The 20 Most Important Things I’ve Learned in the Past 20 Years

7 min readOct 14, 2020

Recently it was my 20th birthday so I thought it would be interesting to come up with a list of the 20 most important and useful facts I’ve learned so far.

This essay was is inspired by Sam Altman’s: “36 Lessons Before Age 30”. I recommend reading that too.

Time and Life

1. Time is your most valuable resource

To understand the value of time, consider this thought experiment: imagine if you had the choice between being yourself or a billionaire with weeks to live. Most people would choose to be themselves. This shows just how valuable time is.

Time is the most useful resource because it’s so general. You need it to create, experience and live. You can always get more money but as Ben Franklin says, “Time lost is never found again.”

So how do you spend your time well? How do you have it in abundance? It’s a good idea to live each day as if it was your last. Do something every day. Treat today like it’s your last day on earth (without doing anything crazy). When you treat time as if it is scarce, it becomes abundant. If you live each day to the full without wasting any days, you won’t have to worry about time because a lifetime has thousands of days. Therefore, the person who lives each day as if it were their whole life has thousands of lives.

“My favorite things in life don’t cost any money. It’s really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time.” — Steve Jobs

2. You are Very Lucky to Exist

“Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born.” — Richard Dawkins

The people who have ever lived are a tiny subset of all the people that could have existed. Consequently, there was only about a 1 in 400 trillion chance of you existing because:

there are a huge variety of possible combinations of DNA. Your genome is one of those combinations.
There had to be a long unbroken chain of ancestors before you so that you could exist. If one generation from this chain died before having children, you wouldn’t exist.

If your chance of winning the lottery is one in a million, then winning the lottery twice in a row is still more likely than you existing (1 in a trillion vs 1 in 400 trillion) (1).

Many people want to win the lottery, but in some sense, everyone has already won twice!

Success

3. Learn to delay gratification

The ability to delay gratification and have self-restraint is an essential life skill. Wealth, good health, good relationships, and productivity require delayed gratification. You need it to save and invest instead of wasting your money on consumer purchases, to eat healthily, to control your emotions and get stuff done.

The famous marshmallow experiment, where kids had the choice between one marshmallow now or two later showed that children able to delay gratification better ended up as teenagers with better grades, social skills and a greater ability to cope with stress (2).

How to Improve Your Willpower

Eliminate temptations: a weightlifter who lifts lighter weights is less likely to fail to lift them. Likewise, the fewer demands you put on your willpower, the less likely you are to fall prey to temptation. You can decrease the strain you put on your willpower by removing temptations from your environment. For example, you could put your phone in a drawer so that you aren’t tempted to check it or not have unhealthy foods in your kitchen so that you aren’t tempted to eat them.
Create habits: actions require more effort when they aren’t habitual. Tasks like brushing your teeth become effortless as they are repeated and become habits. Repeating a daily routine that involves productive activities turns these activities into habits. Eventually, following your routine is easier than becoming distracted.
Practice exerting self control: researchers have found that exerting self control may strengthen it over the long term (3).

Memory vs Results

Beneficial actions such as working, studying and exercising can be difficult in the moment. But the negative emotions brought on by these activities rapidly fade while the benefits accumulate. Therefore, it’s an important skill to be able to ignore these short term emotions when they aren’t helpful.

Activities that involved delayed gratification or instant gratification often follow this pattern: delayed gratification is difficult in the short term but leads to positive long term results and instant gratification is immediately appealing but can lead to undesirable consequences down the line.

So which choice is better, short term or long term gain? It seems like a dilemma but the trade-off is not as balanced as it seems. The reason why is that the long term is a much longer period of time than the short term. Delayed gratification often involves a few hours of effort followed by weeks, months or years of returns. Conversely, instant gratification is often beneficial only for a few minutes or hours but could have months or years of long term negative consequences.

For example, saving some of your income is a simple action that may take a few hours per month, but it can lead to better financial stability years down the line. Exercising for a few hours per week leads to better health years down the line. Smoking is immediately satisfying on the timescale of minutes or hours but has lasting negative health consequences that can last for decades. Therefore, choosing delayed gratification is often the better option.

Our natural tendency is to choose instant gratification over delayed gratification even when it is irrational (eg. a small reward now vs a large reward later). This made sense for a lot of human history as people were more concerned about short term survival.

But to succeed in today’s world, the ability to delay gratification is essential.

4. Procrastination

How to beat procrastination:

Make the task smaller so that it is less daunting.
Realize that starting is the hardest part. Work for two minutes to get started.
5 second rule: count down from 5 and then start.
Use a pomodoro timer.

5. Deliberate Practice

Deliberate practice, not talent is the real key to high performance. Deliberate practice involves:

consciously practicing with the goal of improving performance rather than just mindlessly practicing.
Getting feedback, looking for problems and errors and correcting them.
Continually increasing difficulty as you get better so that you are always outside of your comfort zone.
Breaking skills down into chunks and then focusing on mastering each chunk.

6. How to Get Stuff Done

Brian Tracy on how to get stuff done:

Select Your Most Important Task.
Begin Immediately.
Work on It Single Handedly.
Finish It.

7. Other Important Productivity Principles

The 80–20 principle.
Parkinson’s Law: a task fills the time available for it’s completion. The further away your deadline, the longer the task will take. Therefore, give yourself as little time as possible for each task
Time boxing: work on a task for a period of time and then quit when the time limit is over. This makes tasks less daunting.
Focus: we can only do one thing at a time.

Happiness

8. Happiness = expectations — reality

9. Happiness: 50% genetics, 10% environment and 40% state of mind.

People Skills

10. Take the perspective of the other person. Put yourself in their shoes. Be aware of what other people want and how they feel. By default, appeal to self interest, not altruism.

Thinking

11. Avoid confirmation bias: when we see evidence, we tend to use it to confirm our own beliefs. Instead try to use evidence to disprove your existing beliefs. It can take many examples to prove a fact right but only one to prove it wrong.

12. Improvement: since improvement is a form of change, there cannot be improvement without change.

Health

13. These four factors account for 80% of chronic disease risk (4):

not smoking, not being obese, exercising half an hour per day and eating healthier (defined as consuming more fruits, vegetables and whole grains and less meat).

Wealth

14. Use your money to make more money: save at least 10% of your income and invest it (5).

15. Buy assets (things that put money in your pocket such as stocks). Avoid buying liabilities (things that take money out of your pocket such as cars). The rich buy assets, the poor have only expenses, the middle class but things they think are assets (6).