3 Lifestyle Mistakes All 20 Somethings Need to Avoid

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.” — Mark Twain

Times are changing. The way our parents became successful and lived their life is not the best option anymore.

They trained us poorly. By ‘they,’ I mean “The Man.” Big brother. Uncle Sam. The patriarchy.

They put us in preschool just to shape us up for kindergarten. In elementary school, they held getting into grade school over our heads. In grade school, high school was the fear tool of choice. In high school, it was college.

But when you look at college from the outside, you realize the whole thing isn’t set up for the students. The real customers of colleges are employers. As long as colleges succeed in producing a product (you) that employers want to buy, they will get more tuition. I say that with a negative connotation, but it’s not a bad thing. It works if the primary assumption is that employment is your preferred source of income, or at least your most viable.

But fewer and fewer people are interested in that model. We want more autonomy in our lives, and that means different expectations of our employers or less reliance on them overall.

Having a stable, well-paying career used to be the best option out there. It was safe and had room for growth. But now, young people everywhere are making money in ways our parents couldn’t even imagine.

We can start a youtube channel and make ad revenue. We can build a Shopify store for $20. We can sell our crafts on Etsy. We can make money writing online. We can build social media accounts. We can make our own schedule. We can learn anything in a day.

The problem is, this way of life is foreign to the people who raised us. And we still carry that baggage.

Baggage #1: We are too results-focused

It’s way too easy to look online and see the results everyone else is getting (or showing). We see the YouTubers, writers, and online business owners parade their results around and make it look like it’s a simple 3 step process. It’s easy, right? Just buy low and sell high? It isn’t. And if we try creating a life for ourselves with that expectation, we will get crushed.

Here’s the problem. When you’re just getting started on a new venture, like starting a youtube channel, it’s completely foreign to you. You can’t expect to be great at it when you start. That’s the myth we’re sold when we see a “How I Made $15,000 My First Month Dropshipping” headline. It’s easy, and if you follow the simple 3 step strategy, you will have the same outcome.

Seth Godin believes this is a result of our industrial system. As long as we fall in line and follow the recipe, we will get the success that’s been promised to us. “So we focus on the outcomes,” Seth analyzed, “because that’s how we know we followed the steps properly. The industrial system that brainwashed us demands that we focus on outcomes to prove we followed the recipe.”

If you want to live the life of a new age internet cowboy/cowgirl, you have to be in it for the long haul. That means the only result worth focusing on is getting better at the skill. Until you get good at the skill, whatever it is, there is no reason, except delusion, to think you’ll be successful.

You can’t follow a recipe for building a creative life because “Creativity doesn’t repeat itself; it can’t.”

Everybody’s journey to financial independence is a new frontier. You can never take the same path as anybody else because that niche is taken.

One simple truth will help you get through your journey — you’re going to be bad before you’re good. Too often, we tell ourselves that says something about us. We see others’ success in making money writing, investing, working, or whatever, and because we measure ourselves up against their results, we take our lack of success personally. Buying into this is a recipe for a sad self that feels inadequate compared to the millionaire twelve-year-old.

This happens when your results-focused at a time in your life when you’re not good at anything. How could you be? You haven’t practiced. You’re not trained.

“We don’t rise to the level of our expectations;” Archilochus says, “we fall to the level of our training.”

Results don’t measure how good you are at something; they measure how much you have practiced one thing. If your results are not where you want them to be, you need more practice. And if you need more practice, you need to create a practice.

Having a practice means you show up to do something consistently. It doesn’t matter if your social media post didn’t fare too well. It’s a part of your practice, so show up again tomorrow and post again. Write again. Film again. Take another sales call. You’re not bad; you’re just practicing.

Baggage #2: Living up to your means

Living out-with your means is a huge financial mistake and one of the worst you can make in your 20s.

A paycheck to paycheck lifestyle has two components: your paycheck and your expenses. Over the last 30 years or so, paycheck to paycheck became the norm.

There are a few reasons for this; one being the generation before are very used to a stable income. They could reasonably predict the amount of money coming in next month and weren’t too worried it might be less. Another reason, and it’s probably a symptom of the first, is readily available credit.

