On my 20th birthday, I got piss drunk and started peeing on
some old lady's lawn. Just as I was finishing,
the cops rolled up. - You're disgusting. - And despite being underage
and completely inebriated, I somehow talked my way out of it. I guess you could say My
20s started out with a bang. Your 20s are probably the most exciting decade of your life. You're old enough to be independent. It's still young enough that everything is new and life is full of opportunity. You have tons of drive and energy, yet, not enough life experience to quite know what not to do. Your 20s are also likely
the highest leverage decade of your life. Good decisions made in
your 20s will compound into massive results over
the course of your life. But bad decisions, like
peeing in an old lady's lawn, well, they can end up holding
you back for many years. Looking back, I made plenty
of mistakes in my 20s. I spent a lot of time
pursuing the wrong goals, caring about the wrong people, and worrying about the wrong problems. In this video, I want to help you to not make the same mistakes I did. I'm gonna share with you some truths that if I had understood
when I was in my 20s, it would've made my life so much better and success so much easier. So let's get started. Number one, the willingness to
be disliked is a superpower. Growing up, you're
rewarded for being the same as everyone else, for
wearing the same clothes, studying the same subjects,
and getting the same grades. The goal is always to
be as liked as possible. But in the adult world, you will quickly discover
that to do anything notable or important, you must be
willing to be different and that means you must
be willing to be disliked. Now, this is hard for
most people to handle and many people never do
learn how to handle it. They spend most of their lives passively following what everyone
else expects of them. These are the people who wake up one day in their 20s, 40s, or 50s and realize that they haven't
really lived their own life. If you develop the
willingness to be disliked, you will inevitably have the courage to do the hard things that most people are not willing to do. This will then imbue your life with a sense of meaning and importance. It will also likely lead to success that others will be too
intimidated to go after. But I would go even further than this. I would argue that
until you're comfortable with the disapproval of others, you are not truly a free
individual yourself. You must develop the
ability to be disliked in order to free yourself from the prison of
other people's opinions. Learn to do what's right even if others might think it's wrong. Learn to tolerate criticism
and negative feedback because that's what will make you better. Learn to be laughed at,
hated on and trolled, because if you can become
comfortable with the hate, you'll be fucking unstoppable. Number two, you can't
fundamentally change yourself or others, so stop trying. When you are young, everything changes. Body, your mind, your friends, your stupid ass uninformed opinions. Change is a constant. I think that's why young people tend to have this idealistic view of change, because they have experienced so much change so quickly they think that not only
is change always possible, but that it should happen
quickly and easily. When I was in my 20s, I had a naive view that I could literally
change anything about myself, whether it was becoming
a world-class athlete after training for a summer, learning half a dozen languages in a year, or overcoming my anxiety and insecurities within a couple weeks of effort. My 20s are riddled with a lot of stupidity and some spectacular failures. Now, when you get older, while you realize that
some things can change, there are a lot to our personalities and identities and cultures
that really can't be changed. People who have trauma in their history will never not have
trauma in their history. People who struggle with addiction will never not struggle with addiction. People who are highly
emotional or unemotional will never not be highly
emotional or unemotional. As you get older, you realize that improving your life is less about completely changing yourself and more about adapting and becoming comfortable with who you already are. This is especially true
in our relationships. When we're young, we naively believe that we can fix people and we waste a lot of time in tears trying to do so. But again, a healthy relationship is not about changing someone. It's about accepting and loving them for who they already are. Number three, if you're not
embarrassing yourself regularly, you are not trying hard enough. Your 20s is the optimal time
to take life's biggest risks. You have the most to gain
and the least to lose. You likely have little
to no work experience, no kids, no house, or car payments, no professional reputation to protect. So the cost of failure is pretty low. Conversely, the benefit of
success is extremely high. Successful moonshots in your 20s will continue to pay off well throughout the rest of your life. Yet, people in their
20s avoid taking risks for the dumbest possible reason. They don't want to embarrass themselves in front of others. They worry what their friends
or coworkers will think, not realizing that most of those friends and coworkers will be dead to them in a few years anywhere. They worry what their parents and family will think when the whole point of being a fucking adult
is being able to decide what's best for yourself. Look, this is the time
