17 Life Lessons I Wish I Knew at 21
Taste excellence. To be human is to want to wed and impregnate the divine essence of this beauty.
Sometimes what you need isn't success to keep you going as it's often far off than you'd like, but constructive feedback so you can refine your approach and feel like you're making progress in the right direction. The feeling is important. You can afford patience and endure doubts if you know that you're approaching excellence. That your ability to do cool stuff is improving.
Optimize for more energy if you want to be more productive without burning out and feel good working hard. The years lay waste to the potential of most smart people because they lack the primal vitality to dominate a domain, explore their limits in the ocean of unconventionality, and pursue novel interests. More libidinal energy also sheds light on ideas previously hidden to you in the darkness of a gloomy disposition exposing you to sunny ideas that add the rewarding luster to your chief aim. Eating well, fasting, exercising, napping, quality sleep, and the company of other ambitious people will do a lot to enhance your essence.
Too much energy can be a problem. You can develop a strong disinterest for boring work in a craft requiring repetitive motion to attain mastery. The expense of this fleeting attention amounts to a surface level attention to detail, an intolerance for deep thought, and lots of undone or mediocre work — you'll have wasted your time. Decreasing your energy isn’t the solution. Train your frontal lobe with meditation to guide the life force.
Taste excellence. To be human is to want to wed and impregnate the divine essence of this beauty. It's good to have a feel of how performing or thinking at a high level feels like because in the ethereal experience of dexterity you have an ideal to aim at to give you hope when you're doubtful of a path or if you want get out of a funk. Remember the feeling of strength and power you got that time you controlled yourself to get the result of delaying gratification and the outcome was so good you were elated and proud of yourself. Remember when you felt the unbound ecstasy of mutual love and affection. Remember when you worked on what you liked for longer periods than you imagined. When you connected deeply with that one person, heard a song so good you repeated it even before it got to the five second mark, danced with so much swagger you couldn't believe your eyes. Or explained an idea with such profound depth and smooth articulation you even awed yourself. That's beauty. She's a good muse. But she needs you to woo her. Longing for, as you pursue her, will help you embody the attitude of mind and strategies that made you possess and ravish her that one time you tasted excellence.
Resist the urge to distract yourself when you get frustrated fleshing out an idea in writing or in the effort to understand a hard subject. The frustration is a sign that your brain is working hard to grasp the fleeting concept. It's like training with heavy weight in the gym; you get aggressive and apply more energy to lift it. And so does your brain during high-order thinking. Lean in to this frustration and keep tinkering until you squeeze out what you need.
To love is nothing other than seeing a situation or someone as they are and giving them the appropriate response as a creative and benevolent being.
Fasting helps with creativity, drive, and idea generation. Taking afternoon naps can also help with that. But nothing can substitute the learning process necessary to cultivate a mind capable of creativity.
Persuasion and manipulation have some similar strategic means but the ends differ. The former is a crucial element of leadership helping you form high-quality lasting relationships and great outcomes with love, empathy and a keen understanding of human nature while the latter caters to self-interest and hurts people through selfish acts. But life isn't a zero-sum game and it'd be foolish not to want expansion from cohesion.
An excited curiousity of what more you could do drives resilience. Inner strength supports this open-mindedness. All you need is to control yourself and curtail the attention to what's outside your control with immediacy.
To play right as your soul demands, it's good to know how people with poor character play so that the goodness you want to express isn't stifled by timidity but elevated by the freedom of a bold mind, the composure to reclaim attention toward what's impactful — what you can do, and the strategic utility of understanding human nature.
Ask yourself when you’re struggling with a roadblock, “Have I tried to learn how to solve it?” Most life and career problems stress or worry you because you don't realize you can always learn to solve them. This is why learning is a high ROI activity as it’s how you get what you need to overcome and level up. Thinking of your education in this way also makes it fun because you’re excited to apply what you’ve learned to produce a desired effect. The trick is to curate the best people and books to learn from so that your learning is thorough, you’re more confident and you don't have to learn for the first time twice.
Shadow integration is using your dark impulses for good reasons. All that matters is giving the darkness a target and limiting its scope of action rather than trying to exorcise it. Lust can be charm and charisma, wrath can be a weapon against evil, pride can be delusional self-belief. Think of yourself as the character Eddie Brock housing Venom — your shadow; you need each other to survive this crazy world and reach surprising heights.
The unconventional is to be sought and cultivated if it's true, fun and valuable. Anything different without purpose is a matter of mere preference, more ornamental than substantial.
In conversation, it’s wise to favor connection over the indulgence of self. Many people eventually forget what you say about yourself and it's better to punctuate a prominent quality you'd like known as an echo in the silence if you’d want it to stand out.
Love now, smile now, work hard right now, have fun now, connect with a person right now. Caretake this moment as best as you can for a great life is the cumulation of moments. People also don’t forget how seen, loved, understood and good you make them feel.
It's better not to mention a mistake unless asked and it's even better not to belabour it when it happens or is discovered. Not so you can get away with it but to direct your attention and other peoples’ where there's impact instead of dwelling useless pettiness. What matters is you learn and preserve the perception of competence as much as possible for the latter gives the former a platform to serve and practice.
"It takes confidence to throw work away. You have to be able to think, there's more where that came from." — Paul Graham.
Even better, it helps to give away creative work for free instead of throwing it away. Serves as good marketing.
‘Til next time,
Antonius Veritus.
An underappreciated fact here on fasting. I do intermittent fasting daily. There is a window of the fasting period that is most productive, full of energy and mental acuity.
Something I will write about eventually.
Life lessons are learned through years of living fully and starting at 21 or sooner is great. Learning, growing and changing is a process and there is no way a 21 year old has the battle scars of an 81 year old. That took 60 years of blood, sweat and tears. As far as I know there is no magic recipe or formula and most people on their own timetables have the opportunities to change over time. Unfortunately there are those who do not progress and remain stuck at some earlier human developmental stage. You can call it a lack of maturity or a failure to learn. "Those who do not learn from the mistakes of the past are condemned to repeat it." George Santyana in "The Life of Reason" (1905)