us become a better person regardless of the problems we face. Meditation is a great way to manage stress and find a deeper connection to oursleves. Finding a higher power is a way to let go of troubles and know that something greater than oursleves is guiding us.
WEALTH – It sucks being poor and no one likes a rich asshole. Wealth is a matter of being financially independent. It means having enough money so that you don’t have to work but could, espically if you like what you are doing. It helps to start when you are young because compounding is one of the best tools you will have on your side. We will talk more about this on the in depth section of building wealth. Just know that its not what you make, it’s more about what you spend. Earn money, invest and spend it wisely.
What now?
Health, Love, Peace and Wealth – Some of this might be new concepts, topics or ideas so start small, break it in to chunks and try to apply a little each day. Focus on constant improvement in these areas. Here are my top 4 books for getting started:
7 Habits of the Highly Succesful – This is one of my favorite books that I continue to re-read. Develop a mission statement and refer to it when making those big life decisions.
Man’s Search for Meaning – This book will help you to gain some perspective and show show that no matter what, you have a choice to how you react to any given situation.
Atomic Habits – Habits are what makes us or breaks us. You essentialy are what you do consistinetly. The hardest part to doing anything is consistency.
The Simple Path to Wealth – Leveraging money to work for you instead of you working for money is the greatest gift. Live below your means, invest and become financially independent.
HEALTH
Nutrition and Exercise
If you learn to cook and exercising regularly, you have just increased your survival by 10 times. Actually, I have no idea how much it would increase your survival but when you look at the numbers – the likliehood of dieing from the majority of causes is preventable with nutrition and exercise. Take a look for perspective at this image below of causes of death and explore the site – change the location, year, age and sex around to see some unique views of health data. I would also encourage you to look at Gapminder – a site that helps to identifies systematic misconceptions about important global trends and proportions and uses reliable data to develop easy to understand teaching materials to rid people of their misconceptions. Although not specifically tied to Nutrition and exercise it bridges the gap between health and wealth on a data level.
One my favorite experts on the subject of health and nutrition is Dr Gregor and you can find all the stuff he reviews here https://nutritionfacts.org/. All of his articles are peer reviewed and he gets straight to the point. There is always a new doctor to come along and tote some new cure, disease, and a way to prevent or cure them. Finding the facts in all the noise is one of the hardest things about the online world – I think he does a great job of presenting the truth on diet. You can even check out his book “How Not to Die Cookbook” which has a bunch of awesome recipes. Really though, there are great free resources for cooking on YouTube – just search whole food, plant based and you will find a ton of awesome resources for how to make good, healthy food.
The main takeaways are exercise reguarly and eat healthy. It is something you will want to do for life, so you might as well be good at it and the only way to get good at something is to stay consistent. Find what works for you! If you enjoy running then run, if you don’t like running then do something else that you enjoy and is active. You will find it a lot easier to stick with something if you enjoy it. I like to hike – so everyday I go for a brisk walk with my dog first thing in the morning. It gets me outside and I accomplish one of the most important things first – exercise. I like to track my daily activities by journaling and use a free app called Daylio. Its super simple and I add all the activities that I really need to do to it so I can check them off. It helps to stay accountable and to record my progress.
LOVE
Love Yourself & Love Others
What does it mean to love? That’s a big question and there can be a lot of valid answers. For the sake of simplicity lets focus on some common threads of what it means to love and why it’s so important to love yourself and to love others.
One my favorite experts on the subject of health and nutrition is Dr Gregor and you can find all the stuff he reviews here https://nutritionfacts.org/. All of his articles are peer reviewed and he gets straight to the point. There is always a new doctor to come along and tote some new cure, disease, and a way to prevent or cure them. Finding the facts in all the noise is one of the hardest things about the online world – I think he does a great job of presenting the truth on diet. You can even check out his book “How Not to Die Cookbook” which has a bunch of awesome recipes. Really though, there are great free resources for cooking on YouTube – just search whole food, plant based and you will find a ton of awesome resources for how to make good, healthy food.
