7 Things I Wish I Knew in my 20s

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

00:42 1. Invest in yourself in your 20ties

04:04 My Online PT Course

04:28 2. Start investing

05:27 3. Fix your sleep

06:34 4. Going out

07:29 5. Personality and IQ testing

08:40 6. Know the value of your time

09:33 7. Learn to ask for what you want

10:32 Outro

Transcript:

Here are seven things I wish I had learned earlier in life to become happier and more successful. First, a little bit of background about myself to provide some context. I’m a former business consultant that worked for some of the most successful companies in the Netherlands. I traded in my company car to pursue my passion in fitness and become an entrepreneur. That went pretty well and I’m currently the CEO of a multinational fitness enterprise. I’m also a bestselling author, an international public speaker, and I have coached people for over 15 years to improve their lifestyles, focusing on fitness and health, but also generally improving their lifestyles because I think of fitness as a subbranch of personal development in general. Also, I obtained a lot of life experience by living in over 50 different countries as a digital nomad.

Lesson number one. Your 20s are for investing in yourself. There’s a lot of debate about what you should focus on early in life, and my advice, especially if you’re a guy, is to focus on investing in yourself in every possible manner because everything you invest in now compounds to make you more successful and happier later in life. Conversely, investing in a social circle, while very, very important and arguably underrated in current society, it’s not something you can rely on anymore because many of the people you associate with, whether it’s colleagues or people from college, they will leave. They will go to other places, other countries, whether it’s for a partner, whether it’s for work, whether it’s for education. Many people simply don’t stay in touch. Even if you want to stay in touch. This goes both for your physique and your career.

For your physique this will never be as easy as in your early 20s to build a great physique and set the stage to just maintain that in the rest of your life. You’ll probably don’t yet have a full time career with high stress, a long commute, and a family to take care of. So it will pay massive dividends if you’ve already built a lot of muscle mass and reached a low body fat level, and importantly, you know how to sustain that low body fat level. Having a good physique is not just about looking better. It helps you with many things in life. It significantly improves your long term health outcomes, and it makes you function better both physically and mentally.

A 2023 meta analysis found that exercise improves almost all aspects of cognitive functioning, including but not limited to, global cognition, executive function, memory, attention, and information processing. Moreover, the effects of exercise on well-being are very substantial, larger than most other things you can do to improve your happiness. Research has found, for example, that the effect of exercise on well-being is larger than going from an annual income of 15k to 50k per year. Career wise, the success you build now also significantly improves your long term outcomes due to things like operating leverage and compounding. Operating leverage basically means that any improvement you make has a bigger effect when the total amount of productivity or output you have is bigger.

As a concrete example, if you make 100k per year and you improve that by 10%, that is a 10k improvement. However, if you make a million a year, any 10% improvement is 100k improvement. Moreover, due to compounding, if generally your salary or your income increase is 5 to 10% per year, that effect is much, much bigger when you’re already at a high number and you start early in life. Plus, if you do the opposite, and you have an essentially blank resume until age 30 people think of you as a bum and it is very hard to get back from that.

If you’re a woman and you want kids the same advice applies. But I think you should spend more time trying to find a good partner early on. For men, their partner value typically increases as they go into their 30s, and they become more successful and more mature. For women, however, while we may not want things to be this way, partner value in the eyes of men significantly decreases. Even older men significantly prefer younger women. Moreover, as a woman, you are on the clock. Literally the biological clock of fertility.

First stage romantic love, which is characterized by what is basically insanity, typically lasts about two years. That means you can expect to need at least two years to thoroughly vet a partner to see if you want that person to be the father of your children and a good long term life partner. If you’re already in your 30s that means you can realistically only possibly evaluates to more people. And choosing your life partner is not a decision you want to make out of necessity. So for women it pays off significantly to find your ideal man early. For men, in contrast, partner value typically increases as they get more successful, and it becomes easier to find a good woman.

Lesson number two: Start investing money early. Preferably in reliable assets like real estate or stocks. The mathematics of compounding are truly magical, even if you’re not investing large sums. For reference: if you start at age 22 and you invest $100 a month, which rises 5% annually because your salary increases and all of these investments compound at 10% per year, which is quite realistic because that is approximately the average return of the US stock market, guess how much money you will have at age 65? Even though you only put in 172,000, you will have 1.3 million by age 65. Starting early in investing, if your investments are reliable, is often even more important than investing very well. Even Warren Buffett, the greatest investor by almost any metric, has made most of his money after retirement age because of compounding. When you already have 100 billion and it compounds at 20% per year, then you make 20 billion the next year just from your investments. You cannot even spend that money that fast.

