Advice to My 20-Year-Old Self: Thoughts on Health, Wealth, and Wisdom
What would you tell your former self many years ago? If you even could, would you?
I recently finished reading Tim Ferriss’ book “Tools of Titans,” where he interviews “billionaires, icons, and world-class performers.” I’m not a big fan of most of his books, and I think they’re extremely overrated. But this one was good because it’s full of advice from people who aren’t him.
It’s not really a book in a traditional sense, it’s more like a compendium of helpful information on a completely random variety of topics: everything from health, to finance, to making your life easier. In fact, it’s split into three separate parts with the following headings:
Healthy
Wealthy
Wise
The various interviews in each respective section fall mostly under the three umbrellas listed above, but there’s a lot of overlap.
The interview with Arnold Schwarzenegger, for example, is listed under “wealthy,” not “healthy” as you’d expect. But that actually makes sense: even though “The Governator” was a world champion bodybuilder, he also has quite a bit of advice about starting and running a business and making money.
Some of the questions asked in the book are just plain dumb: “What is your spirit animal?” is something he asks almost everybody, and people answer it without any explanation at all. This is weird.
As a good example, why does the Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams say his spirit animal is a “Toy Australian Shepherd?” We don’t know. Adams doesn’t explain because Ferriss doesn’t ask. That’s poor storytelling.
But despite its faults, there is one question Ferriss asks fairly consistently:
“What advice would you give your 30-year-old self?”
Hearing what famous actors, world-class athletes, military members, and billionaires would tell themselves when they were younger is a great premise for an interview.
I heard this question so often as I listened to the audiobook that I started thinking about my own life and how I would answer it if I were being interviewed.
What advice would I give my younger self?
The whole “30-year-old self” thing is kind of irrelevant to me, though. Most of the people in the book are in their 40s, 50s, or 60s, so it makes sense to ask about their 30s in their case. But I’m only 38, so going back just 8 years isn’t that helpful as a thought exercise.
But as I was thinking about all of this, I realized that if I tack on ten more years, now, all of a sudden, I’ve got a good question.
“What advice would you give your 20-year-old self?”
Framing it this way, it now becomes interesting. On my 20th birthday, I was in college (kinda sorta: I was taking part-time classes at a community college) and working two part-time jobs: one in construction and one as a hotel banquet server.
I was engaged to be married to a young woman I met at the 1950s diner I’d worked at before (and recently quit working at) a few months earlier. Aside from that, I didn’t really have much going on in my life, or any serious plans. I was basically a clueless, directionless teenager.
I had some dreams, sure, but no solid plan at all, and life was very confusing and frustrating. I didn’t know what I wanted, and even more than that, I didn’t know how to get what I wanted.
My life at 20 was so different now from what it is today that it’s completely unrecognizable.
At the time, I had no kids and lived with two roommates in an incredibly cheap apartment where I literally slept on the floor in a sleeping bag (no bed, no mattress… just a sleeping bag).
I owned almost nothing. I had a car, a humidor with some cigars in it, a couple of guitars, a big boombox, and that was about it.
I didn’t have internet access or own a computer. I had a teeny-tiny flip phone the size of a business card and had to pay for text messages at something like $0.25/each, which is worse when you take into account just how hard it was to peck out a few sentences on the phone’s numerical dial pad.
Where was I going in life? I wasn’t sure. I was certainly not prepared for what did come next, which was: my wife and I would get married, have five kids in six years, and then I’d get laid off from my job the same week we bought our first house.
But somehow, we all survived, and we’re still here. So, at least so far, it’s turning out okay.
But if I were able to somehow transport myself back in time to 2005 and give myself some advice, there are some thoughts I’d share with 20-year-old Ron Stauffer.
Of course, there would be some super-obvious hints about how to get rich quickly or tip myself off about unexpected disasters:
“That weird new company called “Google” that just went public last year? Buy as much of that stock as you can and hold it for exactly 25 years. Sell it in 2024 right before they destroy the entire company when they release ‘Gemini AI.’”
“Your coworker Roberto is about to kill himself. Go check in with him before it’s too late.”
“The night Rachel is due with your third baby, don’t go out to Arby’s for dinner. Stay at home, run upstairs, and shut off the washing machine before it floods your entire three-story townhouse, and you end up moving in with the Rice family and giving birth in the basement.”
Pay a few more visits to Grandma Siechert: she doesn’t have as much time left as you think she does.
But by and large, it’s true that the people we are today are the result of the experiences we have, whether we were prepared for them or not.
For example, if you knew you were going to die of a heart attack, would you want to know that? Would you want to know exactly when? How soon ahead of time would you want to know?
Might it be better to just live your life with blissful ignorance? These are all good thoughts to ponder.
