Youthmaxing

Short note on how I am trying to spend my 20s

Was thinking a lot about it with the intern meetup @ iterate we are organizing.

9th of August, 19:00

What should you really be doing in your 20s?

Travel the world? Stay home and save money? Go to university? Drop out? Start a startup? Focus on love and relationships? Stay single and independent? Quit your corporate job for freedom? Chase your passion? Forget passion - follow the money? Go into finance? Invest early? Spend your money on experiences? Build your network? Avoid people and focus inward? Take big risks while you’re young? Play it safe so you have a foundation? Work 100-hour weeks to get ahead? Avoid burnout at all costs? Live in one city to build roots? Move to a new city every year? Follow your dreams? Be realistic? Try everything once? Specialize early?

respectfully. shut up.

So many people want to give you your advice. Parents, friends, people you meet, everyone has their own opinion on YOUR life

Finishing a book called The Mom Test, and it has one of my favorite lines of all time

Rule of thumb: Opinions are worthless

Funny how a book about customer interviews can expand into a broader life perspective. Opinions are self-indulgent noise with a high risk of false positives. If someone is giving you “advice,” they’re simply viewing things from their current perspective, trying to map it onto your situation.

They’re mapping it based on their own goals, fears, history, and constraints, not yours. Different times, different people, different goals.

Instantly, my mind jumps to a chapter in Psychology of Money (boring book, still haven’t finished). It explained why different people invest in different things. For example, my dad grew up in a stable real estate market and believes that putting money into bricks is an excellent way to achieve financial stability, but someone who lived through the 2008 crisis in the U.S. might disagree with him.

Point is - while it might be somewhat helpful to listen to what smart people did to maximize success when they were young - there is no guarantee this is your path.

Structure

So what should you do if you can’t listen to the advice people give you? I have no clue :(

But I will try to tell you a bit about myself

I don’t look at my life as a plan with X -> Y -> Z goals mapped to it. I see it as a structure. It doesn’t matter where I am, what I am doing with my life - I have a set of rules I follow to continue growing as a person.

• Work hard

• Rest

• Read

• Exercise

• Meet cool people

• Try new things

Dead simple, right? Let me explain them one by one

Work hard

In any line of work - whether it's a corporate job, a startup, or school/university studies - always put in effort. I live by the principle that it doesn’t matter what you are doing; if you are spending time on it, spend it wisely. There is never an excuse to procrastinate if you have allocated time for work.

There might be an exception for people who are trying to just "get by" in university while focusing on something else on the side (that’s what I am trying to do). However, the whole point of "getting by" in university is to save time for other things and work hard on those. It also doesn’t mean the limited amount of time you've allocated for university can be spent unproductively.

Rest

This includes everything - sleep, holidays, exercise recovery, and more. Balancing rest and work seems hard, but it is not. Getting your mind off work can be difficult, and here is what I do to make it easier:

Separate work and personal lives using spaces (home/office).

Use different apps and, if you have the luxury, laptops in your work/personal time.

This creates boundaries in your mind and doesn’t allow it to switch to the opposite mode in an unnatural environment.

I'm not saying you must set a clear boundary between work and life. That works for some people, but it doesn’t for others (e.g. in startup culture). It’s more like a soft boundary, where things in the middle can blend slightly. However, if you go deeper into one side, you won't notice anything from the opposite side.

Recover from exercises, and sleep well. Good sleep patterns are always underestimated, when they have proven to increase lifespan and lower mortality rates

fun fact: I sleep in AirPods Maxes and a sleeping mask - can’t deal with any noise or light.

Exercise

You can’t believe how much sport and basic exercises improve your life. To start with, you will live about 10% longer if you exercise regularly. This alone already should be enough to get you started. I am not even talking about general health benefits, like not being gassed after going up the stairs, moving faster and lighter, and looking better.

Read

This. Books are one of, if not the best, ways to learn new things. When you are listening or watching you don’t memorize information, whereas the book actually makes you think and follow the author’s thought. 30 minutes a day. One book a month. Doesn’t need to be a lot. Just do it consistently

Also, you get ultimate bragging rights :)

Meet cool people

“Your network is your net worth” - one of the stupidest but most real phrases out there. Humans are social beings, and we adapt to our closest circle. If you meet new smart people, you can watch them grow and grow with them.

Try new things

This one is quite obvious. I know I will stagnate if I won’t try new things in life - this is what life is all about.

If you don’t fuck around you never find out

New food, new places, new projects, new programming languages, new friends. Trying never hurts.

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These 6 points are just the basic way how I approach life. They are not a plan, but principles I live by. Here are some thoughts on planning:

Plan A. Scrap the plan. Plan B...

Certainty kills fun. I hate overplanning. Sometimes when I try to plan every 5 minutes in my calendar it works out really well time-wise, but it is boring as hell. Same with life. If I know exactly what is going to happen then what’s the point?

Just live your life, and you'll see your path unfold naturally.

Final thoughts

Everything is temporary. Most of us will die in around 60-70 years.

Listen to yourself. Do the thing you wanted to do. Don’t overthink

Money is important, but is also temporary, memories are forever

Some random memories from this year:

Skipped lectures to fly to a hackathon in a different country. Went to a gym in hello kitty pjs. Got an A2 bike license. Was recognized on the street from my Linkedin (aura?). Did around 20 scuba dives. Went to SF for the midnight tacos (real ones know). Cycled 100k.

age is a number, stay young :)

unrelated pic of my bike cause I think it is cool