Between age 20-25 (more like 22 – 25 ) I read around 100 books and listened to around 200 podcast about self-improvement, physiology, finance, health and fitness, success, productivity and other similar topics. Here are the 25 best lessons I learned. I recommend also reading the short paragraph after each lesson.
1. Priorities Your Mental Health
Good mental health / a healthy mind is achieved by finding a good balance between positive and negative feelings. Too many negative feelings and you become depressed. Too many positive feelings and life eventually becomes boring. You need negative feelings so you can appreciate the positive ones. You need some struggle and go through some hardships. A good balance is not an equal amount of positive and negative feelings. A good balance is mostly positive feeling with some negative ones.
The image bellow shows which feelings are positive and which feelings are negative:
Our internal thoughts is a reflection of our well being. A common cause of bad mental health is if a person is constantly having negative thoughts. This is something that should be solved and not be ignored. Constantly seeing ourselves as a victim and putting the blame on others will also create many negative feelings.
Progress equals happiness. One way create more positive feelings in a reliable way is to set some long term goals, such as learning a new skill or starting a side project and work towards them everyday. A reason a person can feel depressed is because it feels like they are making no progress in life. Instead on focusing on being happy, focus on progress and happiness will come automatically.
Every time you consume something, you should take note on how it makes you feel mentally. If the feeling you get afterwards is negative you need to either limit it or remove it completely. The feeling afterwards is much more important than the feeling you have while doing something.
2. Develop Discipline Instead of Looking for Motivation
Motivation is an unreliable feeling that easily goes away. Discipline is about doing the difficult, challenging and stressful work even when you don’t want to do it. Most people know what they need to do in order to progress in life but they can’t do it because they lack discipline. The hard thing and the right thing are almost always the same.
3. Choose Delayed Gratification Over Instant Gratification
This is similar to developing discipline. Do what you need to do, not what you want to do. It’s about choosing to experience discomfort for the sake of progress in life. Choosing the difficult choice that gives long-term results over the easy choice that only gives short-term pleasure but no long-term results. Almost always, choose delayed gratification over instant gratification.
It feels good in the moment when you eat something unhealthy or play video games but once you are done all you are left with is guilt and thinking about why you did it. Everyone has things they want to accomplish in life. To accomplish these things, it’s all about choosing delayed gratification over instant gratification enough times. Hard choices easy life, easy choices hard life.
Actions have consequences. If you continuously do the wrong thing and choose instant gratification over delayed gratification these consequences will catch up to you in the form of regret, guilt, feeling of being left behind and feeling that you are not happy with where you are in life.
4. The More You Do Something the Easier It Becomes
This applies to probably all skills in life because that’s just how our brain works. The more we do something the more familiar we become with it and the easier it becomes. Some examples are waking up early, asking people out, cold showers, going to bed early, eating clean, gym. If you do something enough it takes less effort and becomes part of you identity.
This applies to negative things also. If you skip one day it will be easier to skip again the next day. Do it enough times and it becomes part of your identity, you won’t even feel any guilt eventually for skipping.
5. Things Won’t Change Unless You Change
Don’t expect things to change unless you change. Don’t expect things to get better unless you get better. This is why someone would focus on self-improvement. You change yourself for the better and the result is you get a better life. You don’t wanna be a person who only complains but does nothing about it.
Everyone wants to live their best life possible, you can only live your best life when you are the best version of yourself. You become the best version of yourself by improving yourself.
6. Porn Is Bad For You
It really messes up your brain and dopamine level and all that stuff. It negatively affects your mental health, ambitions and motivation. Your energy will also be lower and you will feel more tired in life.
The 5 biggest distractions to achieving ones goals are:
- Processed food (especially those high in sugar or fat)
- Video games
- Videos (tv series, movies, sport and random videos in general)
- Porn
- Social media
They are different distractions created with the purpose of stealing you attention in exchange for short-term pleasure. The main reasons why a person falls victim to these are: not having a strong purpose or goals in life, unstructured life and a weak mind.
The main bad thing about these activities is the dopamine to effort ratio. Meaning that you get a lot of dopamine for very little effort. You then become lazy and weak and will not wanna do things or feel unmotivated to do things that require effort.
