Ten best life lessons for your 20s to live a successful and rich life

20’s is a defining period of our life. That’s where we learn new things, make new connections and it sets the stage for our adult life. Here are ten best life lessons I learnt from my 20’s for a successful and rich life.

1. Things to do in your 20’s – Learn about yourself

The first thing that should be on your list is to explore yourself – your strengths, weaknesses, what powers you on, what you love doing, what energizes you and so on.

Learn about yourself. Learn about your personality. Lean into your quirks and read about them. Try to acquire knowledge around the people who had a similar personality like yours and what they did with their lives.

Try all kinds of life advice and rule them out. See what works for you and what doesn’t work for you. If getting up at 5am in the morning, taking a cold shower, working out intensely and writing in your journal doesn’t work for you, then forget about it.

Two hours in the gym in the morning and feeling like dead weight all through the day doesn’t work. To be eating a particular kind of food and always feeling sick or getting some allergies at the end of it signifies that it’s not for you.

Make your own routine. See what works for you.

What kind of work environment or surroundings do you like best? What kind of people do you like to hang out with? What kinds of things or environment bring out the most productive or creative part of you? What really makes you happy?

Hanging out with a particular group of people and always feeling left out, feeling like you don’t belong there and always looking for something more, means you don’t belong there.

Find where you belong. Find what belongs with you.

Learn what works for you, what doesn’t work for you, what natural strengths you have, or gifts you have that people always talk about. Lean into them and see how you can upskill them. Figure out how you can solve a major problem with your skill set and your natural strengths. That’s how you monetize your skills.

Most importantly, figure out the things that you absolutely love doing. Is there something that, when you’re in there doing it, makes you feel alive? Something that you do with the utmost attention, so much so, that you don’t feel tired or hungry or cold or you don’t even remember the time that passed by while you were doing it?

That’s called flow.

Find your flow. It’s your gateway to abundance and a successful and rich life.

2. Things to do in your 20’s – create systems

The second thing on your to-do list for your 20’s is to customize your life around your needs to create an optimal life experience.

Create systems. Create systems for as many things as you can for the things that you have to do daily in your life or the situations that you usually face in your life. Create Systems for most of those situations.

Systems simply end the overwhelm around a task and boost productivity. Systems ensure that you’ll show up and be consistent.

An example here can be that you have to study for your semester exams. Sounds simple to do, right? But this is what happens – when you’re deciding to study, you spend a lot of time thinking about how to get started, what chapter to begin with, where to study…..

And even when you settle down and study, you end up spending an entire afternoon with your books and that makes you cranky. To make things worse, the next day, if appears that you don’t remember much from what you studied and you feel like getting nowhere!

Now let’s see how systems work.

First you set a weekly measurable goal – for example, read 20 pages daily. Next you set aside a time for it (called time blocking) everyday. Say you have to read 20 pages everyday between 3 pm and 5 pm.

Decide where you’re going to study, do you need a snack or a drink to go with you, that boosts your concentration or puts you in the right mood? Do you need some concentration music or a study partner? How can you make your study experience better?

If you were somehow not able to read 20 pages in that timespan, ponder on the reason. Was it because it’s too much to do in 2 hours? Do you need to reduce the number of pages to 15, maybe?

At the end of your schedule, make a list of takeaways, something that you’ll revise later.

It is always rewarding to create systems early in life because then they become habits. In your 30s and 40s, these habits can be immensely useful.

3. Things to do in your 20’s – Experience things deeply and widely

Experience all kinds of emotions.

Experience love. Be in love as deeply as you can be. There’s no other feeling as unique as being in love for the first time.

Experience anger. See how angry you can get about something. Understand your natural stream of thoughts when you are having such emotions. What are they telling you about yourself?

Experience fear. See how afraid you can get about something and still continue with life. This can be one of the most resilience- building exercises of your life. Whatever you feel afraid of, is whatever you need to do. This can be immensely rewarding later in life.

