🪞Reflection: Things I learnt/wish I learnt in my 20s

😊Hi everyone, what’s up? It’s been a long while. I just celebrated my 30th birthday last month🥳. Reflecting on my 20s, I realized a lot of things about myself and life. Let’s dive into what I learnt and wish I learnt.

👍Generally say “yes“ to more opportunities to gain more experience.

This is something that I learnt early in my early 20s and I've been readily doing this. For things that I have some passion in, I generally say “yes“ to opportunities that come my way. Why? Because, in your 20s, you generally have “more free time, few responsibilities”, since you have not yet “settled down”; you don’t have that many responsibilities like a spouse, kids or debts to pay. So, you have more time to gain experience and explore your interests before you are bogged down with more responsibilities and less time in the future.

In my case, I was fine spending more time seeing more patients and doing more cases earlier so that I gain more experience quickly and establish a solid, reliable foundation to build upon.

👩🏾‍🤝‍👨🏽Maintain your friendships and relationships

I only truly realized this in 2022 as it becomes difficult to maintain relationships as time goes on. Throughout grade school and medical school, I would see my friends every weekday for many years. Now, I may only see them maybe a handful of times throughout the year, if I'm lucky. As we get older, people start families and need to spend more time with them and have less time for maintaining friendships. This makes it harder to organize catchups with old friends. So, what I tried to do this year was to reach out to old friends and contacts with a ❄️✉️ “cold message/email“. This means sending a message, reaching out to hang out, not expecting a reply. Most times, I get a reply, people are grateful and we end up having a worthwhile catchup. What I learnt was that it is worth being proactive since other people are generally scared to make the first move to reach out because of fear. Being proactive led to experiences like these:

Go out of your way to reconnect with old friends and to maintain your current friendships.

❤️⌛Life is fragile; cherish the time you have and the people you have since they can be taken away at anytime. Don't take things for granted.

In November 2023, my older brother tragically died in a motor vehicle accident. I had spoken to him one Sunday morning, making jokes and catching up. I didn’t know that that would be the last time I would speak to him.

The next Sunday, whilst oncall, I get a call from my cousin sister that his car was involved in a “hit-and-run“ accident on his way home from the store. I haven’t seen him in person in 12 years.

What this taught me is that life is truly fragile and that you really need to tell the people who are important to you that you love them and how much they mean to you. I’m trying to focus on creating positive memories and experiences with the friends and family who are important in my life. I’m more focused on finding meaning, symbolism and really connecting with others, rather than materialistic things. For example, if I am catching up with a friend at a café, I find more meaning in the act of us sitting down and interacting, rather than things like the whether the food we ordered was cooked right or whether the service was fast etc, because in the long run, those things don’t matter. 10 years from now, I’m going to want to say “Damn, I really enjoyed that great catch up I had with X all those years back. Those were good times,“ rather than “Man, the service at that one restaurant was so slow, I’m never going to live it down.“

🧠Live intentionally towards building the future you want and the life you want to live

Over the years, I have learnt to shift my focus from trying to live up to other people’s expectations than to live up to my own expectations. There were a lot of times where I would be doing something for someone else, just to please them, when the thing I’m doing does not align with my goals. While I’m not opposed to helping others, I have learnt not to go so far out of my way to help someone else, at the expense of my own time, energy and sanity, since, in most cases, my actions would not be reciprocated. I’ve learnt to be more strict with myself and my time, since I’d rather spend my limited time and energy on my goals first, where there is intrinsic motivation doing things that align with my planned future.

At the end of last year, I made the decision to live a healthier lifestyle. I want do this by making the time to exercise more frequently, significantly cutting down on my extra sugar through soft drinks, and to eat less fast food. I made this decision because I want to make sure that I can spend as much time as possible with my friends and family before I die. Because I voluntarily made this decision myself and my motivation is intrinsic, I am more likely to follow-through with my goals.

Make your own goals based on what you desire in life; not what others expect of you or demand of you, what you actually want out of your life, then take to small steps to bring you closer to achieving your goals.

🧪Treat life as an experiment and learn from your mistakes

This is has been a game-changer for me since I made this realization in 2014 and was emphasized in 2022. I’ve developed a more “scientific” approach towards life, in the sense that I try something and see if it works or not. If it works, that’s great, more power to me. If it doesn’t, I learnt something from this “experiment“ and can use what I learnt in the future.

Most of us, myself included, are brought up being told that mistakes are really bad things to make. We are taught that it is very embarrassing and that it means you’re stupid. Yes, there are some mistakes in life that are very bad, speaking as a doctor, no doubt. But those are few and far between. The majority of mistakes are not as devasting as we make them out to be, and can be (relatively) easily rectified. Not all mistakes are equal and sometimes, are beneficial.

For example, learning a language. When I was learning Tok Pisin way back in 2014, I was terrified of speaking because I didn’t want to mistakes and look stupid. But, I realized that I need to make mistakes or else I wouldn’t improve at all, just like any skill in life. So I spoke, made a lot of mistakes, some embarrassing ones even, and now I feel like I have reached conversational fluency, even if my grammar isn’t on point. And also the world didn’t end.

Since then, I’ve been extrapolating this concept of seeing things as experiments with minimal negative lasting effects. Things like, trying a new diet, sending cold emails/messages to people or just putting myself out there on a daily bases. These things have a high return on investment just by making an attempt. Here are actual examples of cold emails actually working:

Cold email of me successfully reaching out to the developer of the “Audio Profiles - Sound Manager“ app on the Google Play Store to get a free premium subscription.

Me reaching out to Ondrej Markus, founder of www.ondrejmarkus.com, on self-mastery and self-optimization.

I have gained so much joy and excitement coming up with new experiments to try every week and learning from them. I find that it makes my life more interesting coming up with fun, harmless things to try and just putting myself out there.

I hope some of these insights have resonated with you. I hope you have a great day and a productive 2024.