Every year around this time, I make it a point to share ideas and advice I wish I’d known about earlier. Most of them come from conversations with people who are a lot smarter than me, some come from books, and I’ve learned a few the hard way.
Nauseatingly cliche as it sounds, living in L.A. has taught me a lot, mainly because it’s a city filled with so many wild success stories—and even more cautionary tales of failure, burnout, and stupidity.
I wrote down a lot of stuff in my Notes app over the past year, but these 11 lessons stuck with me:
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1. Opinions are the most interesting when they involve someone changing their mind to form them.
2. Never take the last bite of something you didn’t pay for.
3. Stop kicking cans down the road. If you need to fix your car or renew your insurance, do it right away. Letting all of those little bullshit to-dos pile up in your head slowly grinds away at your sanity.
4. Most people would rather plan a yearly vacation than build a life they don’t need to escape from.
5. I heard someone talking about the “fuck yes or no” motto for making decisions. (If your reaction to choosing something isn’t “fuck yes!” then you shouldn’t do it.) Then someone smarter pointed out this was incredibly stupid considering important decisions are never simple. If I had only ever done things I was 100% certain about, I wouldn’t have much to show for myself. Conversely, I’ve wasted time and energy on “fuck yes’s” because I didn’t think things all the way through.
6. Figuring out how to use fancy new tools is less important than figuring out the things that never change.
7. Your best friends should be people who don’t really understand how you earn your money. Beware of people who are over-eager to know “what you do for a living.”
8. Whoever needs it less, wins.
9. Forget taking care of the low-hanging fruit. Always do the hardest thing first, whether that’s doing the workout you hate, waking up early to work on a side project, or sending an email to that person you’re terrified of.
10. Step letting people guilt you into consuming “classic” books/movies/music. A lot of stuff is popular simply because a small group of nerds decided it was. Life’s short, do what you want. Murakami nailed it: “If you only read what other people are reading, you can only think what other people are thinking.”
11. People never fully forgive or forget—they just get busy.
