Transcript: “I asked people a while ago what content I should make on YouTube and somebody said talk about your 20s. And sure, why not? I turned 30 in June this year (2020). 30 years old – an adult, a man, right? I have felt like an adult man for some time, but there is something about turning 30 that decisively– in the eyes of others, or just socially– there’s this sense that you’re no longer in your 20s. Right? You’re no longer there. There is that demarcation, however imaginary, that a year has passed, a threshold has passed, you’re no longer in your 20s now, you’re in your 30s.
I guess the question was, what do you have to say about your 20s, or what advice would you give people in their 20s? And I am generally wary about giving advice— and maybe that’s my first “meta advice”, which is: very often, the problem with advice is that all advice is constrained by the utterances in the advice. Right? All advice is context dependent to a degree that you may not appreciate until you encounter a different context. And another phrase I have is, “sufficiently caveated advice is indistinguishable from chaos”. For any piece of advice, there is often an opposite: “Take things slow? no, you should move fast!” Okay, how do you know when to do things slowly and when to do things quickly?
To fully explain all of the possible scenarios in which it is advisable to act slowly versus advisable to act quickly, it might takes a lifetime to figure that out – and that’s living. That’s how you figure it out. So I am pretty wary about offering advice in general. It depends on who you’re talking to. If you’re talking to kind of a mature audience that appreciates the limits of knowledge and the limits of advice, then you can say almost anything, and it doesn’t really matter because you don’t have to worry that they are gonna misinterpret what you’re saying and apply it in some domain in which it’s not appropriate. You as the advice giver cannot caveat your advice sufficiently. So there’s always an act of trust in giving advice or receiving advice, and there’s always that work that needs doing that each individual has to do for themselves – that cannot be outsourced. You can’t get someone else to do it for you, you have to develop your own judgment. You have to cultivate your own judgment.
Anyway, about my 20s. I turned 20 in 2010, and my first 2 years were spent mostly in the Singapore Armed Forces, as many Singaporean men do. At 22, I left the SAF and got married to my childhood sweetheart. We bought a house and I got a job in software marketing. I spent five and a half years there, was very happy with great colleagues and a great work environment. I learned a lot, and my boss Dinesh was like my therapist/coach. However, after 5.5 years, at 27, I felt like life had just kind of whooshed by. One day, I was 19 and a teenager, and the next thing I knew, I was 27. I was worried that if I got another job in software marketing or technology, whatever corporate-ish or professional-ish job, that was intense, like my job was, it would be another five and a half years, and then next thing I know, I would be in my mid 30s. And maybe by then, let’s say me and my wife want to have kids, and then we have kids, and then it just gets harder and harder to live a creative life or to do experiments.
I always wanted to honor my inner child. When I was a child, I used to play. When I was a teenager, I used to play music. I used to read a lot. I used to want to write at some level. I was blogging a lot and I loved that. I didn’t get to blog as much for myself while I was at work. Prior to starting work, I used to blog for fun and for pleasure and for passion. Whatever I felt needed saying, I would say it on my blog. And that was how my boss found me, through my blog. And I was determined to do more of that kind of personal writing.
I did make sure to do a little bit of it every day, or almost every day. I would write for myself on my commutes, on the way to work, and on the way back home. And sometimes at night. And I’m very proud of my younger self for making sure he always spent a few minutes every day writing. Mostly. Sometimes I would go a few days without, sometimes I would go a couple of weeks without. But generally, over my 20s, I tried to make time for my personal writing, because that was important to me. I felt like if I had stopped doing my personal writing, I would have kinda let the dream die. I would have shut the door on a part of myself that I didn’t want to shut the door on, because I felt that there was something beautiful and valuable there, that I wanted to keep alive. I was writing as much as I could, but it wasn’t quite enough. Much of my headspace was devoted to work, and then there’s like this little space for my personal creative work. And I wanted to know, what would it be like if I spent a year of my life allowing that small sliver of creative energy to take up my whole day, whole month, week, year? So I did save up money to make sure that I could afford to do that. And that’s another decision that you have to make, I think it’s very important. I highly recommend that in your 20s, you try to keep your expenses as low as possible, because the freedom you get in your late 20s, maybe being able to take a year off to do whatever you like, that’s really precious to me.
I have friends who are doctors, lawyers, investment bankers, and they made much more money than I did. But they also had a higher standard of living. Like they have cars and nice houses, and handbags or whatever it is they spend their money on. But for them, taking a year off is unfathomable. And so, in a sense, they are more constrained by their lives than I am by mine. I’m blessed to live a very free life in a sense. I can… I’m basically making videos. So I don’t currently make money from my videos, but I’m free to experiment with making videos as much as I like because my past saved up to give me this freedom. Right? I sell ebooks now, which is something that I can do because I spent time and energy building an audience, which takes time. These things take a lot of time, so you really have to kind of plan these things out.
