The decade of your 20s is one of the most impactful decades of many people’s lives. The changes in your person from the age of 19 to reaching 30, can result in you reinventing yourself multiple times! Looking back on this influential decade in my life, here are 5 things I learned in my 20s that are helping me navigate my 30s.
Time is on your side
This abundance of time manifests in your life in many different ways. I know you are working hard to remove the stigma of being “young”, but having time on your side is a huge gift. Embrace it rather than rushing to pass time as quickly as possible.
Time allows you to use the power of compound interest to invest for the long term. Starting investing for retirement and your future at age 25, allows your investments to grow for 30-40 years. Those initial investments into your retirement account will have the time to double 3-5 times during the time before you need them in retirement. Start early!
You have the time to re-invent yourself and your job many times over your career. Many people reach the end of their career in a job that is hugely different than the job they started with. You don’t have to know what you want to do for the rest of your life right now. Keep your eyes open for interesting new opportunities and be brave in trying new things!
Adulting is a process
Arriving in adulthood is a process, that may take longer than you think it “should”. Just because the government arbitrarily determines you are an adult when you turn 18 or 21, doesn’t mean you need to be fully adulting at that time. As a 30-year-old, I feel less like an adult than I did when I graduated college, so there is no rush on reaching the peak of adulting.
Your life and its path are unique to your life’s story. Don’t compare your adulting journey to anyone else’s. Everyone’s situation is different and each person responds to those differences in unique ways. There is no adulting destination to reach. Enjoy the journey you take to get there even if it wasn’t the path you had planned.
Spend less time comparing your adulting and your life to other people’s. This includes managing social media time and the emotions social media brings up. There are so many different paths and processes you can take to gaining adulthood, it is hard to set a path when you are young! Trust me, you will never stick with it!
Stuff is just stuff
Live like you are a poor college student, or poor early 20’s employee for the first few years after you leave your childhood home. So many people upgrade everything in their life, furniture, cars, living space, and technology all in the first few years of moving out. That money can be put to better use building long-term wealth instead of buying stuff that will eventually be trash.
Instead, focus on living life and finding the joys in life.
Stuff wears out, gets old, and becomes outdated. There is always someone with nicer, newer, or shinier things that you can upgrade to, but when it comes down to the details, they are just things. A couch is a place to sit, relax in the evening, and have friends over. Those friends will be excited to spend time with you and won’t notice that it is not the stylish color of the year.
These upgrades are a huge financial cost, and often you are paying to upgrade parts of your life that are not really that important to you. Take some time to learn what of those things are most important to you, and focus on prioritizing your spending in areas that mean the most to you.
Keeping your existing, fully functional, couch for 5 more years, allows you to make smart financial choices, with your funds, like saving up for the purchase rather than taking on debt, or using the funds for investing for your future rather than spending today.
Try new things
By the time you have reached your early 20s, you may have a good idea about some of the things you like and dislike. As you start to expand your circle of influence, you are able to see, learn about, and experience many new things in the world.
Be liberal with your experimenting, but be critical with your discernment of whether a new activity is a good fit for you.
Be open to meeting new people, but be critical with your discernment if they are healthy people to have in your life.
The world holds an infinite amount of new experiences and possibilities for you to try, and use much of the freedom you have in your 20s to try out as many of those as you can. Hold fast to the experiences that give you life, and move past the experiences that don’t fit you or your life.
Search for the meaning of YOUR life
There is a huge difference in finding the meaning of life in a nebulous and always searching kind of way. This mission is personal to your life and yet will probably take you your entire life to find.
A little tip, the meaning of your life will change, evolve, or become more specific as you experience new seasons in your life. So, always be searching, experimenting, and looking at the world with a critical viewpoint.
You can often start discerning the meaning of your life by looking at the areas of your life which bring you the most joy and rejuvenating energy. Look for connections with people, causes, and education that light a fire in your soul!
Looking back on those 5 things I learned in my 20s that help me navigate my 30s, I am a little overwhelmed! Those are some huge themes of life, and some feel unattainable! I still don’t feel like I have a handle on some of them, but I do feel like I am farther along in these ideas than I was in my 20s.
What about you? If you are beyond your early 20s, what life lessons have you learned that would have helped you earlier in your life? I would love to hear everyone’s personal “Things I learned in my 20s” in the comments below or over on our Instagram page!
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