8 Things I Wish I Knew When I Was 22
almostfearless.com
almostfearless.com
I'm drawn to a more nomadic life, but am having problem breaking free because of these. Anybody else run into these problems? How did you solve them?
Everything shapes who you are from then on, and an experience like travelling may have a big effect on your later life. But so does being a parent, or starting a company, or any number of other big experiences. You just have to make a judgement as to which you want to experience first.
You could make a similar argument for having kids later in life - to some it doesn't any sense to wait until you're old and tired to have kids.
If I want to travel, I can rent it out (the rent will cover the mortgage) and in 12 odd years I will owe nothing on it, and can live rent free for the rest of my days (or buy a bigger house) - I am only 28 so by 40 the house thing is largely sorted, which is nice ...
The environment you live in is a huge part of your life, and if you don't own your home, you're unlikely to be able to stay in an environment you enjoy. Aristocratization[1] isn't that far fetched.
[1] http://www.theonion.com/content/news/report_nations_gentrifi...
Having pets has been one of the best things I've ever done.
Mine are magical and mystical, have taught me many things, love me unconditionally, and are better companions than many people I know. I love their company during long coding sessions.
They expect little in return. Just a little food and attention. I always have someone to care for them when I travel.
Their greeting is the best thing about coming home, whether it's been 8 hours or 8 days.
If you do extended travel, learn how to be outgoing. My first long trip was to Japan. Being shy and quiet made the first 3 months a nightmare. Luckily, at the time I was young and still reasonably good looking so women would ask me out. But it would have been more fun and easier if I hadn't had such social anxiety. I did some extreme personality modification afterwards and when I went other places I had a much better time.
It is very important to nail #1, figure out a career that you love, or at least LIKE. It isn't as though you come back, return to work, and your work anxiety is alleviated by your fond travel memories. In fact, your travel experience makes it much worse because you are just thinking "fuck I could be on the beach in Thailand right now instead of rebooting these servers at 4 in the morning."
Safety net is sort of important. You don't want to return and then be stuck taking the first job that comes along. Note that safety net doesn't necessarily mean having a bunch of cash. It could mean having a friend or family with an extra room where you can stay in the area where you want to work. In my case it sucked, because most of my friends were bums like me who live in studio apartments, and most of my family lives in the extreme middle of nowhere. Trying to find a job in Palo Alto while you are in the Yukon is not easy or fun.
Also, figure out what you really want. Travel is easy. You just need money for a plane ticket. You can go almost anytime. I didn't realize until after I traveled that what I really wanted was financial and career independence. I probably missed out on 5 prime career building years by bumming around doing the travel/slacker thing. Now I have to compete with Google Ycombinator braniacs. Back in the day, I only would have had to be as smart as the guys who made BlueMountain.com or geocities...
I'd love to hear more about this. Usually when I go to a party I talk to a few people and have an OK time. However, the few times I've talked to everyone at a party, I've had a memorable blast. It's definitely not natural and I feel I have to be warmed up socially.
Now stop reading about mistakes to avoid and start discovering new ones to make by yourself. Those mistakes will end up perversely leading you to your greatest successes, but you can't make them if you try following someone else's retrospective perfect blueprint for happiness.
Adam then keyed in on the core of his talk: Learning. He said there are only kinds of learning: Learning from others & Learning by doing. You only learn by falling down. Nobody gets everything right the first time. Set yourself up to rapidly trying things until you find what’s right. Just like you don’t play hockey without padding: don’t develop without padding. Unit tests, exception notifier, cheap branching/merging in git, fast deploy with capistrano are all padding that mean you fear less and can try things that might hurt you because you can fix them fast."
Adam Key's talk summarized "Oh the Fail I’ve known" http://drewblas.com/2008/06/01/railsconf-2008-sunday-afterno...
Roll with them.
Because one really bad mistake I'm half-blind and since then I prefer to think damn hard before making decisions.
Advice to Young Men from an Old Man http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/sfo/279126743.html
Things I wish I’d known when I was younger http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifestyle/things-i-wish-i’d...
Oh dear. I hope there are exceptions.
sorry, i'll stop ranting. I just want women to be able to screw whomever they want without consequences. :)
(Naturally that only applies in some cases, but here I think it's pretty apt.)
One most important things that I have taken notice to in the past few years or so is that your life path is exactly what you want to make it. Early on in the school systems we are led to believe that your life will go as follows: School => Find High Salary Job => Retirement => Death. They train you to become reliant on the system and think that your goal should be to exit schooling with a high paying salary and if you don't you are screwed. You will be miserable and lonely forever. They never suggest once that you can stray off that path and most never question it.
Another realization that I have come across lately is that it is easy to become caught up in idealism. It's nice to dream up what you see for your future and forget where you are now. Steve Jobs spoke in his 05 Stanford commencement speech of connecting the dot's in hindsight and not realizing the impact that some previous events had at the time. The important thing to realize is not that we should look back in hindsight and connect the dots rather, focus on the creation of the dots themselves. You are in control and your future is not some mystical set-in-stone experience that you will have a great epiphany over sometime in the future while reflecting. So rather than hope that everything will work itself out, find out what you want and be the one to create the dots, not connect them. I could go on more but it's time I go create my reality rather than ramble about potentials.
From what I gather, it's easy for engineers to spend a career like this if they want to. School advisors tell you to make yourself valuable, but they emphasize it with a stick -- if you don't, you'll be poor -- instead of a carrot -- you can cash in on your own value anytime. As PG mentioned in one of his essays, success is easier to tap if you stay upwind of it.
(Incidentally, I'm going back to grad school soon -- being a pseudo-engineer isn't as upwind as I'd like. That's one get-out-of-a-rut-free card with pretty low risk.)
this is a startup site, aren't we all trying to get rich so we can work on what we really care about without interference? that's what money buys.
For me, cool was Alaska for 10 years (a few years longer than I should've stayed, really). If you love tech, get to a place where tech is exciting. If you really love tech, that's probably SV. If you'd like to live someplace less crappy/expensive, that might be Seattle, Austin, or (if you can stand the East Coast) Boston.
Heh. That's funny...if I could give my 22-year-old self a piece of valuable advice, it would be to stay the hell out of Seattle.
(It's June 3, 55 degrees and raining. Fun stuff. Y'all come.)
IMO, Seattle beats SV/SF as a place to live, but I'm moderately outdoorsy (sailing, kayaking, etc) and travel a lot during the wet winter. I only lived in SV for 3 months (for YC) but I really didn't care for it. I like Austin, but 95 in the summer is murder.
Incidentally, does the background of the title look like Oregon's Crater Lake to anyone else? That is water I would not want to jump into... It's "cold, damn cold".