What's the best life advice you can give to me as I am turning 25 today • Hacker News Board

Re: What's the best life advice you can give to me as I am turning 25 today

#11

Post by ricc » Fri, Jan 15, 2021, 9:46 PM UTC

I would give my 25 year old self the following advice:

In general: Try everything you want to try, keep moving and exploring, and do not be complacent and/or stagnant. Your 20s is meant for exploration while your 30s are meant for stabilisation.

There are some specific exceptions however:

1. Do not disregard your health. You won’t be able to explore as much and then stabilise later on if you’re weak and/or always sick. 2. Try to learn how to invest, at the very least in index funds. Compound interest is much more powerful when started early.

Re: What's the best life advice you can give to me as I am turning 25 today

#12

Post by Trias11 » Fri, Jan 15, 2021, 10:15 PM UTC

Buy a little bit of bitcoin every month.

Re: What's the best life advice you can give to me as I am turning 25 today

#13

Post by minimalismhuh » Sat, Jan 16, 2021, 2:13 PM UTC

thiago_fm wrote: post #5

there's no life advice. do whatever you want and suffer the consequences if you are looking for advice of how to optimize yourself or outcomes, at some point you will realise you've wasted much of your life working for that optimisation and not actually doing the things you've wanted. and if you do too much of the things you want, you might end up too fat, too unhealthy, broke etc. there's no way around that, there's…

That's not really a good reason to neglect statistics and probabilities/studies/findings. If you know that crossing a highway will make it likely for you to get killed, then you better not cross that highway. If you know that smoking is detrimental to your health, you better not smoke etc. I am sorry that your mother died, but you should not justify being reckless with your life with the death of a loved one. I know it is hard to think rationally when emotion is involved, but the point is statistics/studies etc. give you good directions for your life:

https://www.inc.com/dana-severson/after-studying-lives-of-72...

A study/finding is not meant to be absolute/100%, it is just "good advice" for you to follow that will most likely help to keep good health. So don't neglect a finding/study just b/c a small percentage had "bad luck".

Re: What's the best life advice you can give to me as I am turning 25 today

#14

Post by rdtwo » Sat, Jan 16, 2021, 4:33 PM UTC

Hard to give advice without learning your life situation. In general though I’d advise you to focus on the areas you are really good at for personal wealth generation but also to take the areas you are bad at and work on those for personal growth and satisfaction. For example if you are a great programmer but bad in social situations you more programming will make you more money but working on end achieving improved social success will make you happier and provide more sense of growth.

Re: What's the best life advice you can give to me as I am turning 25 today

#15

Post by thiago_fm » Tue, Jan 26, 2021, 4:36 PM UTC

minimalismhuh wrote: post #13

thiago_fm wrote: post #5

there's no life advice. do whatever you want and suffer the consequences if you are looking for advice of how to optimize yourself or outcomes, at some point you will realise you've wasted much of your life working for that optimisation and not actually doing the things you've wanted. and if you do too much of the things you want, you might end up too fat, too unhealthy, broke etc. there's no way around that, there's…

That's not really a good reason to neglect statistics and probabilities/studies/findings. If you know that crossing a highway will make it likely for you to get killed, then you better not cross that highway. If you know that smoking is detrimental to your health, you better not smoke etc. I am sorry that your mother died, but you should not justify being reckless with your life with the death of a loved one. I know…

you aren't a data point in a statistic model

i haven't said that you should snore cocaine all day and die. i've just said that it doesn't make sense to optimise every bit.

drink water, do some sports, visit your doctor etc. that will let you have plenty of time, but apply the pareto principle there or like I said, you'll end up wasting your whole life trying to have some edge over other people and such thing do not exist, as you'll die no matter what do you do.

and it would be such a waste to live forever.