Life will also be more boring because your brain define what is fun and interesting by comparing to what you saw online. All you will wanna do is stay home within your comfort zone.
7. “Your 20s Should Be Used to Live Life And Have Fun”
I used to believe this but it’s just wrong. You should definitely enjoy life, there is plenty of time for that in your 20s, but the main goal of your 20s should be to lay down a solid foundation, develop yourself, educate yourself, develop good habits and set up a plan for the future. You don’t wanna have the mind of a 20 year old and the body of a 30 year old.
Your 20s is when you will have the most amount of free time and energy. Your responsibilities will increase as you get older. If you prioritize fun and comfort over growth, you may have to pay for it with the rest of your life.
8. Read Books and Study On Your Own To Avoid Problems in the Future
The main reason for reading non-fiction books is so you can learn from the experience and mistakes from the author of the book. A lot of research goes into writing a book. So reading is a great return on investment because you can get all this knowledge from the book, that probably took years of research, in a couple of hours. When reading you need to have an open mind. You need to want to be changed by the content of the book.
You will for example become more self aware, better at making decision, controlling emotions, personal finance, health, becoming more effective and productive. Almost all the information to our problems can be found in books and the internet.
Your life will change, almost certainly for the better, If you read and apply the the knowledge from these non-fiction self-improvement books. You can change and really improve your life in 6 months.
The more people I get to know, the more thankful I’m for having read non-fiction books. The majority of problems people have can be solved by reading non-fiction books and then applying the knowledge from the books to their lives. But most people will never do this since they never question themselves in being wrong and think they know enough already.
Once you read enough of books or listened to enough podcasts about the same subject you will find out that the things everyone are saying are more or less the same. The lessons everyone are sharing are very similar. At that point you should start studying a different area. You don’t wanna be studying the same lessons over and over again.
9. Take Responsibility of You Life
Actions have consequences. The life you have right now is the result of all the previous choices you have made in your life. Your life is a reflection of how well you have spent your time. If you are not happy with your life, it just means you have not spent your time very well. You might think that you are spending your time efficiently but chances are you could be wrong so question yourself often about this.
The results of our decisions compounds with time. So the decisions we make when we are young are probably the most important ones in our life since they will have the most time to compound. Make sure these decisions are good.
Take responsibility of the things that happen to you. It’s all up to you to take action and to create the life that you want. No one will come and help you to accomplish your goals in life. No one will come and look after you to make sure you are doing the right things.
10. Develop Good Habits
Good habits takes you in the right direction and you end in a good place. Bad habits takes you in the wrong direction and you end up in a bad place. Our habits decide where we end up in life. Time will make or break you. You might think that small habits performed every day does matter but on a long enough time scale these small habits will cause big differences and results. This applies to both good and bad habits.
Big results in life comes from the daily habits we perform every day. The effect of our habits compounds with time. If you want to be rich just do some research on what habits a rich person has. Same goes for other things for example if you want to healthy, happy and successful.
You wanna start doing things and develop habits that can give compound interest. Compound interest means that the returns and value you get from something increases exponentially with time. Some examples are investing, developing good relationships and skills.
11. You Need to Have Some Goals In Life
It’s a know fact that progress equals happiness. You won’t know if you are making any progress if you don’t have any goals. Having goals and working on them also proves that you are capable of commitment. A common regret many have is that they wish they would have started sooner. By setting goals and working on them as early as possible you will avoid this kind of regret. Having goals will also make you a much more interesting person.
Don’t solve boredom with entertainment. If there is work that needs to be done, which there almost always is, then you should choose to do the work instead of entertainment. If you are bored and then watch some random movie, you feel so much worse afterwards The feeling after binge watching something even when I did not enjoy it is probably as close to being depressed I have ever been. Entertainment should only be used as a reward after enough work for the day has been done.
You will feel empty, tired, unmotivated, regret and that life is meaningless if turning to entertainment whenever you get bored is your default answer. Once you are done, you will for a short while feel a little bit better and then you will again be looking for the next thing to consume.
12. Happiness and Peace Come From Solving Your Problems and Not Avoiding Them
If you procrastinate on your problems they will just compound with time and you will just have to deal with a bigger problem in the future. Part of your attention will also be stolen from you because your brain will be thinking about the problem. You won’t find any inner peace / a calm mind while having unsolved problems.