to embarrass yourself. This is the time to pack up the car and move across the country on a whim. It's the time to sell everything and go spend six months in Asia to chase that crazy business idea that everyone thinks is insane. To stay up all night
fucking around with AI. It's the time to walk across the room and ask that attractive
stranger out on a date. It's the time to create
a dumb YouTube channel about your passion for clowns
or something like that. What the fuck are you looking at? Number four, most relationships are supposed to end, and that's okay. When you're young, nothing
feels more important than your friendships and
romantic relationships. So it's easy to
overestimate how significant these relationships will be
for the rest of your life. You aren't old enough yet to realize that most relationships end. Many are forgotten, and very, very few actually make a lasting impact. Most relationships in life
exist for a specific reason. This reason can be very deep and profound, like the girlfriend that
taught you how to love or the friend who taught
you to respect yourself. But the reason can also
be entirely superficial. Like that old after work drinking buddy or that girl in college who used to let you copy her notes from the classes you slept through. Shout out to Rachel Warrick. Never forget. Most of these reasons come and go. And therefore, most of your relationships in life will also come and go. Very few will end up lasting forever, and that's perfectly fine. In fact, that's actually
healthy and normal. But most young people resist this. They hang on to bad
relationships for too long and they overly rely on
good relationships too much. They procrastinate
putting themselves first because they overestimate
the length and importance that other people are
gonna have in their lives. Yes, you will have some
lifelong relationships and they will matter a lot. But they will be few and far between, and you don't necessarily
get to choose them. Put simply, you can't
force a good relationship and you don't want to
force a bad relationship. So the best strategy is to
simply don't force anything. Number five, your dreams are overrated. Watch any award ceremony and you're likely to be
subjected with a bunch of deliriously happy people telling you to never give up on your dreams. - It's not about how many
times you get rejected or, but you fall down or you're beaten up. It's about how many times you stand up and are brave and you keep on going. (audience applauding) - [Mark] Think about this. For every person on stage telling you to follow your dreams, there are tens of thousands of people who had the same dream worked just as hard and
didn't win a fucking Oscar. (buzzers blaring) Don't get me wrong, dreams are great. They help us get out
of bed in the morning. They keep us excited and
focused from week to week, but we tend to overestimate
the power of our dreams. We have this big, bold vision of how we want our life to be, and we tacitly assume that if we somehow achieve that vision, then we're gonna live happily ever after. But as you get older, one
of two things happens. Either one, you achieve the dream and despite the initial joy, it doesn't make you nearly as happy as you thought it would. Or two, you don't achieve the dream and you spend the rest of your life being a fucking bitter asshole about it. - I'm the lowly shoe man. Who once have been a mighty
athlete in high school and scored four touchdowns in one game and had many offers to junior colleges and could have made something of his life, laid down and died. (audience laughing) - Either way, the dream only helps you early in the process
and it likely hurts you late in the process. So my recommendation, hold
on to your dreams lightly. Dreams are great. Pursue them, follow them, care about them, tell everybody about 'em, but never forget what they are. They are just imagined
endpoints in your head. You invented them so you can
uninvent them at any time if necessary, and it
probably will be necessary. Number six, the only way to feel better about yourself is to do things worth feeling good about. When we feel bad about ourselves, our natural inclination is to believe that some external thing
will make us feel good. If I just had a nicer car,
I'd feel okay we say it. Or if I wasn't single,
then I'd finally be happy. Or if I had a 100,000
likes on a YouTube video, my parents would finally be proud of me. - [Woman] They ask you how you
are and you just have to say that you're fine when you're not really. - This assumption puts us on a treadmill of chasing something, achieving it, realizing it doesn't change anything and then choosing another
thing to chase after. The truth is, nothing
will make you feel better about yourself other than the meaning behind your actions accomplished or not. The only way to feel good long-term is to do good things and these good things can exist on multiple levels. They're the daily good things, like making your bed, going to the gym, talking to your partner, and they're the long-term good things, like building a career,
or raising a family, building an app that solves
starvation in Africa, or growing out long, luscious hair. (soft music) The point is, stop looking for happiness in the things you have. And instead look for them
in the things you do. Then get to work doing them. If you're lucky by your 30s, you'll have something
remarkable to show for it. (soft music) (upbeat music)