I turned 30 yesterday. I’m grateful – I’m incredibly fulfilled, happy, and healthy, and I don’t have it all figured out, but I’ve been lucky to learn from people smarter and wiser than me.
Here are the 30 lessons that stuck with me:
1. Your physical health is the foundation for everything.
I used to think that with enough mental strength, you could brute force long hours and weeks behind a screen to get stuff done. Wrong. You start to feel this in your late 20s.
The foundation for everything mental: focus, energy and productivity – starts with the physical. Good sleep, food, and exercise, in that order. If you want to be a great entrepreneur, leader, creative… get these right first.
2. Critics are proof you’re doing something worthwhile.
If no one disagrees with you, you’re probably irrelevant. Doubters are a sign that you’re doing something significant. Before every major inflection point in my life (getting my 1st job in tech, moving to New York, leaving Google to pursue entrepreneurship), I always had people telling me I was too ambitious. At first, I believed them, but now I use their criticism as fuel.
3. How to slow time down.
It seems inevitable that time speeds up as you get older.
The truth is, there are only two ways to slow it down:
Do hard things (run long distances, read slowly).
Do novel things (travel, meet new people, chase new experiences).
Type II fun hurts now but pays back later. If life feels like it’s rushing past, it’s usually because you aren’t challenging yourself enough.
4. To advance your career, learn how to build snowballs.
The highest performers I know share one skill: they can quickly turn abstract ideas into tangible things – like prototypes, mockups, or even apps. These are called snowballs, and they dramatically increase the chance that your idea becomes something significant.
Like building a snowman, the hardest part is making the first snowball. Once you’ve packed it together and placed it on the ground, you just roll it forward. The weight accumulates, and soon the snowball takes on a life of its own.
*Inspired by Henrik Werdelin.
5. Leverage comes from media, code, capital, or labor.
There are only four ways to build leverage:
Capital (money working for you)
Labor (people working for you)
Code (technology working for you)
Media (content working for you)
Capital and labor are “permissioned leverage.” You need someone to give you money to invest or people to manage. Code and media, on the other hand, are “permissionless leverage.” You can create them yourself, scale them infinitely, and no one can stop you.
Inspired by Naval Ravikant.
6. Writing is the new resume.
A resume tells people what you’ve done. Writing shows them how you think. A blog, a collection of essays, or even a trail of posts on the internet is a hundred times more effective than a bullet list of jobs.
The best way to evangelize your skills and protect your career is to accumulate artifacts online. Essays, newsletters, tweets, and posts create proof of competence. Years later, people will still find your words, and that proof of work will open doors long after you’ve forgotten you wrote them.
7. There is no alpha in published work.
Alpha is timely, rare information that gives you an edge. It lets you see around corners and act before others, while the rest of the world is still catching up. But alpha is almost never published. Once it’s written down, it’s already old. It’s been reviewed, shared, and acted on.
The most valuable information I’ve ever found came from conversations with people on the fringe, ahead of the curve. Ideas that will never be published, but can change everything if you catch them early.
8. Easy doesn’t mean invaluable. Hard doesn’t mean valuable.
Just because something feels easy and natural to you doesn’t mean it lacks value. More often it’s a sign you’re operating in your zone of genius – doing something others struggle with but you find effortless.
On the flip side, difficulty alone isn’t proof of value. Some things are hard simply because they’re inefficient, poorly designed, or not worth doing in the first place.
*Inspired by Andrew D’Souza.
9. Growth requires shedding your shell.
A lobster only grows by shedding its shell once it becomes too tight, leaving it exposed and vulnerable until a new one hardens.
People are the same way. You can’t expand without letting go of things that once protected you. Everyone reaches a point where they need to pause, shed an old identity, and create space for the next stage.
This might mean quitting your job, taking a sabbatical, tinkering without purpose, or traveling the world. It’s easy to discount these phases as wasted time, but the truth is, they are a necessity for everyone.
*Inspired by Laurie Segall.
10. When you start to walk on the way, the way appears.
Nobody has a fully formed idea when they first begin. But once you start working on it, the map will reveal itself. Clarity comes from action, not thinking.
On the other hand, if you wait for perfect information or a guaranteed outcome, you’ll never start.
*Inspired by Rumi.
11. Seek principles, not outcomes.
Instead of chasing outcomes (e.g. “I want to be a CEO”), consider optimizing for principles (e.g. “I want to work with people I admire). Outcomes are almost always outside your control and depend on variables, timing, and luck.
Principles, on the other hand, are durable. “I want to work with people I admire” is a compass you can carry through your entire career. Principles lead to better decisions, which, over time, create better outcomes anyway.
*Inspired by Henrik Werdelin.
12. The most effective mentorship comes from shared work.
Through a decade of working, I’ve found that monthly standing 1:1s about business or career are usually a waste of time. Neither person has enough context and surface-level conversations can only teach so much.
Instead, I’ve learned the best way to learn from your role models is to do work together and find opportunities to see how the other person thinks, solves problems, and makes decisions.
13. Build the well before you need it.
If I could give only one piece of advice about networking, it would be this: build it before you need it. Most people wait until they’re desperate to reach out, but by then, it’s too late.
Plant seeds early. Meet new people, offer generosity, connect a friend to a job, or help a founder meet investors. Do this consistently over years and the goodwill compounds. When the time comes and you do need a favor, people will be eager to help because you invested long before you asked.
