- be confident enough to start purging negative people and situations from your life.
- Early in your career, if you ever find yourself saying "I wish I could do X, but I work to much/have already used all my vacation time, etc" - without question you should to do those things and work less. Nobody ever looks back in time (especially in a situation when they are out of time) and says "gee I really wish I worked more".
- You are about to enter the age of drinking/bar/club/happy hour culture. Sure, have fun. But remember that there is almost never any return on this investment. All that time spent in the bar (and the time spent recovering from it) costs you time that could be spent pursuing your passions, hobbies, fitness, etc. Those things return in MULTIPLES later in life.
> be confident enough to start purging negative people
Except at 18 it's often your own raging insecurities that instantly label people as bad. More so, the main thing to tell my 18 year old self would be to just relax and open up around people who knee-jerk make you feel insecure - athletic, good looking people, really smart over-confident people, attractive women, etc. I put up all sorts of defenses when I was younger, and I paid for it, even now moving into my 30s. It's obvious now I could have easily befriended these people, or dated others, if I had just relaxed and kept my wits about me.
Want to second the drinking/bar/club/happy hour comment. It turns out that drinking is a surprisingly cheap hobby, but as mentioned it has little return.
At about 24 I consciously ended that period of my life. At 27 I have my scuba certs, pilot's license, a piano that I'm finally learning to play, a hang glider, a 4x4 which I used to take off road regularly before I got all the other stuff, etc. These have even led to several related career opportunities.
The only caveat is that these things do take money and time, and you will need strike the right balance with work. If you find you don't have enough time for something, cut your losses and focus more on what you do have time for. It's probably more important to you. I'm only just now selling the 4x4 ...
That calculus class the university thinks you tested out of is pretty important and you should take it anyway because EE classes will make a lot more sense if you already know Taylor series.
Also, take stats in college even though you don't have to.
Don't waste time with religion, drugs, or alcohol. They all consume too much time and lead to useless guilt.
Exercise more. Don't let yourself get fat.
Stick with the guitar or piano or whatever instrument you play.
Put off marriage as long as possible. At some point you will have an urge to reproduce. Until then, enjoy life. Once you have kids your priorities dramatically change and by the time you can get back to what _you_ want to do, you'll be too old and broken down to do it.
Don't get into debt. Better still, live below your means and save like crazy. When you do spend money, spend it on experiences (like travel) rather than things (like a car). The memories of your experiences will stay with you for the rest of your life, while the things you buy will get put aside as soon as you have kids.
Spend quality time with your parents. When you're older and they're dead you'll wish you had.
Be who you want to be. At 18 I thought I could do what I wanted and eventually morph into a person that had qualities I valued.
You won't magically turn into who you want to be. If you want to be a hard working person then start working hard. If you want to be an independent person stop depending on others. If you want to be a nice person then start being kind and empathetic towards others. You have to BE, right now and in the present, who you want to become.
So simple and self evident but I didn't figure it out until my mid-late 20s.
I would second the never start drinking and stop doing drugs advise but pretty sure 18 year old me would never listen to that advice.
Depending on where you live / the culture you grow up in, this may be easy or challenging. I had to make up for "lost time" after I arrived in America as a 24 year old from India (where, as you may or may not know, dating is(was?) a taboo.)
- The truth of the matter is that while you're good at programming and 'tech' in the abstract, you're missing the key production skills that actually make you employable. Spend less time on Lisp and more time on the kind of thing that people post job ads for. Employers will be more satisfied with a decent Django project than a great Diplomacy Adjudicator.
Web frameworks are a great idea anyway, you'll be happy you used one.
- Every project needs an interface, stop neglecting subjects like typography and really learn how to make something good.
- Read CLRS start to finish. This will make you more employable than most other ideas you pursue.
- There's a bus stop just up the street from you, it's not actually that hard to go places and the world isn't that dangerous. You should get out more, it'll be good for you.
- You're going to forget where you're at right now with this place in your life, this is a problem because such amnesia makes it hard to evaluate long term growth. You should write down what you're doing and keep records that your future self can use to evaluate his progress. Start logging your emotional state with the experience sampling method. As a heuristic if you wouldn't be in trouble losing the last six months of skill growth you have major problems.
- Stop focusing on being rich by making lots of money at a job and focus on being rich by investment and steady growth. There are people who make 300k a year in Silicon Valley that live paycheck to paycheck and people who make 90k a year but live like they make 40k while investing the rest. You would much rather be the latter than the former.
