By age 30 you should be world's richest person?
If you are scrolling on twitter, you would have come across advises such as:
By age 30 you should be <insert your fantasy here>
I understand such tweets are meant to drive engagement, tried and tested techniques to capture audience attention.
What value did you derive from such an advice?
Perhaps a spike in your dopamine which made you hit the like or the retweet button.
In this piece, I explore utility of such advises in further depth.
Contents
Utility of advises
Lost time
The problem
Path towards excellence
Insights
Utility of advises
Advises are for those who are lost in life and trying to gain a sense of direction.
It is not for those who have it going good. Advises provided to people who are not in the need of one, would consume them like platitudes and appreciate them at the outset.
The lost ones however, would treat the advises differently.
These are words that can make it or break it for them. They would consume, internalize and act upon the advises in order to gain some semblance of direction in their lives.
They would see these advises as a drop of water for a thirsty man in the middle of the desert.
Lost time
A common regret harbored by the lost is that of time that is lost. This is however unnecessary.
Being lost implies exposed to a situation that is undesirable. Since you're lost, you are finding your way back and hence you have lost time. This is only natural, particularly when you are navigating the complex journey of life, where every moment is your first moment.
This is main reason why advises such as "By age 30 you should be…" are moronic. These advises aim to optimize time. They are akin to what schools teach you and doesn't account for the vagaries of life. It assumes a singular path towards ascension, towards mastery, towards success. Study of life trajectories of many masters of the past will show you that success has no fixed age group, some achieve quicker and some achieve later.
Worst of all, it focuses on outcomes. Adhering to a philosophy that focuses on outcomes places you firmly on a fragile path.
You are so fixated on what should be, that you fail to notice what you can be.
The problem
Let’s extend this logic further, if you can achieve something by age 30, what prevents you from achieving the same by the age 27? 28.5? 22?
Where does this end?
The problem is that these advises do not leave any scope for making mistakes, it assumes you know the right path and must pursue it swiftly. It does not account for randomness in outcomes, differences in initial conditions such as economic background and exposure to appropriate network to grow.
In most cases, figuring out “what is possible” in itself takes decades due to lack of information.
Example: I became aware of existence of possibilities of pursuing a masters degree at an alien country after completion of my bachelors degree in engineering and working at an university as an apprentice for two years. Knowledge which was common to many of my colleagues remained oblivious to me for I come from a family of farmers.
Hence rid yourself of timelines and focus on process instead. The process of mastery may begin at the tender age of 4 for someone like Mozart or late into thirties for many others.
Remember:
Who takes a rigid approach to mastery or education?
Schools.
Path towards excellence
A crucial element in building a decent life for yourself and excelling in your chosen field of study is to tinker, experiment, trial and error.
Randomness plays a major role in this journey.
By invoking randomness, I do not wish to deride your success. I am merely pointing to the fact that a single random event can lead to two different successful paths. You could either be a successful software engineer at corporate or a successful researcher at academia - two widely different professional areas and skill sets.
Tinkering is essential as it helps you understand the environment which is local for you and not the same for everyone. It helps you accumulate experiences unique to your actions. More, it helps you to learn about yourself, your weaknesses, strengths, your tendencies, and interests.
Nobody is born with this knowledge. A greater part of growing up is to know yourself.
Get rid of thinking that you're supposed to know everything.
This is life.
A person who has never made mistake is the one who has never attempted anything of his own will. That indeed is a mistake in itself.
Life is about making mistakes and mistakes cost time.
Then what is the optimal path?
None, as you cannot define a solution to life.
Hindsight bias will always leave you with the feeling “If I could do that again, I would do it differently”.
Insights
Start from where you are.
Make quick moves and mistakes. Focus on minimizing errors and avoid making mistakes of the same kind. When you run out of mistakes you could make, you reach success - which can only be considered as milestones.
Focus on process and be content with wherever you get in life. Do not anticipate results. If you gave your best results are irrelevant. If you did not give your best, results are still irrelevant.
Results must only be used to course correct. From this perspective, both good and bad results are welcome. If you know you are progressing everyday, you shouldn't concern yourself with your age. This is not an invitation to waste time. Rather it is to prevent you from setting age or time based goals. You cannot rush the process.
A smarter, hard working person will always outpace you. So what? You gonna go home and cry? No. You work at your own pace, make your life a little better everyday and be content.
You are here to test your own abilities, contribute your knowledge and not compete.
Competition ceases to exist when you begin to spot infinite opportunities that lie ahead.
With adequate trials and enough persistence you will learn to spot and create your own opportunities.
You just need to be patient.
Thank you for reading!
Recommended reading: Mastery by Robert Greene
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