Summer is almost over, and hopefully, a lot of the recent Latino college graduate out there have a job in place or about to get in one place. If you don’t have one in place, make sure you check out Jordan Harbinger’s course on networking, which should help kick start your search.
First off, I want to say congratulations for making it to the next part of your life. For me, school was the easy part of life because you were told what to do for the majority of your time in college. In the work force, things are going to be a lot more up in the air, and it will be your job to figure it out for the most part. I was lost for the most part when I entered the workforce, and I just tried to figure things out.
I took a nontraditional path where I joined the Marines, but when I got my first job outside of the Marine Corps, I was not sure what I should do. Now that I’m in my 30s, I feel like have a better grasp on life and what I should be doing, but it took a lot of trial and error. Here are five lessons that I wished I learned in my early 20s, which would of saved me a lot of time and money.
20s Are For Learning, 30s Are For Earning
It takes 10,000 hours to become a master in a subject. This means if you spend four hours a day, five days a week, for 50 weeks, it will take you ten years to reach your 10,000 hours. You can put more hours in than four hours a day but make sure you’re realistic about it. I spent the last ten years, just consuming information and learning from anyone that I could, and this has made me a much stronger individual. Every day, I strive to work on myself, physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. If I do this, then I will become a stronger person in the future that will receive more opportunities.
I would advise you to strive to become a better person every day and see how much you can challenge yourself. Life has a lot of amazing things to offer, but you need to ready for those things when they come your way. So spend your 20s training, and when your 30s come, you’ll be unstoppable.
Keep The End In Mind
A great book that everyone should read is 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Steven Covey. One of the habits of successful people is that they keep the end in mind. It’s easy to let life dictate where you should go. You go into your job, do your time, go home, relax, go to bed, and you rinse and repeat mindlessly. There is a great scene in the Simpsons where Marge is telling Homer that he should spend more time with his kids because he will regret in the future. And Home goes, “That is a problem for future Homer, and I don’t envy that guy.”
Not knowing where you are going is a horrible situation to be in. As a financial planner, I’ve seen people who didn’t do enough for the future self, and it just causes stress for themselves and can take a toll on their relationships. If you don’t take a proactive approach to the future, life will dictate what type of future you will have, and you might not like what you get.
You should know who you want to be in life and the strive to be that person. This will come from having the end in mind and trying different things to give you more clarity.
When I sit down with young professionals, I ask them, when do they want to retire and how much much do they want to have. I also ask them what type of future do they want to have. Then we come up with a plan and strategy to help them reach those goals, but we can’t do this if we don’t keep the end in mind.
There is a balance between preparing for the future and enjoying the present, but you know the balance by taking some time and thinking about your future. So take some time every week and ask yourself, “Am I on track for the future that I want?” If the answer is “No.” Then there is some work that needs to be done.
You Have To Dig The Well Before Your Thirsty
Networking with other people is going to be crucial to your development as an individual. As the saying goes, your network is your net worth. So you have to do things to help foster relationships. I have been able to do some cool things in life like going to secret guacamole parties and sporting events for free because I knew the right people. I also got business opportunities because I knew the right people. When times are tough, you going to want to reach out to your network for help. When I went through my divorce, it was a rough time but thank god for one friend who helped me out.
The last thing you want to do is to reach out to folks when you need a favor out of the blue. They are most likely going to say no to you if you do this. Before you need the favor, you need to do things like help someone move, offer some advice, and just check-in with some periodically to see how they are doing. Remember their birthday and reach out to them. There is an excellent book called Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi, and I would recommend that you check it out as soon as possible and implement the lessons in there so that when you’re thirsty in the future, you have a well that can supply you a source of water.
Today's The Oldest You've Ever Been, And Today Is The Youngest You'll Be For The Rest Of Your Life
You have to realize that time is the scarcest resource we have, once it’s gone, it’s gone forever. And life can be long as long as you know how to use it. I read a book called On The Shortness Of Life By Seneca, and it changed the way I look at a time forever. In life, there are essential things we should focus on, and unimportant things that we shouldn’t be focused on. What falls into either category depends on your goals and what you want out of life. I spent a lot of my time in my 20s going from job to job trying to figure out what I wanted to do in life, and with each experience, it taught me what is important to me and what I should remove from my life.
My goal in life is to spend as much time as possible on the things that are important to me because the last thing I want to happen in my life is to wake up in my 50s and regret what I have done in my life up to that point. I feel like I’m on the right track, but I have to continually review what is important and not important because things change. Take advantage of your youth to experiment and see what you can accomplish in the world. You’ll be surprised with how fulfilled you will feel when you challenge yourself to do more with your life.
Hard Choices, Easy Life; Easy Choices, Hard Life
If you want more in life, you have to be more as an individual. This is a precious lesson that Michael Jordan’s grandparents instilled in him, and he is the greatest basketball of all time. To be more as an individual, though, it’s going to require hard choices. It’s a hard choice to push yourself to get to the gym and do a hard workout; it’s a hard choice to focus on your work when social media makes it so easy for us to be distracted. It’s hard to have tough conversations with people; then it is to keep quiet.
The easy choice now will lead to a harder life down the road while the hard choice now will give you an easier life down the road. There is an excellent quote by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin who wrote the book Extreme Ownership where he says discipline creates freedom. If you think about it, it is very accurate. The more disciplined I’m with my health today, the less likely I will develop a severe health condition down the road. The more disciplined I’m with my finances today, the more financial security I will have in the future. The easiest thing to do as a human being is to get distracted by the easy choices in life. Develop the self-awareness to know which hard choices you should make in life, and it will lay the foundation for the future you desire.
What Now?
I know all of this sounds like a lot of hard work, and it is. I’ve spent a lot of time developing myself over the past 15 years, and it required a lot of sacrifices, but I look at those sacrifices and see the progress I’ve made as an individual, and I wouldn’t change anything. These five lessons took me a while to figure out on my own, and if I had had them when I was 18 years, it would have given a big shortcut on my development.
The critical thing is that you need to implement these lessons in your life if you want them to benefit you. So take five minutes every day, and 15 minutes every week to see if you’re on track to be the person you want to be in life. If you are, keep up the excellent work, if you’re not, what is stopping you?
Want help implementing these lessons in your life or need help with creating a financial plan, click here to set-up a complimentary consultation with me.
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