I saw this on Facebook and felt the need to share it here. It fits right in with my list of 24 things to do when you are young. It was written by Joe Payton (A facebook friend of a friend of a friend). He said he was responding to a post from a 19 year old who had just completed his real estate coursework and was preparing to take off into a new career. And its the kind of non typical advice that I believe can help to into a successful and rewarding future. So here it is
1) You’re ahead of everybody else here. That means you can try lots of stuff and make lots of mistakes. So relax and have fun and also work like hell. Your body and mind can take the workload. But have fun doing it and be gracious and be grateful.
2) draw a smallish circle, softball sized: drop some small pebbles in it. Now put a penny in the center.
Next draw a larger circle, the size of a basketball – with one edge of the larger circle touching one edge of the smaller circle. Move the penny to the center of the larger circle. OK – the small circle represents your life up to NOW. The larger circle represents the life you’re about to expand into. The penny is you. The pebbles are your friends. As you grow, your world expands. As your world expands you go places you’ve never gone before. Your friends may choose not to. That’s OK. They are still your friends, they still share a part of your world. But you’ve got to acknowledge to yourself there are new places to go. If they don’t also grow that’s their choice. The next circle is the size of a kids swimming pool, but that’s too far in the future: be the basketball sized circle next.
3) get Jordan Peterson’s book “12 Rules For Life”. I got it in Audible and listened to it at the gym. Follow and apply the rules.
4) spend as much time as you can with your parents and uncles and aunts and grandparents. They are the closest thing you have to older versions of yourself and have the highest likelihood of truly wanting the best outcome for you. Be brave and vulnerable with them. Ask them to see you at your best and hold you to the highest possible outcome for potential you-ness.
5) Read. A lot. All the time. Audible, youtube, cliffs notes, epic movies. Read the classics. Find an author and read everything g he’s written. Twain, London, Fitzgerald, all of them. Buy books and mark them up and build a library. Read current events and read history. Watch for patterns and train your mind to look for inconsistencies and illogical outcomes, note the propaganda patterns and listen to the dissent. Build your own worldview based on your own empirical truth based on your research and experimentation. Keep your own counsel and don’t over-share. This ability to develop “a knowing” based on underlying reasons is at the core of the most successful people in history.
6) Pray. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know if there’s a God, or don’t believe, or if you know for certain there is no God, pray anyway. There will be moments when the only single thing keeping you alive and sane and able to cope is because you can converse in complete surrender to the force of the universe that I choose to call God, and that force will contain, support, supply, restrain you to make it through to a next breath. It will happen and you want to be in conversation when that time arrives. The bonus is that an ongoing conversation gives you daily enlightenment we humans are hardwired for. So use the hardware.
7) Have fun, fall in love, be friends with the oddball, go to concerts and go camping and rebuild a car.
8) Start to learn to play a musical instrument in 2019.
9) Write.
For my part, I took Action #3 – Read Jordan Peterson’s “12 Rules for Life” on Audible. I have the Audible app anyway with 5 free credits (I got sucked into that a few months afgo when my 14 year old did not want to read a book for school. So its time for me to use it.