Since all the obvious things have been said, how about this.
All the awesome things you were promised that adulthood would be? Adulthood is only like that between 18 and 30 (or even only at university).
Staying up as long as you want to, waking up when you want to, drinking, partying, flirting, getting laid (with different partners), being at peak physical health without doing much for it, having time to study something deeply, taking a stab at changing the world and having the illusion that you will live to see your utopia, travelling the world, disconnect from everything, or go right into the middle of the action... That life that you couldn't wait to grow up into is over quicker than you think.
I don't want to sound too depressing. Life after 30 has it's own benefits. You finally really feel like an adult, and can say fuck it, I'm buying that grill, that car, because I earn enough and it's my decision now. I'm participating in grown-up politics and business without feeling like a pretender. And having a family is incredibly awesome and rewarding.
But you're never going spontaneously get wasted with your friends on a Wednesday night tequila party again. It has its good and bad sides...
-Your metabolism is going to slow down, so stop eating so much
-Don't smoke, it negatively affects your desire to workout (you will get fat)
-Don't waste (too much) time at the bar
-You're going to drift apart from your friends
-Cultivate experiences that you can talk about (ie. not chess)
-Understand cities, live somewhere walkable
-Understand money. (ie. Tax on labor vs tax on capital gains.)
- the industry connections that your college has matters as much or more than the curriculum.
- live while you're young. All of the talk about saving while you're young and let compounding work for you is mathematically true, but you'll probably make enough more later on so it won't matter. Once you have kids, mortgage, and responsibilities you'll regret not spending your youth having fun.
- on the other hand live below your means. Don't obligate yourself to high fixed costs - like an expensive car, house, apartment. Have enough disposable income to gain experiences.
I enjoyed my younger, single years and now that I'm older and settled, I don't go through life questioning what would have happened if I took more risks.
- read "starting strength" and get a weightlifting routine
- meditate everyday
- dont be normal, be you
- dont study what everybody is studying, study what you really like doing
- dont believe in fairness, but karma may be true
- read "the gervais principle" before stepping into a cubicle
- if you force yourself to never be an employee, in the long run you will make it on your own, just follow that rule
- learn about investing, yes you may lose money, but is not that hard to make money on it, and it turns out the way the world works is that you can be very rich without ever producing anything or working just sitting in a good investment
Don't be afraid of hard work - when you're overburdened, work hard and get it done. It will payoff later, you'll learn how to do the same amount of work in less time.
Don't stay in one place too long, changing jobs every 1-2 years worked out pretty well for you!
Trust your gut feeling about people. If someone feels shady, they probably are. You got burned a few times not trusting your gut.
Call and hang out with your friends and family more. The days when people will reach out to you first will start to end and all the days will start to feel the same.
Keep programming and don't be afraid of corporate I.T. You don't have to be a musician or make a huge impact on the world but if you keep programming you'll be happy.
That was back in 1994. Back then I felt pulled in multiple directions because I was in a band, hanging out with hippies, writing music, but I also loved hacking and all things computer related. I was raised to believe we all must do our best to have the maximum positive impact on the world, and anything less would be selling yourself short.
I also wanted to be a programmer, maybe eventually a game developer, but back then the only programming jobs required a CS degree. I went through some books and wrote a few apps, but it all seemed out of reach back then.
I eventually settled on I.T. but stayed in the SMB space due to bad experiences in the corporate world early on. I hit rock bottom after failing to run my own business during the late 00's. I was ready for a career change when I stumbled on an enterprise I.T. gig. About 2 years ago I discovered DevOps and now I'm a full time developer focused on simplifying, automating, and abstracting complex infrastructure tasks. It's so fun! Python, HTML, and JS all day!
So yeah, I should have stuck with programming, I had no idea how fun it would be. Maybe back then I didn't have the focus or perspective to really engineer complex projects. I was also intimidated by all the maths.
Develop relationships with your college professors.
Going to office hours isn't just for suck-ups and people who can't keep up with the work. And professors aren't strange incomprehensible creatures from another plane - they're just human beings.
This will pay off when you need a thesis advisor, need references for entry-level jobs, apply to grad school, etc. Plus, yanno, new friends. Human relationships are kind of the point of being human.