Pay attention to what other emotions and feelings run through your veins day to day. What kind of thought patterns create around those emotive experiences?

Experience all kinds of deep emotions and experience them as deeply as you can.

4. Things to do in your 20’s – Explore. Read. Travel. Learn. Connect.

Travel a lot. Travel to new places, try new foods, see new culture, see how people live their lives. Make new friends.

Read a lot. Read about everything. Read about history, culture, arts, science, Psychology, investments etc. You should learn the basics of investing and you should start investment as soon as you start earning.

Then there are some basic skills that you need to learn in your 20s. They include emotional intelligence, empathy, communication skills, setting boundaries with people.

Make connections. Get to know people. You are going to leverage those connections you make in your 20s all your life. So make the right kind of connections, get to know the right kind of people and get to know them in the right spirit. In your 20s always be a giver. Always be the first person to stand up to help someone. Always be the first person to take responsibility.

Because in your 20’s you have the time, energy and effort to do it all plus you have nothing to lose.

5. Take risks. Make mistakes. Embrace failure. Do not play it safe.

Don’t shy away from taking risks. Don’t shy away from being scared or doing something that makes you feel scared. Explore everything, explore all the options and make as many mistakes as you can.

We fail because we overestimate or underestimate the time, effort and resources we need, to accomplish our goal. And that’s okay.

That’s all a part of learning. What’s important is not how we fail or how badly we fail, or how many times we fail.

What’s important about failure is what we learned from it.

And what we learn from failure about ourselves. About our capabilities, about our decision making quality, about our capacity to make genuine effort, about our ability to set the right goals, about our ability to figure out the right systems to reach those goals.

If we go through life, and we have a series of failures in the beginning itself, but we use all those failures as a stepping stone and figure out all these things about us, we will be so successful later in life.

We will be primed for success, because we have ruled out all the reasons for failure. We have figured out all the solutions that we needed, to work on ourself.

So failure is not something we should hate. Failure is not something we should be ashamed of. Failure is something that’s a part of life and it should be welcomed with as much enthusiasm as we welcome success because it teaches us some very valuable lessons. And if we are able to accommodate those lessons in our lives, we can use every failure as a stepping stone to success, to achieve bigger successes in lives.

And they say that an expert is not someone who knows more about a topic. An expert is someone who has made all the mistakes that could be made in that particular field. So this person knows what works and what doesn’t work.

6. Things to avoid in your 20’s – Do not work for social approval.

Whatever you do in your life in your 20’s, you should have the right reasons behind it. You should have a clear ‘why’.

It’s imperative that in your 20’s you work for your own approval. When you do something, you do it because your own personal interests lie in it.

Do not work for social approval. Do not do something to make everyone happy or become more acceptable in whatever circle you’re hanging out.

This is one of the most important things you should avoid doing in your 20’s.

7. Things to avoid in your 20’s – Never settle for anything in your 20s.

A lot of us have had parents or grandparents and family members who grew up in an environment of scarcity. You know, most of us who were born in the 1990s or 1980s know that our childhood was not the same as our kid’s childhood is these days.

There was scarcity in almost every aspect of life, you know, right from home where you had limited hours of water supply and power shortages.

There were less opportunities for education, for higher education, even less opportunities for jobs. And people used to earn less money compared to the consumer culture we have today. They believed that the earlier you settle down with a job and a family and start getting a consistent monthly income, the better your chances of living a good life.

For them, it was a huge thing to have furniture in the house, to have a car in the house, to send your kid to a good college, or to have your daughter married in a prosperous household. And that is why the questions that come from them at local weddings about your life decisions may sound crazy, or the solutions they offer to your life’s problems!

But things are very different today. There is no scarcity anymore. There’s abundance. There’s abundance of everything. If you think about it, there’s abundance of time. And time, I think, is one of the most immeasurable thing or the most precious thing out there. You can save a ton of time by using the right technology / apps or by using a personal assistant in your business. We are talking about a four day workweek or a four hour workweek these days.