I think the advice I’d give myself would be a few simple warnings, that I can easily fit under the same three sections as Tools of Titans does: healthy, wealthy, and wise.
Here’s the advice I would give my 20-year-old self.
PART I: HEALTHY
#1: Take care of your teeth with a religious fervor.
People already know it’s important to take care of their teeth, but they don’t know just how important it is.
I thought I did a pretty good job with my oral hygiene, but it wasn’t good enough. But now, with a mouth full of 20 or more cavity fillings throughout my mouth, I would stress this with urgency.
Especially since my failure to go to the dentist every six months as an adult allowed a major tooth infection to fester, almost causing me to lose part of my lower jawbone.
So far, I’ve had two root canals and a few crowns, and I probably need more in the future. So, I would tell myself to spend lots of time and money on preventive dental care.
It’s one of those things where you’ll pay for it now, or you’ll pay for it later. And if you don’t pay for it with cash, you’ll pay for it in pain.
C’mon, Ron. Take care of those teeth as though your life depends on it. Because it actually might.
#2: Develop a habit of relaxation and pay for the massage therapist.
I have a weird sort of sense of shame where I feel bad if I spend money on myself. When I pay over $100 for a 75-minute “Stress Melter” massage, I feel like I’m doing something naughty or wasteful.
I’d try really hard to convince myself that it’s okay: that I’m a nicer person and I can be more productive when I’m relaxed and in a good mental state. These are both true, and I should make regular practices of deep breathing, relaxation, and massage.
As it stands now, I have so much stress built up in my body that I’m nearly in a panic by the time I go in for a massage, and I’m usually told that I’m so tense I shouldn’t have waited so long before coming in.
I know this now. If I could, I would try to convince my 20-year-old self to start working on stress reduction and relaxation much sooner. It would probably make me live longer.
PART II: WEALTHY
#1: Never go into debt. Never, ever, ever, ever.
Growing up, my parents always told us kids:
“Never go into debt. Credit cards are very bad. Don’t use them. Just save money and pay for things with cash.”
Of course, that’s easy to say. But it’s very hard to do without any plan in place for how, exactly one will accomplish this.
Especially when those same parents also told me:
“You MUST go to college. This is not negotiable. You have to get a four-year college degree.”
Yet they didn’t pay for any of it and didn’t equip me with the understanding of how I was supposed to be able to pay for tuition, rent, a car, insurance, gas, and food, all while working two part-time jobs, and somehow, miraculously still passing my classes and getting good grades.
Long story short, it was almost impossible. I don’t know how I could have gone to college, full-time and gotten a degree, paying cash as I go, without getting any student loans and while working at jobs where I made between $10 and $12 per hour.
Perhaps this was possible in 1976 when they went to college. But in 2004, it was patently absurd. So, I ended up taking on student loans and getting credit cards. Because:
Everybody else I knew did.
I got unsolicited offers in the mail for credit cards that were too easy to say “yes” to.
Applying for apartments was nearly impossible without credit history.
In order to play the stupid debt game, I ended up having to go to a bank, paying them $1,000 cash for a CD (certificate of deposit), then getting a secured personal loan for—you guessed it—$1,000.
I spent two years paying back $1,000 of my own money just to establish credit history so I could do things like open an account with a utility company, rent an apartment, get a car loan, etc.
This was among the stupidest exercises in idiocy I’ve ever partaken in, but I essentially had to do it in order to build up a credit profile so I could have a place to live.
Today, if I had the chance to warn my 20-year-old self about this, I would.
“Say no to debt,” I’d say. “Do almost anything on earth except go into debt.”
But I would then follow that up with a plan for how to do that, and offer skills and advice, not just say: “Credit cards are bad.”
#2: Don’t put money into anything you don’t understand.
Over the years, I’ve had jobs with benefits, and there were all kinds of weird things where people told me to invest my money: stocks, bonds, money market accounts, mutual funds, IRAs, 401(k)s, 529s, ESAs, and more.
I never understood how any of them worked, and nobody was ever able to explain them to me sufficiently. They always acted like it was already so obvious or that I should know by now.
I put many thousands of dollars into weird financial accounts where I couldn’t touch the money until I was 65, or I could take the money, but there would be huge tax penalties or weird “back-end loaded” fees on mutual stocks that I didn’t understand or agree to.
Long story short, almost any time I ever tried to do things with the money in my account—MY MONEY—I was told I couldn’t, or I’d have to pay fines, fees, commissions, or penalties. Again, I could never understand why, or how, or how much, or when.
I should have just told them all “NO!” and stuffed it all into a savings account until someone could finally explain it all to me like I was a five-year-old, which they NEVER Did.
