Lessons From The Defining Decade (Your 20s)
Ushering in another year of life and what the 20s have meant to me.
The 20s are a defining decade. My college professor said they were for failing and figuring things out. I exhaled a deep sigh in his class as I realized I didn’t need to have my life figured out at 21 with graduation lurking in a few weeks. It stuck with me. The 20s help make sense of what you do and don’t like. I still had so much learning and failing ahead of me.
As I inch through my 20s, I am beginning to realize I am getting kinda old. Today, I turn 26. The year you fall off your parent’s insurance, sad times. Some would say, I have much to look forward to and so many years left to live! I won’t deny that I do, but growing up feels weird. I never envisioned being 26, over halfway to 30! I feel young at heart, and to be 26 feels absurd. I felt I will always embrace the persona of being young, but even as I get older, I reflect on what the different waves of life teach me.
I used to enjoy staying up late, but now I yearn for a calm, slow morning where I rise with the sun. Life changes, priorities flip, but each year of your 20s teaches you something. I am not writing about 26 lessons for my 26th birthday, but one about what I think each year of my 20s taught me. The 20s have been transformative. I have lived what feels like many different lives as I grow, change, and mature in who I am meant to be.
At 20 and 21, I was still in college embracing the mindset of being young, free, and having few responsibilities. I said yes to all the experiences trying to release all the FOMO from my body. I was taking the trips, embracing my limited responsibilities, and trying to take advantage of the free time college affords you. These are the years of having fun, but also the beginning of setting your future. It is worth taking that trip, booking that flight, and saying yes to doing that philanthropy. 20 and 21 are for tasting all the different experiences that life affords you and embracing the time of being one door over from your friends, having world class facilities to learn, and relishing needing little money to have fun.
22 I was mired in a quarter life predicament. You realize life is short on time. It smacks you after graduation of what a full-time job entails, and you begin to drift to find your next purpose. For the entirety of our childhood and a portion of our young adult life, until 22, our purpose is to prepare ourselves for our adult life and set ourselves up in our careers. We work tirelessly in school, take college classes in high school, become presidents of clubs, change majors five times, and maybe start a small business. The search to define this purpose provides both meaning and suffering. You spent the last 15 years of your life working on something, only to find it may have left you with more questions than answers.
But part of finding those answers to the questions is to explore and apply those life experiences over and over until something sticks. Life is a constant reinvention of yourself. You are growing and changing every year and carving yourself into who you are meant to be. You challenge the status quo and seek out answers to make sense of a life that is no longer defined. 22 is about failing, learning some things, failing again, and doing it over again on repeat.
23 comes and you begin to accumulate some cash. You are no longer in the college kid mindset of eating ramen noodles for dinner every night, doing weird side hustles, and living off financial aid and loans. It’s nice to afford things, but you begin to see the status games that you were once blinded to. Everyone in college embraces the “broke college kid” mindset, but that dissipates. You begin to see that people spend money only to impress others.
However, no one is impressed with your possessions as much as you are. It is never about the person who has the item. It is always about how I would look if I had that item. It is an endless cycle of trying to impress others, but people are too concerned about themselves to even notice. Seeking to impress others with your finances is a fool’s game. Life is meant to be fun and done on your terms. It is a musical thing where you should dance and sing along the way while not always being caught in the rat races that status games bring.
At 24, I began moving towards a career that I felt aligned with as I gained more experience, but how did I find the best way to get there? Life can feel like one big waiting game. You have defined thoughts, plans, and goals for where you want to go, but I find the best advice isn’t to always be planning and plotting. Instead, I always appreciated how the University of Oregon football coach Dan Lanning put it,
“Everyone has goals and aspirations, you know how you get those? You be the best where you are at. It’s not worrying about the next thing, it’s about worrying what’s right in front of you, six inches in front of your face.”
It is putting a disproportionate amount of energy into what you can control. This isn’t to say I don't have long-term goals. I certainly have them. I probably couldn’t function without them. It helps with the process of everything. However, the best long term plans are held lightly and the way I reach my long term aspirations is to be present. A degree of being present in being great at what lies in front of you to help you achieve those goals. As Sam Altman, the founder of OpenAI, says,
“Piece of advice I heard in high school I’ve never forgotten: ‘Successful people aren’t smarter than you, they’re just way more persistent.’”
And the way you are persistent is to keep showing up and being the best at what lies in front of you.
25 is the year I could feel my prefrontal cortex starting to be fully developed. I embraced my agency and channeled the resources I had to fulfill to reach my potential. I started just doing things. I went to San Diego alone to learn how to surf. I never traveled alone but always had a burning desire to. It was only the beginning. I went to Las Vegas and Washington DC alone, not knowing a single soul, to race in Hyrox. I learned how much I didn't know but I saw how much I gained from just doing things. If I am ever struggling, I ask myself, “If I had ten times the agency, what would I do?” or “What would a high agency person do?” It is a work in progress, but choosing to blame a lack of agency or dissatisfaction with life on something beyond me doesn’t help. It only robs me.
I read the stories of James Cameron who copied 300 page filmmaking dissertations into a binder and studied while driving his truck to teach himself filmmaking. So much is gained from just doing things. Agency and Decisiveness pays. Life has a decisiveness issue. "I am cool with whatever" isn't as chill and relaxed as you think. Decisiveness is needed or life will continue to move along without getting what you desire. An entire life can be wasted overthinking, and being indecisive. Windows close. Paths get overgrown. Waves crash. The food gets cold. Act decisively. You will thank yourself, and those around you will thank you. 25 taught me to just do the thing.
26 is now here being ushered in. It will be another year of figuring things out, learning, growing, and of course, changing. For year 26 as Matthew McConaughey said,
“The approach is the destination and we're never finished… We do our best when our destinations are beyond the measurement, when our reach continually exceeds our grasp, and when we have immortal finish lines. And when we do this, the race is never over, the journey has no port. The adventure never ends, because we are always on the way.”
A special thank you to all those who have made this 26 year adventure fantastic and for you for reading this far.
-Scantron
Into the archives:
Happy 26th bro!