“I always believed we should do whatever we wanted, whatever we loved until we’re 50. Then we work until we die – a reverse engineered life.”
An 80 year old said this to me at work today and I can’t stop thinking about it. His thoughts really drove home all the ideas I hear from Gary Vaynerchuk about “Having so much time”, “Doing the things you love”, and “Failing for the next 5 years then still being young as hell.”
The early part of your life should be spent taking advantage of your youth. The early years are when you can take chances, travel, make mistakes, start businesses, and spend money on yourself. But life works in the reverse of that.
We spend our youth anxious about figuring it all out as quickly as possible. We spend years in school hoping we made the right choice. We try so hard to find a well-paying career that we’re content with. We build a family and a life and continue doing the same routine until we’re one day able to relax. One day we’ll have enough money and time to do whatever we want, but at that point, we’re too tired to take advantage of it.
What can you do to live a life in the reverse fashion – a life where you live it up and enjoy your time early on before it’s too late? I think all we really can do is become aware of the importance of our youth and try harder to incorporate “living it up” into our routine.
To me, that means trying to start businesses or passion projects to whatever capacity I can manage. It means not stressing so much about taking a week off work to travel. It means enjoying weekends with friends and making dumb (not dangerous) mistakes. We should splurge on ourselves every once in a while. We should worry less about embarrassing ourselves and more about being our genuine self no matter what. It’s choosing to switch jobs because we’re not happy where we are.
We have responsibilities and we need to be smart and safe, but we don’t have to waste the most opportunistic years of our lives worrying, saving every penny, building a career path, or trying so hard to “figure it all out”.
Enjoy the time you have as a young person. Try new things, meet new people, travel, and invest time in yourself. Live your life before it’s too late.
July 15, 2022