The main takeaways are exercise reguarly and eat healthy. It is something you will want to do for life, so you might as well be good at it and the only way to get good at something is to stay consistent. Find what works for you! If you enjoy running then run, if you don’t like running then do something else that you enjoy and is active. You will find it a lot easier to stick with something if you enjoy it. I like to hike – so everyday I go for a brisk walk with my dog first thing in the morning. It gets me outside and I accomplish one of the most important things first – exercise. I like to track my daily activities by journaling and use a free app called Daylio. Its super simple and I add all the activities that I really need to do to it so I can check them off. It helps to stay accountable and to record my progress.
Wealth
Finding your purpose
I have done a lot of different jobs and learned a bunch from each one. Some I would never want to do again and some I wished I had followed through on, instead of moving on. When I was younger I even wrote down a list of “careers” that I wanted to do when I grew up – I think I have done every one of them. Finding the ideal job or your passion, can be a tough thing to sort out, especially if you don’t have a lot of experince. When you are young it’s important to try different things and fail often! Wait, what? Fail often – what does that mean? It means don’t be afraid to try different things, the more you try the more you learn and the closer you get to success. It also helps to prevent you looking back at some point and wishing you had done something but now it’s too late. When you have a family, more responsibilities or your body can’t do the things it was able to do – you will realize that you had more oppurtunity than you realized. As you get older the oppurtunities fade and become harder to come by. Make those moments count!
Ikigai (ee-key-guy) – is a Japanese concept that combines the terms iki, meaning “alive” or “life,” and gai, meaning “benefit” or “worth.” When combined, these terms mean that which gives your life worth, meaning, or purpose. Ikigai is similar to the French term “raison d’etre” or “reason for being.” If you find what your purpose is early on. awesome! If you don’t, no worries, there is still time. There is a website where you can take a test that will show you what your job/career should be based on what you love, what the world needs, what you can be paid for and what you are good at – https://ikigaitest.com/
The test takes some time to complete and can be a little confusing. I’d suggest you take this test when you have the time, are in a relaxed place and you don’t need to rush through the answers – dig deep and reflect.
Cool story bro but I already have a job I like...
Okay you little punk, I’m just trying to help. Let’s get in to the basics of what to do now that we have a job and are doing something we like (and we have money coming in and probaly going out just as fast, if not faster). The high level view is Make Money -> Save Money -> Invest Money -> Spend Money Wisely -> Become Financially Independent and do some good in this world! First thing first – we need RULES!
Rule #1
Save more than you spend. Sounds super simple but hard to do especially if you live in a high cost of living area. What is a high cost of living area? California is a high cost of living area and unless you are in the north east portion you are in a HCOL area. You can get rich real quick if you follow this rule no matter what you make.
Rule #2
Don’t pay interest. If you have a credit card (and I actually recommend them) pay your balance in full each month and never, ever, ever pay interest. Do you know that people who have a mortgage pay more interest than what the home is worth in the end!? That is friggin crazy IMO. Cars are no different. If you can’t afford it don’t put it on credit.
Rule #3
Keep track of your expenses. The only way to know that you are doing rule #1 right is keep track of your expenses. Make a spreadsheet and list all of your expenses per month. This is a little daunting at first and some expenses might be unknown but you are going to do the best you can. Shinning light on what is coming in and what is going out allows you to see the big picture.
Dave Ramsey has a 7 step prgram you can follow to get started https://www.ramseysolutions.com/dave-ramsey-7-baby-steps. This process is the start of a finacianlly independent journey and there are many paths you can take. Focus on the first 4 steps when you are young and add the last 3 steps when and if they apply to you. Crucial step here is don’t buy any of his stuff – at least not yet. Dave Ramsey is out to make money just like the rest of us and at this point you don’t need to pay for anything yet plus the site has a bunch of free tools – for now just focus on the basics.