[+] [-] OhHeyItsE|8 years ago|reply
- Early in your career, if you ever find yourself saying "I wish I could do X, but I work to much/have already used all my vacation time, etc" - without question you should to do those things and work less. Nobody ever looks back in time (especially in a situation when they are out of time) and says "gee I really wish I worked more".
- You are about to enter the age of drinking/bar/club/happy hour culture. Sure, have fun. But remember that there is almost never any return on this investment. All that time spent in the bar (and the time spent recovering from it) costs you time that could be spent pursuing your passions, hobbies, fitness, etc. Those things return in MULTIPLES later in life.
[+] [-] orthoganol|8 years ago|reply
Except at 18 it's often your own raging insecurities that instantly label people as bad. More so, the main thing to tell my 18 year old self would be to just relax and open up around people who knee-jerk make you feel insecure - athletic, good looking people, really smart over-confident people, attractive women, etc. I put up all sorts of defenses when I was younger, and I paid for it, even now moving into my 30s. It's obvious now I could have easily befriended these people, or dated others, if I had just relaxed and kept my wits about me.
[+] [-] 0xfaded|8 years ago|reply
At about 24 I consciously ended that period of my life. At 27 I have my scuba certs, pilot's license, a piano that I'm finally learning to play, a hang glider, a 4x4 which I used to take off road regularly before I got all the other stuff, etc. These have even led to several related career opportunities.
The only caveat is that these things do take money and time, and you will need strike the right balance with work. If you find you don't have enough time for something, cut your losses and focus more on what you do have time for. It's probably more important to you. I'm only just now selling the 4x4 ...
[+] [-] sevensor|8 years ago|reply
Tell your loved ones that you love them.
Exercise classes can be really fun.
That calculus class the university thinks you tested out of is pretty important and you should take it anyway because EE classes will make a lot more sense if you already know Taylor series.
Also, take stats in college even though you don't have to.
[+] [-] segmondy|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justboxing|8 years ago|reply
This. Reminds me of the quote from the movie "Rounders". At the very end.
"People insists on calling it Luck."
[+] [-] Binky_Bob|8 years ago|reply
Exercise more. Don't let yourself get fat.
Stick with the guitar or piano or whatever instrument you play.
Put off marriage as long as possible. At some point you will have an urge to reproduce. Until then, enjoy life. Once you have kids your priorities dramatically change and by the time you can get back to what _you_ want to do, you'll be too old and broken down to do it.
Don't get into debt. Better still, live below your means and save like crazy. When you do spend money, spend it on experiences (like travel) rather than things (like a car). The memories of your experiences will stay with you for the rest of your life, while the things you buy will get put aside as soon as you have kids.
Spend quality time with your parents. When you're older and they're dead you'll wish you had.
Keep a journal.
[+] [-] bensonn|8 years ago|reply
You won't magically turn into who you want to be. If you want to be a hard working person then start working hard. If you want to be an independent person stop depending on others. If you want to be a nice person then start being kind and empathetic towards others. You have to BE, right now and in the present, who you want to become.
So simple and self evident but I didn't figure it out until my mid-late 20s.
I would second the never start drinking and stop doing drugs advise but pretty sure 18 year old me would never listen to that advice.
[+] [-] moarrgan|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justboxing|8 years ago|reply
Depending on where you live / the culture you grow up in, this may be easy or challenging. I had to make up for "lost time" after I arrived in America as a 24 year old from India (where, as you may or may not know, dating is(was?) a taboo.)
Youth is fleeting.
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] skylark|8 years ago|reply
In the real world nobody cares that I was a nearly straight A student, and my grades haven't helped me move forward in my career in the slightest.
I should have taken more time to cultivate my friendships and get out more.
[+] [-] unimpressive|8 years ago|reply
Web frameworks are a great idea anyway, you'll be happy you used one.
- Every project needs an interface, stop neglecting subjects like typography and really learn how to make something good.
- Read CLRS start to finish. This will make you more employable than most other ideas you pursue.
- There's a bus stop just up the street from you, it's not actually that hard to go places and the world isn't that dangerous. You should get out more, it'll be good for you.
- You're going to forget where you're at right now with this place in your life, this is a problem because such amnesia makes it hard to evaluate long term growth. You should write down what you're doing and keep records that your future self can use to evaluate his progress. Start logging your emotional state with the experience sampling method. As a heuristic if you wouldn't be in trouble losing the last six months of skill growth you have major problems.
