91–100 of 160 posts
Imagine if we could give you the magic recipe, it won't taste good to you.
My father always told me, I could find the perfect woman for you, smart, beautiful and funny, but you wouldn't like her, you had to find her. Same here.
Hire a trainer and learn how to weightlift. You may have been a nerd like me that thought weight lifters were wasting time on vanity, but as you age your body will betray you. You need to learn how to stay fit or you will end up with myriad health issues and end up unhappy. A trainer is essential for a new lifter. It is easy to hurt yourself, and you need to work on good form for years before it becomes second nature…
Learn to stretch out various body parts and make it a habit.
Travel when you’re young. Get a working holiday visa in Canada, australia, Japan or UK. Go live.
Immigrate to the USA.
Read every damn day. Read in your field proactively - stuff you don't need to know yet. Read stuff tangentially related to your field. Read the stuff most people in your field don't know (sales! business! negotiation! psychology!) This has been the bedrock of my entire career. I now make a comfortable upper middle class salary working 20-24h a week as a consultant, allowing me to do grad school in areas of personal interest, and I didn't even do comp sci in uni, or start programming professionally until I was 30. But I probably read 1-2 hours a day and have read a lot over the last three decades. It has paid off massively. Learning to write is important too, but recently there has been a trend in telling everyone they need to write daily. If you write more than you read, you're doing it wrong and are probably a shit writer wasting your time. (Real Writers who have done an extended period of MASSIVE reading excluded..)
Learn soft skills: writing, communicating, negotiating, reading a room. I did this by doing door to door canvassing in my 20's for an environmental group, haha. Trial by fire. Once you've spent some time hitting rich folks in West Vancouver for money to save trees, you aren't afraid of any meeting. (No German Shepherd ready to roam out onto the road and scare me off? I got this.)
Have a hobby that you can build a life-long practice habit around. I recommend this be something that you don't plan to pivot your career to so you don't ever take your eyes off long term development for short term gain. Music is a popular one, but there are lots of other options. The point of it is to get good and consistent at highly focused solitary skill development. Warren Buffet famously credited playing an instrument as his biggest advantage. I've taught a bunch of juniors to code now, and the ones who already had this skill basically had rockets on their feet. One of my friends who has been a silicon valley exec many times over said "I always hire the musicians".
Lots of other things are important, but for me, those are the big three. Start doing those now and you'll have a very attractive career in your 30's and 40's.