If you have a stable income and, thanks to credit, you can turn most of your big expenses or emergencies into a monthly payment, there isn’t much urgency to create a financial buffer for yourself.

The problem is that time is money. If you’re always living on the edge of your income, you miss out on tons of opportunities to both buy your time back and make more money.

Most people get caught up in this trap, called lifestyle inflation. In other words, as soon as you bring in more income, you adjust your lifestyle to cap your earnings again.

Robert Greene outlines this process in his book Mastery.

“As you progress in life, you will become addicted to the fat paycheck and it will determine where you go, how you think, and what you do. Eventually, the time that was not spent on learning skills will catch up with you, and the fall will be painful.”

2020 is the best example of why it’s essential to have that financial backing for yourself. The people living paycheck to paycheck, either through no fault of their own or from their poor financial management, struggled this year. The people who were disciplined with their finances before the pandemic’s arrival potentially made even more money in the opportunities that came from this chaos.

If in January you had $10,000 and saw the moves that Tesla was making, you might have $100,000 by now.

Hindsight is 2020.

I missed the boat on Tesla but made out well on other opportunities like buying an investment property and different stock investments. If I didn’t have any money saved and the education to make some of those decisions, 2020 would have put me a few steps backward.

Funny enough, I worked less in 2020 than any other year. But I was ready for luck to happen.

If you’re committed to the new age, the age when you can be a part-time entrepreneur and work a consistent job, or one, or neither, you need to prepare yourself to get lucky too. If you’re spending all the time and money you have where you won’t get lucky, it’s not going to happen.

“What is important when you are young, (Martha Graham) decided, is to train yourself to get by with little money and make the most of your youthful energy.” — Robert Greene

Baggage #3: Wanting Work/Life Balance

The idea of work/life balance begins with the assumption that work and life are separate. Are they? What is life without work? What is work without life? Meaningless.

The two are inseparable. Instead, you should consider your life outside of work, work as well. Isn’t working out work? Isn’t relaxing the work you do to reset yourself? Isn’t being a member of a family important work? A relationship?

Maybe the issue is our relationship to work, not the balance of our lives. Work is how we accomplish the important things in our lives. It’s a virtue, and we’ve demonized it. We’ve created a culture that wants to distance itself from anything that smells like work.

We separate our lives into two buckets: having responsibilities and not having responsibilities. We seek to give each bucket the same weight as if responsibility is just a necessary evil.

You only grow as a person if you have the responsibility to grow as a person. Idle time won’t do anything for you. It won’t do anything for anyone.

Yet, we live for the weekend. We reserve that time for our vices. And we can’t seem to wait for the 2 days we can indulge in them. Drinking, being lazy, consuming useless information, Netflix binging. And we’ve told ourselves that those vices are useful to our livelihoods. We call them balance.

No Bueno.

The root of this issue is that we want a break from our week because we did not choose what we do with our time. We’ve spent most of our lives satisfying the expectations of other people, and we’re finally waking up to it. That’s why there’s been a recent surge of the quarter-life crisis.

LinkedIn research reports, “that 75 percent of 25–33-year-olds have experienced a quarter-life crisis, with the average age being 27.”

Finally, we’re waking up to the fact that our life is ours. Technology has allowed us more independence. We don’t have to pick between fulfilling expectations and guarding our free time. We can take responsibility for our whole lives.

Until you are responsible for where your time is spent, you’re going to feel like you need work/life balance. That’s where the appeal of being an entrepreneur comes from. It’s not time freedom, nor money, but the freedom of choice.

Live your life like an entrepreneur, even if your not one. Take responsibility for your time and your choices. Don’t live to fulfill others’ expectations, and the need for work/life balance will fade.

What will be left is the realization that every moment is an opportunity to grow — a chance to invest in your future and practice virtue in the present.

Final Thoughts

Whether or not you are an entrepreneur, you have the opportunity to live like one. And you should. Being an entrepreneur means preparing yourself to see and take advantage of the opportunities around you.

There are more opportunities now than ever. If we keep thinking like the generation before us, we will never leverage the world around us and discover our own paths.

Our own way forward.

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