A few days ago, I turned 35. When I was 28, that number felt inconceivably far away. Now, those seven years seem like the blink of an eye.
On my birthday back then, I noticed the trend of racking up ever more life lessons as we get older — a trend I wished to break. Instead of the expected 28, I wrote down 14 lessons for myself, wondering if even those were too many. “Less is room for more of what’s not there yet” was one of them.
Here’s another lesson I learned around that time: Aging won’t magically free you from stupidity. Only learning will. Wisdom is not guaranteed.
Unless we reflect deeply and continue to improve our habits, we’ll keep making the same mistakes. And while it looks smart if you share more and more life lessons on paper each year, you could argue what’s happening is actually the opposite of learning. If you truly got wiser, surely you wouldn’t need ever more reminders!
Even if we try our best, we’ll have to learn many lessons twice. What better way to create more space in our minds than to distill our knowledge as time goes on? The longer I live, the more I want to condense the sum total of my experiences into a few principles I can easily remember and live by.
So, rather than list 165 individual insights, here are five big-picture lessons from making it halfway through my 30s.
1. Settling down is the path to happiness across many walks of life
Imagine someone who keeps moving from place to place well into their 60s. They take odd jobs wherever they find them. They constantly meet new people and frequently change romantic partners. Does that sound exciting? Do you feel any jealousy towards that person? I don’t.
Of course, we all go through such changes at different times — but who wants to keep starting over forever? Would you be happy living such a transient life? How about any of your friends? Most of us have more in common with trees than we’d like to admit: We enjoy growing roots.
I’ve looked forward to settling down since I was a teenager, but, back then, I didn’t know anything about what it implied or how it would actually feel. Now that I am, I can confirm my gut was right, even if it takes serious tradeoffs. But weight is more than heavy. It is also grounding. So despite its disadvantages, I appreciate settling even more than I imagined.
I visited Munich for the first time in 2007 during a field trip. My entire class loved it. “Let’s all move here!” half of them claimed. I visited several more times, then did an internship in the city for five months in 2014. Two years later, I did move there. I’ll soon have been here a decade, and I have no plans to leave. I literally settled — first into the decision, then into the place.
But settling down is about more than choosing where to live. Teenager-me was a hopeless romantic, yet he was also a rejected romantic most of the time. When I finally started dating properly in my 20s, I broke up with various girlfriends for various reasons, but in the end, it always came down to “I can’t imagine spending the rest of my life with you.” Soon, my now-fiancée and I will have our six-year anniversary. A few years ago, there was a moment where 25-year-old me would have bailed to pursue a fairytale romance halfway across the globe. But 31-year-old me didn’t — because he realized the rewards grow where you work for them, and his relationship was already as perfect as anyone could ask for in this imperfect life. Or, in my grandma’s nonchalant but ever-true words: “What better thing might follow?” She’s been happily married for 62 years, by the way.
Settling down also applies to friendships. I recently put 65 names into a spreadsheet. That’s 65 friends I’ve made in 35 years of life. In elementary school. In high school. In my undergrad, master’s, and at work. I saved their addresses and partners’ and babies’ names. If I can keep up with 65 people over the years, what a glorious feat that will be. I have a running joke with one of them, who also lives in Munich: “See you next year,” we say every time we meet for coffee. Usually, it’s true. If you’re lucky enough to call a few dozen people friends, chances are, you don’t need any more of them. You just need to keep the ones you have.
Knowing your town, knowing your friends, knowing who you’ll wake up next to in the morning — settling is a tremendous source of comfort. It’s not just that it was good enough for our grandparents and, therefore, will also be good enough for us. Today, it might have even more subjective value.
Every time you unlock your phone, the world seems to spin a little faster. The less consistency we can find at work, in the news, in our politics, technology, and global macro environment, the more we cherish balance in our daily lives. Drawing on our roots and routines keeps us healthy, happy, and resilient.
Don’t be afraid to make the big decisions.
2. You can do everything in your own time
My parents had me when they were 26 years old. I wasn’t planned, but it all turned out well enough: My dad could play sports with me. My mom found the incredible energy to raise my sister and me at the same time.
I, too, would have loved to have kids in my 20s. There was only one problem: I didn’t find the wife to have them with back then. Despite this, I refused to rush it. After I met my fiancée, we rode out three years of long-distance. We lived together for over a year before I proposed. We’ll have been engaged for nearly two years by the time we get married, and we’re not planning on buying a house or having a child right after, either.
