The way I started my 20s versus the way I ended them couldn’t have been more different. It was like looking at two different people — different cities, friends, lifestyles, goals, and more.
Yet it was exactly what I needed for success.
With so much lying ahead of you, what you do and don’t do can dramatically alter your future for better or worse. In this article, I’ll share the most powerful things to avoid to help you enjoy more success — by eliminating these mistakes, it’ll be much easier to achieve what you want in this crucial decade and beyond. Let’s get started:
1. Delaying Your Life
Many people wait too long to act. They want to achieve many things, but hold off and say things like, “I don’t want to think about _____ until I’m 30.”
But once they hit 30, they’ll realize that avoiding those actions made things worse.
Your life has to add up. What I mean is, if you want to have a family, buy a home, and have a great career by age 35, you can’t squander your youth and have nothing at age 30. All of those goals take time to find and create — it’s hard to cram everything all at once into five years. Worse, waiting until age 30 (or later) backs everything up, which might mean certain “windows of opportunity” have slammed shut.
Don’t wait until 10 years to “take a trip,” “start a business,” or “find your partner.” Don’t wait “until you’re 30” to get going. There’s no such thing as a “perfect moment.”
Being young is the perfect time to make moves. Take the first steps now. Once you do it, you’ll learn a ton of things you couldn’t have possibly learned otherwise, which will help you for the rest of your life.
2. Negative Influences
My life in my 20s changed to the same extent my social circle changed. As I swapped the people I surrounded myself with, I put myself in different environments with different norms, expectations, and values to help me become the person I wanted to be.
Your social circle is incredibly influential in your life — for better and for worse. Your relationships are the strongest predictor of happiness and health, and having negative friends can drag you down in many ways.
Distance yourself from negative influences — people who bring you down, lower your expectations, have little hope for the future, or reinforce poor habits — otherwise, they’ll shape you in ways you don’t want.
Also, be very selective with your friends and find people you can learn from and grow with during your 20s and beyond.
3. Too Much Electronics
Netflix. Video games. Social media. You’ll hate me for this, but to make the most of your youth, cut the time you spend looking at screens. The average American adult spends up to 4.5 hours watching TV and 4 hours and 33 minutes on their smartphones every day.
But life happens outside of a screen.
Social media is arguably the worst offender for young people. The time spent on social media is associated with mental health issues like depression, anxiety, and stress. It’s also linked to approval-seeking behavior (trying to get likes, praise, validation, etc.), which makes you feel further depressed and unhappy.
Cut back on social media and free yourself from that cycle. And by reducing your overall screen time, you’ll have far more free time and mental clarity to create a brighter future.
4. Your Comfort Zone
If you want to create an amazing future in your 20s, you need to take risks, fail, and push beyond your current level.
The truth is a lot of people who reach incredible heights started their careers making mistakes and failing. Very few hit it big on their first try. Yet it’s from those early setbacks that you learn and build resilience to handle challenges; when life gets tough, you’ll have more experience and mental strength than if you never failed at all.
Nobody ever died of discomfort, yet living in the name of comfort has killed more ideas, more opportunities, more actions, and more growth than everything else combined. Comfort kills!… Happiness doesn’t come from living a lukewarm life, always wondering what could have been. Happiness comes as a result of being in our natural state of growth and living up to our fullest potential.
— T. Harv Eker
Remember: There’s an entire world you can’t discover until you go beyond the limited knowledge you currently have. That’s why it’s important to constantly have new experiences: You don’t know what you don’t know.
Don’t just read about life; live it. Focus on taking action. It’ll grow your comfort zone and give you far more possibilities to enjoy for the rest of your life.
5. Blame
Growing up, I always felt like a victim: I blamed the world for the life that I had, which perpetuated a negative cycle, draining my energy and creating a lot of resentment and bitterness.
But the more I made excuses, the more I empowered them.
It wasn’t until I realized I had to take ownership and responsibility for my life that I started to change and improve things. It wasn’t until I stopped blaming everything else that I was able to empower myself to take action.
No one is coming to save you. Not the government, not your family, and not your friends. No one can want your own success more than you. And at a certain point, you have to look yourself square in the eye and hold yourself accountable for the things you have and don’t have in your life.
It might be humbling to realize you’ve been doing things “wrong” for a while, but with that realization comes freedom. Because you’ll finally understand that no one is holding us back in life except ourselves.
6. Too Many Goals
One of the biggest reasons why most people aren’t successful is they have too many goals — they try to accomplish many things at once, but they overextend themselves and fail to make serious progress on any goal. They don’t want to close options, but because they don’t commit, they struggle to get results.
Success isn’t that difficult; it merely involves taking twenty steps in a singular direction. Most people take one step in twenty directions.
— Benjamin Hardy, Ph.D.
Find the few things that are most important to you, focus your time and energy there, and make progress on those priorities. Not all of your goals have the same importance. While it might be humbling to pause your “lesser” goals, by doing so, you can actually move forward in a clear direction, which will help you succeed in the long run.
7. Not Investing
Use your 20s to invest in your future and reap rewards for the rest of your life.
Invest mentally by educating yourself. Books and courses are great, but emphasize real-world experience — explore a new country, take an internship, and try new hobbies to challenge yourself. Although consuming information is helpful, you need to apply the information to actually learn it.
There comes a point in your life when you need to stop reading other people’s books and write your own.
— Albert Einstein
Next, invest financially. By starting to save and invest in your 20s rather than in your 30s, you’ll have hundreds of thousands of dollars more when you retire.
Finally, invest physically by exercising, eating healthier, and taking care of your body. Trust me, as a personal trainer who’s trained people of all ages, it’s way easier to get fit in your 20s and maintain it than to get into shape in your 40s and 50s and “undo” the damage from decades of inactivity.
The best “stock” to invest in is staring at you when you look at a mirror.
Invest in yourself whenever possible; it’ll pay the best dividends.
And when you put everything together, your future will shine brightly.
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