Plans are worthless, planning is priceless. Spend a day making elaborate plans and then disregard them completely to make whatever you think is most compelling. Repeat monthly or quarterly
— Visa is doing marketing consults (see pinned!) (@visakanv) November 30, 2020
And I don’t mean like a tedious, elaborate plan with lots and lots of small pieces, plotted out meticulously day by day. I’m terrible at that. I mean really just broad strokes – a long-term commitment, thinking for yourself, what is it that you would want 10 years from now, 20 years from now? Like what is it that if you could have a conversation with your 40-year-old self, your 50-year-old self from the future, what will they tell you to do? You can imagine this yourself. You can ask yourself. And I felt that my older selves would tell me, make sure that you have a body of work. Make sure you have a blog, that you have writing, you’re reaching out to people, you’re making friends, you’re kind of always searching, right? Never, never stop searching, and never stop making stuff, because when you do then if the opportunity comes along, which statistically it inevitably will, if you build out your network, but like if you don’t do that then it’s just gonna be frustrating. It’s gonna be sad, right? So what do you have to do to not be sad? I think even Jeff Bezos has this decision-making system that he calls his ‘regret minimization framework’, which I think is useful. Ask yourself, what would you regret?
And that doesn’t mean that you have to live every single day of your life for your future self. I think that can be a kind of escapism from the present, which is bad. It’s really just something you want to keep in mind on the horizon. Imagine a tower or some some big landmark in the distance – you can do whatever you want day to day, but you always keep the dream on the periphery of your vision, so that you can kinda get closer and closer to it, almost naturally.
What else about 20s? Invest in your relationships. So, the things that I do regret, I regret not having traveled more, and now that there’s a global pandemic happening, travel is not an option, and I do wish I had traveled more. My wife was always telling me to do it and I was always not listening to her, which I deeply regret. I think you have to find the way in which it is meaningful to you. So, I never really cared for, ”let’s go and see the sites, let’s go and try different food,’ or whatever, like that stuff kind of felt superficial-ish to me. What I didn’t realize was that if you go somewhere substantially different from where you are, you get to experience a different reality and that will make you question your own origins. It’ll make you question the norms of the place that you’re from. I find that to be psychologically very stimulating, emotionally, mentally, everything, it just makes me really consider myself, and it gives me a new perspective on myself, which which is very nourishing and and a joy in of itself. It also informs a lot of the work that I do, like thinking, writing, talking to people, making friends.
What else? Health! I only learned about box breathing very recently, like last year or early, I think early this year. Take a deep breath over 4 seconds, hold it for 4 seconds, exhale slowly for 4 seconds, hold it for 4 seconds, repeat. It really calms me down. I used to wake up anxious all the time, like I would have like anxiety in my body– like it’s not even a psychological-intellectual kinda thing, I just feel tense and I don’t realize that I’m tense and I feel like my brain hasn’t loaded yet. So what would normally happen would be drinking my coffee, just a stimulant right, and I would just sit there and nurse my coffee and scroll through my phone for like a good hour to wake up and now I can just do that for like a couple of minutes, and, boom, I’m alert. I wish somebody taught me that when I was a teenager. There’s stuff about the carbon dioxide and the inhale-exhale patterns and your heart rate and all kinds of things about why kind of breathwork calms you down — I think of it as like in a video game where you can press a button to charge your mana, like it’s like that it gives you energy in a sense, and it’s crazy that nobody taught me that.
What else about my 20s, um I remember being anxious, I remember being feeling lost, feeling isolated and alone with work and with my responsibilities and… just I didn’t know how my life was going to turn out in my 20s. I would advise my younger self to be more aggressive in meeting people that you can talk to people outside of work outside of your existing friend group – strangers, acquaintances… twitter is a great place to make these kind of acquaintances, but you could also do it… I mean right now it’s a pandemic so you might have difficulty going to dance classes or pottery classes or whatever — but there’s there are other places where you can meet people.
I guess these days you have to meet people online, and I wish that I had spent more time seeking out people that I could talk to– like schedule meeting people, and share your feelings with them, and ask them about their lives, ask them how they’re doing, ask them what they’re worried about… and the more people you can have like that in your life, the better. I didn’t really have anybody in my early 20s and now I have, I have a great network of friends who look out for me, and I look out for them, and I guess the thing that I’m trying to teach people is to that that is possible.
It’s crazy that we live in… the world has technology that allows us to connect with people so easily, and yet people seem generally lonelier and more disconnected than they’ve ever been. Partially because there’s so many options right, I hear this about dating where if you’re doing online dating on tinder or okcupid or whatever, there’s just so many options, and the other person has so many options, and so you don’t really feel compelled to like invest in any one person. That’s rough. I have the way I do it, but like I don’t know if that generalizes well to other people… anyway I wanna try to keep my videos short, so let’s consider this a part one, and if there’s specific things you want to ask me about you can leave the comments and then I guess I’ll make a part two, sounds fun? Sounds fun to me! Alright, cheers, thanks for hanging out.”
(I am still open to receiving questions in the comments of the above video!)
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