Lesson number three: fix your sleep. Sleep debt is cumulative. It functions just like financial debt. After eight days of sleeping. One hour less than you need to the effect, cognitively speaking, on your brain are as bad as a complete one-nighter. After two weeks, the effect is the same. Two weeks of sleeping one hour less than you need to, or one week of missing out on two hours per day is the same as having done two full all-nighters. You don’t notice the effect that way because subjectively you kind of get used to it. But objectively, any measures of cognitive intelligence or brain functioning keep deteriorating. Even though you have kind of entered zombie mode, you don’t realize that you are fading and fading more as a human being. You are a ghost of your potential self if you don’t sleep enough.

You may have heard from Elon Musk and Arnold Schwarzenegger that sleeping is for the weak. Yes, if you are wired like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Elon Musk and you don’t have any issues with sleeping on the factory floor and working days and days on end, then you can do that. Most of us mortals just can’t. For me personally, also, I had massive sleep problems early in life. Fixing those made me an entirely different human being. That is no exaggeration.

Lesson 4: Don’t waste time going out. By all means, socialize with friends, have fun, go to some parties, but of all the things you can do going out and partying at night is, in my opinion, one of the worst possible things you can do with your time. Not only does it mess up your sleep, usually the next day is also ruined. As far as social activities goes, going out is also one of the worst possible ways you can bond. Sure, you can hook up with someone, but you’re unlikely to find a life partner that way because these days in clubs and most bars, you can barely talk to each other. The music is so loud that you literally cannot communicate what social activity is any good. If you cannot communicate. Combine that with the damage to your biorhythm, your sleep, all the calories from alcohol, the money it’s costs, and you are talking about a very destructive investment into your future.

That said, my job is to advise you not to judge you. So if you do go out and binge drink I have a guide in the references below on how to minimize the damage from a night out of binge drinking. Use it at your own peril.

Lesson 5: You should do personality and IQ testing. As a young adult you don’t yet know who you are. Yes, you think you have all the answers, but you don’t. This is grandpas telling you that it takes a lot of experience to know who you really are. We like to think we can just look inside ourselves and know what we like and what is good for us. This is now known as the introspection illusion. We can’t. Usually we learn about ourselves from experience. It’s very important to talk to people who have done things that we like to do and experience things ourselves, and then we create, our mind, our brain – creates a narrative about who we are and what we actually like, but experience is incredibly important to make that narrative correct.

And abundance of psychological research shows that we are very poor at predicting what is good for us if we haven’t experienced it or talk to people who have. Other than experiencing a lot in life I think personality testing and IQ testing is one of the most valuable things you can do to speed up this process. Personality testing is also incredibly useful because it teaches you a lot about human behavior. When you are familiar with things like “The Big 5” model of personality, you can classify other people this way and it helps you understand why people do what they do and who you should associate with in life.

Lesson six: Know the value of your time. In simple terms, the value of your time is just how much money you make per hour. This is a big simplification, but it helps as a frame of reference to decide many things in life. You want to generally outsource anything you can that has a lower cost than what you make per hour. If you make more than the cleaner, then you should get a cleaner. If you have a flight that saves you five hours, and the cost of that flight is less than five hours of your time, you should probably get that flight.

As a crazy example of the opportunity cost of time it is irrational for Bill Gates to pick up a $100 bill. Bill should not pick up the bill because he makes more than $100 in the time it would take to pick up the $100 bill. This is obviously an extreme example, but knowing the value of your time should guide a lot of your life’s decisions. In general, early on in life you are investing time to make money. Later in life, you are generally investing money to save time.

Lesson 7: learn to ask for what you want. One of the people that made the biggest impression on my life was our neighbor, a hairdresser. She became a multi-millionaire as a hairdresser because she always asked for what she wanted. She wasn’t known as the nicest person, but she always insisted. And I was amazed by how much you could get done simply by insisting and asking. Research confirms that somewhat disagreeable people that ask for what they want and aren’t afraid to say no typically become more successful. And this explains a significant part of the gender gap in pay.

Men are typically somewhat more disagreeable than women, which means they ask more for what they want and they pursue it more, even if it comes with some social cost. And this generally pays off. However, you generally want to provide value first. At work, for example, before you ask for a raise in salary first make sure you are indispensable and that your manager knows that you are a very valuable worker. So first you put in the overtime and then you ask for the salary, most people do this the wrong way around.

So there you have it. If you like this type of evidence based content, I’d be honored if you like and subscribe. And if you want to learn everything there is to know about building muscle, then check out my online PT certification.