Let’s not even talk about money. There are 15 year olds with their own startups and earning money. There is no shortage of opportunities. You can have a side hustle along with your 9 to 5. You can sell ‘papad’ from your garage.

We are on the verge of figuring out longevity. Scientists at Google are churning out a 150 year lifespan. And yet, there are people talking about scarcity so please, before judging them, or listening to their opinions, think about where they are coming from.

The bottom line is – never settle for anything in your 20’s, whether a person, a job or a house. You have a long life ahead of you to settle down when you’re ready. But 20’s is your time to explore.

8. Things to avoid in your 20’s – Do not “follow your passion”

Another common advice for your 20’s is ‘follow your passion’. People sound so passionate and inspiring when they say follow your passion. But I want to ask you, do you even know what your passion is?

Most of the people figure out their passion, when they’re in a midlife crisis. When they’re 40 or 45 years of age and they have a house loan to pay off and two kids to send to school. That’s when they realize their passion and then they have no life left within them to pursue it.

So do not look for passion. Do not think about just following your passion because you may not even be sure about it. You may not even know what your passion is right now. And whatever it is, you might not be passionate about it by the time you’re 30 or 40 or 50.

Also, what if nobody pays you to follow your passion? And the truth is, nobody will!

All the great people in the world who have done something really amazing and who have earned a lot of money for their skill, were not the people who were following their passion. They were the people who were having fun. They were doing something that they love doing and they did it for a very long period of time. And because of that consistency, they got really good at it. And that is why they will people willing to pay them a lot of money for what they did. And that’s how greatness happens.

Greatness doesn’t happen because you have something particular in your genes or that you’re born lucky. Greatness doesn’t happen because you’re very disciplined or you’re diligent right from the beginning. Greatness doesn’t happen because you follow your parent’s life advice. Greatness doesn’t happen because you have everything figured out from the beginning. Greatness doesn’t happen just because you follow your passion.

Greatness happens when you show up consistently everyday and do something that’s fun, that you’re good at and that solves people’s problems.

9. Career advice for your 20’s – diversify your options

While considering career choices in your 20’s, or when someone’s giving you career advice for your 20’s, make sure you choose a stream that gives you a variety of options. While planning your career in your 20’s, it’s important to keep in mind that career trends change faster than ever, and something that’s paying well today and in demand, may not be so later in life.

So when you’re in your 20’s, you should choose a subject or stream that allows you to diversify your career choices. For eg, if you choose Maths, you can go into finance or coding or engineering. But if you choose coding only, you can’t go back from there.

Do not choose a career stream in your 20s that only allows you to be a particular thing or only one thing all your life because that might get boring and out of practice.

Also, whatever stream you take in college, don’t define yourself by it. Do not define yourself that Oh, I am a medical student. I am training to become a doctor. So that’s the only way I see myself. You should know that it’s your day job and you have to perform well at that. That’s great, but at the same time, keep exploring yourself. Keep exploring all your other strengths. While you’re lying in your bed at night, you can be anything.

10. Have fun while you’re in your 20’s.

There is only one thing that guarantees a life time of success.

Guess what? It’s not genius. It’s not discipline. It’s not even hard work. It’s consistency.

It’s showing up every day for yourself. And you know, you can never be consistent with something that you don’t want to do or that you hate doing. Or something that you don’t feel like doing because you find it boring.

You can have consistency only with something that you love doing because it’s fun. Let that sink in.

And if that one thing is something that you’re good at and it’s something that solves people’s problems in some way, that’s your thing. Work on it in your 20s so that by the time you’re in your 30s or 40s and you have shown up consistently, you’re the master of your own game.

This is the only way you can live a good life while in your 20’s, and prepare yourself for a successful and rich life ahead.

So above all, whatever you’re doing in life, make sure you’re having fun.

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