Life lessons are the bits and pieces of information we gain from life experiences about how the world works, how people behave, and how we should act. Some of them come in a flash while others might take years to fully comprehend. Some can be rather minor in impact and others truly profound. The life lessons we’ve learned and those learned by others are an important topic of discussion for two main reasons.
First, life lessons are strictly derived from the personal life experiences we have. Two different people having two different sets of life experiences will have distinct life lessons that are important to them. Consider a 50 year old male who spent most of his life running his own business and a 35 year old mother with three children. These two people have very different vantage points in life and will likely have different lessons they have learned.
Second is their ability to sum up and easily convey the entirety of a life’s experiences. Life lessons are usually short and to the point, even if they took an entire lifetime to formulate. By sharing life lessons, we are able to share experiences with others in a way that they can understand and apply to their own circumstances. Going back to our previous example, the 50 year old male sharing his experiences running a business with the 35 year old mother might not have any discernible value. But if he, instead, shared the life lessons he learned from 30 years of operating a business, there would undoubtedly be some wisdon she could take away and apply to her own life.
The following are eight life lessons I’ve learned from my own experiences and the experiences of others that I wish I had known earlier. Life lessons are often like that. Once we truly accept them we look back and realize we would have made different choices given our new insight, but we can’t. We can only move forward and apply our new insights.
1. Time is your most valuable asset
Our lives are composed of many different resources. There’s money, relationships, faith, knowledge, our physical ability, etc. But one is different from all the others, and that is time.
Time is non-renewable, meaning that once it’s gone we can’t ever get it back. We can spend time, we can waste time, we can manage it, but we can’t ever truly gain more. The clock is always ticking. This, coupled with the fact that we don’t know how much time we actually have on this earth, makes it the most important asset we have.
We need to spend our time with the people we care about, doing the things that make our lives meaningful. If we aren’t mindful of our time or its importance and we don’t learn to manage it, it will slip through our fingers. Don’t let that happen.
2. It’s okay to fail and make mistakes
No one likes the feeling of trying to do something and coming up short. No one likes the feeling of pouring everything they have into achieving some goal or outcome just to end up failing. As a result, we feel like we’ve wasted our time and our energy.
But everyone is going to fail at something at some point in their lives, everybody is going to suck at something. We need to reframe these setbacks and failures in our lives as learning experiences and realize that not only is it okay to make mistakes and fail, it’s literally the only way to get better at it.
We try something, we fail, we learn from this failure, and then use this knowledge to take a different approach. Fucking things up is inevitable–as long as we aren’t making the same mistake twice, its okay. Avoiding things because we might fail will always stifle our growth.
3. No one is coming to save you
Family and friends can support you throughout your life but it’s important to realize that your future and your success or failure is dependent upon only you. If you don’t like the way your life is going, stop waiting for reinforcements to arrive because they aren’t coming. You need to take action and you need to hold yourself accountable. No one can save you if you are unwilling to save yourself.
There’s a moment when every boy realizes that nobody’s coming to save him, and that’s when he becomes a man. Some boys never get there and stay children forever.
-Alex Hormozi
4. What you aren’t doing is just as important as you what you are doing
The difference between successful and unsuccessful people often isn’t a difference in what they are doing, it’s a difference in what they aren’t doing. This is for two reasons: a lack of focus and taking contradictory actions.
In order to succeed and make progress in our lives, we must focus on what’s most important and what brings us the greatest results. We are all limited by things like time and money, and if we spread ourselves too thin we don’t allow ourselves the resources to take advantage of what truly matters. Consider an entrepreneur who decides to open not just one, but five different businesses at the same time. Any of them could probably have been successful given the right skillset, but because of a lack of focus it is unlikely that any will get the attention or resources needed to flourish.
We also have a tendency to take two contradictory actions where one will negate the benefit of the other. For example, if my goal is to save money it won’t matter how much I make or how hard I work if I can’t stop overspending and mismanaging my finances.
We need to be conscious of those things we are doing that need to be cut out from our routine and our lives.
5. Spend time thinking about what you want your life to look like
I don’t think there is enough emphasis when you’re younger to consciously evaluate what you really want your future to look like. How much money do you want to make? Do you want a family? What activities and hobbies do you enjoy? What do you want your life’s work to be?
People typically decide in bits and pieces when necessary. For instance, eventually you are going to have to pick a major in college and this will usually decide what you work on for the rest of your life. But coming up with an overall vision for your life and putting all those pieces together is something that isn’t done often enough.
Without a vision for your life, and something to aim at, there is no way to make progress. In order to go anywhere, you need a destination and a route to get there. We are simply failing to define a clear destination.
If we don’t decide what we want our future to look like, circumstances will eventually decide for us. This is a surefire way to end up unhappy with where you are and regret the outcome of your actions, or lack thereof.
6. If you don’t know what to do, pick something and adjust your plans as you go
Figuring out what you want to do with your life is extremely difficult. Very few people in this world feel compelled to dedicate their lives to a clearly defined purpose. Many times we get stuck in neutral because we can’t decide what to do, so we take no action at all. But this is the wrong way to go about it.
We should pick something, the best thing we can at that moment, and aim for it. Having a goal and something we are working towards is the first step to making progress. Very few, if any at all, decisions we make like this are set in stone. As we work towards our original goal we will gain knowledge and insight that allows us to adjust our plans and better tailor them to ourselves.
Through our progression we will develop a better understanding of what makes us tick, what we’re good at, what we need to work on, and those things that are most important to us. The path to success is not a straight line. It’s a meandering mess filled with set-backs, changes of course, ups and downs, and everything in between.
When we begin, we have no idea where success even is on the map. We have to make an educated guess and then work our way towards it. As we do this, the path to success becomes more clear and we can adjust our plans accordingly.
7. Don’t compare yourself to others, compare yourself today to who you were yesterday
We all have a habit of comparing ourselves and our successes and failures to that of others. This is problematic for a number of reasons.
First, we don’t really know the whole story. We typically compare our current circumstances to the highlight reel of others with little to no knowledge of what it took them to get there or how they truly feel on the inside. This results in a distorted view of reality and our current status in life.
Second, the people you are comparing yourself to aren’t you. Everybody comes from different circumstances. We have different families, different opportunities, different goals, different problems etc. This means that when making comparisons to assess how well you’re doing in life, anyone other than yourself is a bad control.
The only other alternative is to compare ourselves today to who we were yesterday. Doing this, not only can we aim up, but we can actually track and measure our progress.
Focus on continuously improving yourself and your circumstances. Don’t get lost feeling inferior to, or jealous of, others.
8. Do it right or don’t do it at all
Don’t get used to putting in minimal effort and just getting by in everything you do. If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing it the right way.
The actions we take in life are always building off of things we have done previously. If we just go around half-assing everything, eventually we are going to look back and realize we’ve built ourselves up on a shaky foundation we can’t rely on.
We want to know that if we take on a project or set a goal, we can depend on ourselves to do our best. When we can trust ourselves to do that, we build up our self-confidence. We also want others to know they can depend on us, and if they see we constantly cut corners and do the minimum amount of work possible, they simply won’t.
How you do anything is how you do everything. Choose to do it right.