13. Money Is a Transfer of Value
If you want to become rich and have other people transfer money to you, you just have to create value for other people. No money means you are providing no value to other people that can be monetised. There are 3 types of value:
- Entertainment (i.e.: fun videos, games)
- Helping others save time (i.e.: food, devices, services). Instead of having to create it themselves they pay you to get it.
- Helping others achieve their goals (i.e.: courses, information).
You can multiply your existing money by investing in financial assets which will compound.
Value is defined by solving problems. The bigger the problem the more you will be rewarded. You can either focus on solving other peoples problem or a problem you have that other may also have.
14. Not Wanting Something Is the Same As Having It
All materialistic desires can be solved in two ways. You either buy it or you stop wanting it.
Many times when we want something, what we really want is only the feeling associated with acquiring that thing and not actually owning it.
15. Every Time You Spend Money, You Also Spend Time
Our time is valuable. There is a lot of time being spent on small activities every time we buy something. For example if you buy something online you will spend time choosing which thing to buy, compare prices, randomly browse around, go and pick up the package and then you need to throw away the packaging. Just another reason to spend less money and stop buying things.
16. Unless You Really Like Your Job, Your Real Job Is To Leave Your Regular Job
- How to know you don’t like your job: The best part about the day is when you leave your work.
- How to know if you like your job: you don’t mind working on weekends, you enjoy your work and think it’s interesting. You learn useful new things and feel like there is room for growth.
- How to know if you really liked your job: you would do it even if you became financially free.
You escape your day job by starting a side project and working on it in the evenings and weekends. You will have to learn many new and difficult skills during this entire process and deal with emotions such as doubt, fear and worry. Then you monetise it so it generates some income.
There are many good benefits with a regular day job such as: safety and stability so you don’t have to worry about money, gives you a good structure and schedule of the day and people to socialise with. It’s recommended to keep your day job while you work on your side project until it starts to generate enough income. Keeping the job will lower stress and pressure on you.
Don’t fool yourself into believing that comfort and job stability equals job satisfaction.
17. Priorities Your Physical Health
Having any kind of chronic physical pain will bother you a lot and reduce the quality of your life. You will just think about it whenever you feel the pain and just wishing it to be over. It will steal a lot of your time and attention. It can be very difficult to get rid of if you have had it for a long time. So the best is to prevent it from the start. The most common areas for pain are: neck, shoulders, hips, knees and lower back. Doing yoga is good for you and will prevent a lot of injuries. Or just google: best exercises to prevent X injures.
Intermittent Fasting Is Good For You
Intermittent fasting is that you only eat during a certain amount of hours during a day. The most common ration is 16:8, meaning that you fast for 16h and then eat for 8h. The three main reasons are:
- It prevents / fights cancer: A process called Autophagy gets trigged in the body when we fast for a long enough time. What happens is that because there is no food coming in, the body starts to eat up / clean up itself and other dead cells which can be the reason for cancer.
- Good for weight loss: The body uses its own fat as fuel because there is no food coming in which leads to less body fat.
- It saves a lot of time since you don’t need to be thinking about eating all the time.
18. Stop Looking For Attention, Praise and Validation
Enjoy and be grateful for them if the come but don’t do things where the main reason is to get attention, praise and validation. Important to know is that what you are looking for is the positive feeling the attention, praise or validation gives you. This applies too many areas of life. What we are really looking for is the positive feeling we get from doing something. These positive feelings can be created in other more productive ways.
19. Focus on What You Can Control and Not on What You Can’t
We should not be too affected by things outside of our control such as the weather, politics, other peoples behaviour and news. The only things that are within control over is our attitude and our next action.
If you created something then how well its received and the feedback you get is also outside of your control. What’s in your control is how you use that feedback for your next work.
20. Don’t Always Listen to Your Own Mind
Pretend like it’s another person ordering you to do something when you feel like you want to do something or not want to do something. For example, you don’t wanna go to the gym but you know it’s the right thing to do. Then pretend like it’s someone telling you not to go to the gym. Most often you would not listen to this advice if it was from another person because you know what the right thing to do is.