- Stop focusing on being rich by making lots of money at a job and focus on being rich by investment and steady growth. There are people who make 300k a year in Silicon Valley that live paycheck to paycheck and people who make 90k a year but live like they make 40k while investing the rest. You would much rather be the latter than the former.
[+] [-] captainmuon|8 years ago|reply
All the awesome things you were promised that adulthood would be? Adulthood is only like that between 18 and 30 (or even only at university).
Staying up as long as you want to, waking up when you want to, drinking, partying, flirting, getting laid (with different partners), being at peak physical health without doing much for it, having time to study something deeply, taking a stab at changing the world and having the illusion that you will live to see your utopia, travelling the world, disconnect from everything, or go right into the middle of the action... That life that you couldn't wait to grow up into is over quicker than you think.
I don't want to sound too depressing. Life after 30 has it's own benefits. You finally really feel like an adult, and can say fuck it, I'm buying that grill, that car, because I earn enough and it's my decision now. I'm participating in grown-up politics and business without feeling like a pretender. And having a family is incredibly awesome and rewarding.
But you're never going spontaneously get wasted with your friends on a Wednesday night tequila party again. It has its good and bad sides...
[+] [-] 0x4f3759df|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LarryPage|8 years ago|reply
Also, STOP DOING DRUGS.
[+] [-] abdulmalik|8 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3BMkHg9_Pg
[+] [-] Jaruzel|8 years ago|reply
2. DEFINITELY DON'T HAVE A CHILD WITH HER.[1]
---
[1] I love my daughter to the end of the universe and back, but my ex-wife...? Um, not so much.
[+] [-] NOSHSHNACKERS|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] chatnati|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] AnimalMuppet|8 years ago|reply
The right girl is out there. She's very much worth the wait. Be patient.
[+] [-] chad_strategic|8 years ago|reply
very very very true.
[+] [-] scarface74|8 years ago|reply
- live while you're young. All of the talk about saving while you're young and let compounding work for you is mathematically true, but you'll probably make enough more later on so it won't matter. Once you have kids, mortgage, and responsibilities you'll regret not spending your youth having fun.
- on the other hand live below your means. Don't obligate yourself to high fixed costs - like an expensive car, house, apartment. Have enough disposable income to gain experiences.
I enjoyed my younger, single years and now that I'm older and settled, I don't go through life questioning what would have happened if I took more risks.
[+] [-] jcslzr|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jbob2000|8 years ago|reply
Don't stay in one place too long, changing jobs every 1-2 years worked out pretty well for you!
Trust your gut feeling about people. If someone feels shady, they probably are. You got burned a few times not trusting your gut.
Call and hang out with your friends and family more. The days when people will reach out to you first will start to end and all the days will start to feel the same.
[+] [-] ZanrielJames|8 years ago|reply
That was back in 1994. Back then I felt pulled in multiple directions because I was in a band, hanging out with hippies, writing music, but I also loved hacking and all things computer related. I was raised to believe we all must do our best to have the maximum positive impact on the world, and anything less would be selling yourself short.
I also wanted to be a programmer, maybe eventually a game developer, but back then the only programming jobs required a CS degree. I went through some books and wrote a few apps, but it all seemed out of reach back then.
I eventually settled on I.T. but stayed in the SMB space due to bad experiences in the corporate world early on. I hit rock bottom after failing to run my own business during the late 00's. I was ready for a career change when I stumbled on an enterprise I.T. gig. About 2 years ago I discovered DevOps and now I'm a full time developer focused on simplifying, automating, and abstracting complex infrastructure tasks. It's so fun! Python, HTML, and JS all day!
So yeah, I should have stuck with programming, I had no idea how fun it would be. Maybe back then I didn't have the focus or perspective to really engineer complex projects. I was also intimidated by all the maths.
[+] [-] twobyfour|8 years ago|reply
Going to office hours isn't just for suck-ups and people who can't keep up with the work. And professors aren't strange incomprehensible creatures from another plane - they're just human beings.
This will pay off when you need a thesis advisor, need references for entry-level jobs, apply to grad school, etc. Plus, yanno, new friends. Human relationships are kind of the point of being human.
[+] [-] cafard|8 years ago|reply
The marginal cost of an additional class in college is entirely in time (see above).
Study languages more. Do not stop with the minimum requirements for your degree, continue on to at least sound reading proficiency.
Take more math classes.
That VDT with a blinking cursor? Learn something about it. Computers are more usable when you can get away from punch cards.
[+] [-] mandude|8 years ago|reply