14. Hard is unavoidable – choose your hard.
Building a business is hard, but so is being broke. Staying fit is hard, but so is being overweight. Being financially disciplined is hard, but so is being in debt.
It will never be easy. It will always be hard, but you can choose your hard.
15. You don’t only live once.
Anything worth doing takes 5–7 years. That means you can take many swings at several things in a single lifetime. You can spend a life writing poems, another building things, and another creating art. You have many lives. Live them.
16. Just when you think you’re done, you’re only 40% there.
Exhaustion is often a psychological ceiling, not a physical one. Most of us quit too early. Push further and you’ll be surprised by what you’re capable of.
David Goggins calls this the 40% rule: when your mind tells you you’ve hit your limit, you’ve really only tapped into about 40% of your capacity.
17. One year of obsession can change your life.
We tend to overestimate what we can do in a single day and underestimate what we can do in a year.
But twelve months of focused, daily work is enough to completely reset the trajectory of your life. It’s enough to build a business, transform your body or master a skill. One year of consistent work beats a decade of distracted effort.
*Inspired by Zach Pogrob.
18. There’s always a third door.
Most people wait in the main line - the obvious, crowded path that everyone else is on. A few have access to the VIP entrance, reserved for those with connections, privilege, or luck.
But there’s always a third path. The one you create for yourself with persistence and creativity. It’s not obvious, and no one will tell you it exists, but it’s there. Once you find it, you’ll never take the regular entrance again.
19. Never let anyone forget that they met you.
When you meet someone, make them feel seen and heard. Offer to help. Share an idea. Show up in a way that’s rare enough to be remembered.
Most people are forgettable because they do the minimum. Be the opposite. Be outstanding.
20. It’s impossible to go from 0 → 1 with multiple pursuits at once.
In your 20s, it feels like you have infinite time. You might want to do everything – start a business, explore hobbies, travel the world, and still somehow master everything. But true mastery is slow …it takes years …sometimes decades to break the top 1% at anything.
The hard truth is that if you try to master two things at the same time, you’ll fail at both. Focus is underrated. Pick one pursuit you love and get unreasonably good at it. Once you’ve built depth in one domain, you can always expand into others.
21. Stress is the tax on ambition.
For ambitious people, stress will always be a constant. It’s the price you pay for chasing an audacious goal, and it will never disappear. So the goal isn’t to have no stress, but to stress about the things that matter to you.
Inspired by Sahil Bloom.
22. The best use of money is to buy time, health, or experiences.
Most people treat money as an end goal, but it’s really just a tool. Beyond a certain point, material possessions become status games that add nothing to your life.
Instead, use money to free your time, strengthen your body, and create memories with the people you love.
23. Regularly ask yourself: “10 years from now, what will I be glad I did consistently for 10 years?”
Then do those things.
24. Create more than you consume.
The best way to stand out in a world driven by “What can you do for me?” is to be generous. Share ideas, make introductions, give your time and effort without keeping score. In the short run, it may feel like you’re spending more than others, but in the long run, it comes back tenfold.
Give without the expectation of return, and over time you’ll create a reputation, a network, and opportunities far greater than anything you could have extracted.
25. Learn to build or learn to sell – learn both and you’ll rule the world.
In every field, there are builders (people who create something of value) and sellers (people who persuade others to care about it). One without the other doesn’t go far.
Figure out which one you are and lean into it. If you master one, you’ll be great. If you master both you’ll be unstoppable.
*Inspired by Naval Ravikant.
26. Get a great coach.
I’ve started using coaches for nearly everything I want to learn effectively: public speaking, fitness, and even making videos. A good coach collapses time. They take decades of learning and condense it into a path you can follow in months.
Coaches recognize the blind spots and the common traps you’d otherwise stumble through. If you value your time, hiring the right coach is one of the highest ROI moves you can make.
27. Always ask for more.
Most of us undersell ourselves. We evolved to avoid conflict, to seek safety, to stay within the tribe. That instinct carries into negotiation, where we fear that asking for more will put us at risk.
But almost every number has more room. The first offer is rarely the ceiling. By pushing higher, you not only improve the outcome, you also prove to yourself that your value is greater than you assumed.
28. The paradox of working for yourself: You won’t have hobbies, weekends or vacations, but you won’t have work either.
If you’re doing something that’s truly yours, you’ll care so much that you can’t turn it off. You won’t have downtime anymore, but you won't have work either… and that’s the beauty of it
29. Don’t trade time you don’t have for money you don’t need.
The most dangerous phrase in business is, “But the money’s too good.” It tricks you into selling your time, health, or relationships for dollars you will never spend. You can always make more money, but it is impossible to buy back lost time.
The answer is to define “enough”. Know the life you want, calculate what it costs, and stop moving the goalpost once you reach it. Past that point, money is just a distraction.
30. Everything you’re doing is meaningless.
A decade after you’re gone, nobody will remember you or anything you’ve done. None of this matters as much as we think it does. The world moves on, and everyone is eventually forgotten.
After all, we’re all just monkeys on a small rock, floating through space.
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Wonderful, thoughtful post. The ultimate truth - 30!
love this quote "After all, we’re all just monkeys on a small rock, floating through space.", I always remind myself that "we are just monkeys with a plan"