Sure, I believe in settling — but I also believe in living life at your own pace.
Society is funny that way. Most people know they want to settle down eventually, but they live as if they never will. Then, once folks hit the big 30, they do it in a hurry. I keep being amazed at how many people sandwich marriage, kids, and building a home into the same year. Maybe that, too, works out well enough for them. But, I’m never quite sure: Did those couples feel inspired by their peers or merely pressured by them? Did they make those choices? Or just, sort of, fall into them?
Life is unpredictable. You never know what’s going to happen next. But for the big choices, you should 100% try to exert as much control as you can — because being deliberate about the important forks in the road offers its own kind of happiness.
It’s never a perfectly calculated process. But I took 10 years to choose a city and 10 years to choose a partner. For most of my friendships, I only knew after 10 years if they would stick. So don’t rush. And if the universe has a different plan for you? Then you can still learn to be happy with the hand you were dealt.
Whatever’s the current hype in your age group, don’t let demographics bully you. Your life is yours. You can do everything in your own time.
3. Focus on your next financial win, not your last financial failure
You know what’s another great thing to do in your own time? Getting rich.
If I had played my cards right, I could have “retired” at age 30. Cashed out everything at the peak of the 2021 crypto bull market, dropped it into some ETFs, and mostly lived off my portfolio for many years, perhaps always. But, of course, I didn’t. Sometimes, I still kick myself for it.
This is totally stupid. Because why stop there? If I had cashed out at the peak of the 2018 crypto bull market, then bought Bitcoin again at the bottom, I might have 10 million dollars right now! If I had paid attention when reading about Bitcoin in 2013, I could have hundreds of millions with much less money invested! If had kept my Tesla stock from 2015, my LINK coins from 2017, or my Pokémon card collection from when I was 9, oh boy! If I had sold this earlier or held that longer — what if, what if, what if? And on and on the regret cycle goes.
Any analysis of financial decisions that pretends you could have made the perfect choice is not an analysis worth continuing. You’ve never made the perfect choice, and you likely never will. Even if you had, it’d be too soon to tell. What if all of crypto goes to zero tomorrow for some reason? Anyone who’s made a single dollar off it will look like a genius!
Focus on your next financial win, not your last financial failure. After my “big miss,” I cleaned up my coin portfolio. I picked some to ride out for the long run and stopped looking at them for a while. Meanwhile, after the big COVID crash, I started buying stocks again. I got interested, analyzed some companies and ETFs, bought what I knew and liked and understood. I set some auto-buys, and now, whenever I have time and money, I add to some positions. That portfolio is up around 80%. Did I miss out on gains there too? Hell yeah. But it’s a win. Good! Next!
In 2023, my business wasn’t doing well, and I had to figure out a new path. To keep my spirits high, I got back into Pokémon cards after many years. What started as a distraction turned out to be an opportunity. I began collecting what I liked but soon learned the space was investable, too. So I kept collecting what I liked but applied a few organizing principles to it. I picked up sealed items from my favorite sets. I focused on cards of my favorite “mons,” premium vintage cards, and mini sets of a dozen or so cards that could stand on their own. My timing was fortunate. A year after I rejoined, the market picked up steam, and now, for Pokémon’s 30th anniversary, it’s booming. My collection has risen about 70% in value. These days, I go slow. I finish sets and consistently buy sealed boxes of each new set. That’s it. A win is a win. Good! Next!
Screw your money mistakes. We all make those. But we can’t live off dollars we never cashed out, can we? We do have the power, however, to always look forward, get excited about opportunities, and build our next position.
4. You can reinvent yourself any day — because no one cares about you all that much
The “next-win mindset” applies well beyond money. Take that 2023 business failure I mentioned.
After mostly running Four Minute Books on the side for almost a decade, I finally decided to double down on it for a year. It went well…until the business collapsed entirely nine months later. Google’s search algorithm, AI, blah blah, its time was simply up — and what once generated some $200,000+ per year in revenue would soon make less than $20,000. I started some half-assed attempts to turn things around, but I soon had to admit: After 10 years of making money in more ways than I could count, I was tired of always having to find new pots of honey.
Thankfully, rock bottom was also a moment of liberation: “Why don’t I just…get a job?” If none of my own ventures would sustain me, maybe I could support someone else’s for a change? Collect my paycheck and worry a little less? I had been self-employed straight out of college, so this would be a first, but I felt ready for a change.