Today, I don’t do that anymore. There are a lot of things I could put money into but refuse to: cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, ETFs, NFTs, and other esoteric financial “products” that have confusing acronyms and may easily vaporize at some point because they aren’t even real.
I haven’t put a cent of my own money into these because I can’t understand them.
Part III: WISE
#1: Fail forward.
If you’re climbing a mountain, it doesn’t matter how many times you fall down: if you just keep getting back up and moving forward, you’re moving upward as well.
Just keep inching ahead, and if you stumble and fall, as long as you don’t fall off the mountain altogether, you will eventually make it to the top if you just keep slowly putting one foot in front of the other.
Remember: slow and steady wins the race. If you start a business, and it fails, use what you learned from that failure to start a new one, and don’t make the same mistakes this time.
That’s failing forward in business, and most successful founders have learned this after failing a few times in a row. Your failure isn’t complete until you stop moving.
#2: Do the thing, whatever it is, and ignore everybody else.
In 2010, I started writing a book on websites. I felt I had amassed enough knowledge about building websites and digital marketing that I wanted to write a book about it.
I started writing it. I got more than halfway done. Then, I stopped to look around and survey the landscape. HUGE mistake.
I noticed that there are almost no books on building websites or digital marketing. I also realized that every time I told someone I was writing a book on websites, they said something like: “Oh, wow, hmm… interesting,” as though it was a very weird idea.
Furthermore, I noticed that nobody else I knew, in any of my social circles had written a book about business, at all, in any format, ever.
This made me doubt myself. I didn’t know any authors. Why didn’t the other people I knew write books about the things they knew? I wasn’t sure, but that made me severely doubt myself in a huge way.
“Was something wrong with them?” I wondered.
I’d meet people who had bragged about “Working in X industry for 25 years,” or “Working in Y industry for 35 years,” claiming to be an expert, and I’d wonder: “If you’re such an expert, why don’t you put that expertise to work for you by writing a book about what you know?”
None of them did.
That was weird to me. And it made me doubt myself so much that I thought, “Well, maybe nobody cares. Maybe books are a dumb idea.”
Maybe I should have just become like all these other people I met who claimed to be experts on a topic yet settled for a dumb 8-5 job working for a corporation that could fire them at any time, calmly pulling in six figures and occasionally golfing on the weekends.
But no… these people were lame! What was wrong with them?
I had a detailed plan to build up a brand of knowledge by writing professionally, speaking in public, making podcasts, building up a huge library of video content, and churning out blog posts on a regular basis, creating a following so I could sell books and make lots of money.
But nobody else was doing this, and I felt a paralyzing fear that maybe I’d make a fool of myself if I tried it. “Maybe they know something I don’t? There must be a good reason nobody else is doing this.”
I shelved the whole thing and forgot about it.
Boy, oh boy, do I regret that.
If I had just finished my book on websites and marketing in 2010 when I started it, it would have been out for 14 years by now. I could have had a completely different career with speaking, writing, consulting, and coaching. I even started finding speaking opportunities but nobody seemed to care, so I just gave up.
But because I let myself fall into the trap of self-doubt, I’m just now picking up the pieces a decade and a half later, starting over with an idea I had when I was 25.
Now, if I could, I would tell myself—no, SHOUT at myself—the following:
Publish the book, Ron. Create the podcast. Record your own musical album. Make the video library. Write the journals. Go on the speaking tour. Invent the thing. File the patent.
Stop giving a crap that “Nobody you know has done that.” Stop telling yourself “If they haven’t done it, it must be because they’re smarter than me.”
No, Ron, they’re not smarter than you. Stop thinking they’re better than you just because they’re older. They’re not.
They don’t do cool things like that because they’re lame.
In fact, all that’s going to happen is that you’re going to put all these good ideas you have on ice for a decade or two. Then you’ll pull them off the shelf when you’re older, and realize “Wow, these were good ideas, I wish I’d done them sooner.”
So, that’s the advice I would give my 20-year-old self if I could. But I can’t. So, actually, this is advice that my 38-year-old self is giving my 38-year-old self.
Years ago, one of my previous employers had a sign printed on the wall that said, in big, giant letters:
“It is what it is.”
My wife hates it when I say that because it sounds so nihilistic. So we have a compromise. I don’t say, “It is what it is,” anymore. Instead, I say, “Here we are now.” It’s not nihilistic; it’s hopeful because it implies it’s not too late.
“Here we are now.”
It’s 2024. Hopefully, I can take my own advice so when I turn 40, and later, 50, I won’t wish I’d given myself advice about being healthy, wealthy, and wise.
I know I have my own best interest in mind. I hope I’m listening to myself now.