When should we not listen to our own mind? Most of the time these moments involves short term pleasure / instant dopamine. During these times, the mind will come up with all kinds of reasons why it’s ok to do it. Some example are: watching another tv series episode, checking social media, watching random videos and eating some processed food.
Another time when we should not listen to our own mind is when we are about to do something challenging or stepping outside of our comfort zone. We know what the right thing to do is during these moments but the mind will come up with different excuses on why we should not do it.
21. You Decide if a Situation Is Good or Bad
What one person sees as good another can see as bad. Most of the time, try look for the positive in every situation. Your overall attitude should be optimistic since it does not really help you not be.
22. No One Cares What You Are Doing
No one really cares about what you are doing because they are too busy focusing on themselves and their own problems. Unless what you do affects or bothers other people, they don’t really care. Don’t do anything illegal.
23. If You Get Angry, Its Almost Always Your Own Fault
Anger is almost always caused by one of two things. Your exceptions of a situation were not met or you lacked preparation. Both these things are within your control. Next time set more realistic exceptions and be better prepared.
Losing control of yourself does not change a situation that has already happened. Ask yourself: is being angry going to help me in this situation? This question can be used for other mostly unhelpful emotions also like stress, worry, jealousy and nervousness. Discarding an unwanted emotion is a skill that can be learned and it’s a simple two step process:
- Become aware of / identify the emotion. You can imagine that the emotion is an object, like a ball or something.
- Become present (live in the now) for a short amount of time and then separate yourself from the emotion.
Being angry is ok, staying angry is not. Since it almost never helps and just worsens your decision making.
24. Desire is a Contract You Make With Yourself to Be Unhappy Until You Get What You Want
Desires are when you choose to remain unhappy and in a state of lack until you obtain what you are seeking. If you have desires but take no action towards fulfilling them, you will eventually feel miserable and sad. Having many desires can make you even unhappier as it implies that you lack many things, and the feeling of lack is typically negative.
Having desires is very important since it is closely related what your goals in life are. Just don’t have too many desires at the same time.
25. Focus on Acquiring Skills Instead of Information
In todays world, information is abundant, skills are not. Focus on acquiring skills that have utility such as presentation skills, negotiation, decision making, communication, writing, etc. What skills to learn depends on what your goals in life are. These skills are usually difficult to learn and requires time and effort. Most people are not willing to commit into learning new skills. You shouldn’t focus on learning general information that everyone can easily know like history, news, geography, sports. The majority of this kind of information is useless and it’s only purpose is gossip and pretending to sound smart to others.
Random Advice
- Anything can be learned, as long as you put enough time and effort into it. Basically developing a growth mindset.
- When it comes to accomplishing goals, on of the most important things is believing in yourself that you can do it.
- You can only learn things when you are focused.
- Every rule and statement has exceptions so don’t take everything you hear too literally.
- Every time you do things that are not aligned with your goals is like you are stealing from your future self. Don’t need to exaggerate here.
- Tolerance for bad habits easily builds up. For example: Ii you play video games and are satisfied with 3h, eventually you will need 4h to feel satisfied.
- Don’t take advice from people who never questions themselves or have no results to back them up. For example you don’t wanna take fitness advice from a fat person, financial advice from a poor person or happiness advice from a sad person.
- If most of your joy and happiness in life comes from external things, like shopping and consumption, then it’s only a matter a time before life gets boring. Most of your happiness and joy would come from growth and doing things.
- You need to write things down, otherwise you will have the same thoughts over and over.
- Over preparation reduces your imagination and ability to improvise.
- You can pretty much say anything, as long as you are honest, kind and respectful.
- Don’t be mean, talk bad about others or make a joke that might hurt someone. We will usually feel bad and regret it afterwards when we do this.
- You get what you deserve and you are not entitled to anything. Just because you made something does not mean other people should like it or spend time to watch, read or use it. Don’t expect to get results just because you put in some work. Just because you put in some work does not mean you deserve to get a reward
The Video That Introduced Me to Self-Improvement
Here is a link the video that motivated me to start reading and educating myself. Before this video, the only books I thought existed were school books, cooking books and non-fiction books.
