21 Lessons I Learned by Age 21

    1. No one gives a shit about you, except for family. Friends who have your back when the kitchen sink collapses are also family.
    2. Don’t wait until someone is bedridden to say I love you, or until they’re dead to give them flowers. 
    3. Never raise your voice, except to cheer people on or to fuck around. 
    4. Don’t take yourself too seriously. Be a dumbass. The key to having great stories to tell is to do stupid shit.
    5. Do things for the sake of doing it, not for results. The person who loves walking walks further than the person who loves the destination.
    6. What you want isn’t happiness; chasing dopamine is a source of suffering. What you really want is peace.
    7. Control your time, or someone will control it for you. Find your purpose, or someone will force one onto you.
    8. “Not enough time” translates to “not a priority.”
    9. Address minor issues early on, especially in health and relationships. Minor issues snowball into major issues over time.
    10. “Work smart, not hard” is shit advice. Instead, be smart with what you work on and who you work with; that sets the ceiling. Work hard at being consistent; that sets the floor.
    11. High functioning people rely on discipline—but the highest functioning people design their environments.
    12. You’re the reflection of the top five people you spend time with. If you want to change who you are, change your top five. 
    13. You can learn everything you need to know about someone’s character by observing how they treat a beggar when others aren’t looking.
    14. Barring basic human decency, self-awareness is the most attractive trait.
    15. Seek out smart people who disagree with you. Your critical thinking atrophies when your beliefs are left unchallenged. 
    16. When someone vents to you about a problem, don’t rush to solve it. Listen. Nine times out of ten, they just want to feel understood.
    17. Respect yourself. Give people a second chance, but not a third. How someone treats you is more important than how you feel about them.
    18. If you want a worthy mate, be worthy of a worthy mate. Learn obsessively, hit the gym, develop compassion. If you don’t cringe when you look back on who you were two years ago, you haven’t grown.
    19. Embrace starting over—successful people fail far more times than most people have even tried. 
    20. Find the people or things in life that are bigger than yourself. It’s worth having something or someone you’d risk your life for.
    21. Treat your homies to boba every now and then, for absolutely no fucking reason.