While applying for jobs, I also turned my business inside out. I pulled the plug on all forms of monetization I hated to begin with. Banner ads, gone. Affiliate marketing, gone. Newsletter sponsorships, gone. I killed my Youtube channel, Substack, and regular book summary cadence on the site. “If I’m gonna be an employee, I might as well do what I like in my spare time,” I figured.
A mere 132 job applications, 86 rejections, 43 ghostings, six months, four answers, and eight interviews later, at the ripe age of 33, I had secured my first full-time job. Nowadays, I wake up early, write, then “go to work” from my couch. I do my job, do my best to do it well, and if I’m lucky, I get to write some more in the evening. I only write what I care about, and I work on my next book a little bit every day. Nearly all of my online energy goes into my own blog, where I’m finally pulling together a decade of writing.
From the inside, my life has changed so much, I feel like an entirely different person. I probably am. But you know what? From the outside, hardly anyone notices. Even many of my best friends don’t know the full story, and what they do know doesn’t shock them all that much. “So, how is it being employed?” I share some updates, and our conversation moves on.
That is exactly as it should be — because my friends are just as busy being awestruck at how much their own lives are changing. Some are parents now. Others have lost their jobs or struggle in new ones. They buy homes and renovate them. Their family members die too soon. It’s all life, and oh, how it keeps us occupied.
Is it sad we’re no longer in tune about every little detail of the lives of the people we love? A bit, but it’s also profoundly liberating. It was always true, of course, but it feels especially applicable in your 30s: No one cares about you all that much — and that’s why you can completely reinvent yourself any day. As soon as I focused on my path forward, I simply became who I needed to be, and it didn’t matter if that meant a lot of change.
If you’re holding back on doing a 180, don’t. You might think you’re saving face. Or that you’re sparing your mom, partner, or best friend from high school some pain. You’re not. The most confused person in all of this will still be you — but if your head spinning for a few months is what it takes to get yourself back on track and go after what you truly want, so be it!
Don’t overthink it. Do the thing. No one cares all that much. And if it doesn’t work? Then you change it all again tomorrow.
5. You’ll never “find” time for your higher callings — you’ll have to make it
Speaking of changing in an instant, here’s one kind of person I suggest you become right away: Someone who dedicates time to their dream every day.
I was lucky. It only took me four years of daily writing to get comfortable with the idea of being a writer for another 40 years to come. But the kind of writing I aspire to do is rarely the kind that pays tomorrow’s bills. So unless I create space for it, I’ll never have a chance to succeed on my own terms.
In 2021, I published my first book. I immediately knew books were the endgame for me as a writer. I also knew I would have to publish lots of them over many years to maybe someday make a living at writing them. I published a second, more creative book in 2022. Then, life happened, and I haven’t published another book since. This is one of the few recurring regrets I’ve had in my 30s. Those are worth paying attention to.
With the business capsizing, applying for jobs, and learning to navigate the corporate world, 2023–2025 were undoubtedly impactful years. But as Einstein’s wife once reminded him, “things are always!” No matter how much time you have or don’t have on paper, there’ll always be justifications for letting the urgent crowd out the important. Those justifications must not stop us from pursuing our dreams.
As inspiring as they are, higher callings still require work on the ground. How else are they supposed to make it from the realm of the muses into reality? But if you don’t carve out room in your life to do that work, they never will. For me, this means writing a daily blog every morning and then dedicating a little bit of time to my next book. Anything else is a bonus.
Your calling might be homemaking, painting, or starting a business. Each of those comes with distractions. Add in some of the build-a-life blocks discussed earlier, and your 30s might be the busiest you’ll ever be: young kids, early career days, building a house, the list goes on and on.
We all know someone who, at some point, lost their footing in life because they left nothing for themselves. Throwing everything at your job or parenting gig is mentally demanding but emotionally easy. Life will always take more if you let it. Fighting back, protecting a tiny bubble of time, and refusing to get swept away completely by the hurricane is hard. The amount of perceived space in your life will forever expand and contract in different periods, but if you maintain an uncompromisable minimum, you’ll always retain a tiny sliver of yourself.
What you choose to do when no one’s watching makes you who you are. Don’t let what’s most important to you slip out of that window.
“I wonder how many lessons I’ll see when I’m 29,” my old self wrote. “I hope less than 14.” It took me a minute, but I can feel 28-year-old me smiling. Who knows? Maybe at 40, I’ll have only four things to remind myself of.
Learning is great. Never stop. But don’t forget to condense your insights. Pressure forms diamonds, they say. Let’s crystallize our wisdom so we may hold on to it for decades to come.
