I am 33 years old, and if I could give one piece of advice to my 20-year-old self, it would be this:
“Expose your mind beyond your geographical limitations.”
Like many people, when I finished college in 2013, I had ideas about what I wanted to do with my life. But all of those ideas were influenced by my geography.
What I grew up seeing the people around me do became my box. My mind automatically believed my choices were limited to what existed inside that box.
I started thinking outside the box because of YouTube.
It exposed me to online entrepreneurship, and once I realized there were better opportunities out there, I couldn’t go back to thinking the same way.
My friend visited me recently and saw me reading the book Outliers. He said, “I don’t know how people get the discipline to read books like this.”
At that moment, I thought it was not about discipline. It’s about exposing yourself to ideas beyond your current perceptions, beliefs, and aspirations.
That’s why, knowing what I know now, the advice I would give my 20-year-old self is to be curious above everything else.
The more curious you are, the more you expose yourself to different ideas, and those ideas can lead to opportunities you never knew existed.
It sounds simple, but trust me, it isn’t.
The moment you begin exposing your mind to new ideas and thinking beyond your geographical limitations, you’ll most likely find yourself in conflict with the people around you. And if you’re not careful, they may subconsciously try to pull you back into that same box until you start wondering whether you’re being unrealistic.
I remember when I was struggling to build something online. I tried many different things, but I never shared what I was working on with anyone except my mum because I knew most people would laugh at how unrealistic my ideas were.
Fast forward to today, and many of those same people ask me to teach them what I do.
There was one principle I always kept in mind:
“I will not take advice from someone who doesn’t have what I’m aiming for.”
Because the advice they’ll most likely give you is some version of, “Be realistic.”
Of course, there’s a lot of nonsense on the internet, and some ideas really are unrealistic. But I’d rather try something ambitious and fail than never try at all and simply hope life changes on its own.
The good thing is that the more you experiment, the better you become at filtering out the nonsense.
Stay curious.
Cheers 🥂
