Editor’s note: This article was first published in November 2016. The author says he is 37, which was his age when he wrote it in 2016.
In our 20s we are full of energy and vitality, and as a rule that is when our health is at its best. At that age the whole future lies ahead of you, but in most cases you have no idea where you want to go.
Your 20s are supposedly when you can enjoy yourself most, but the truth is that at that age your idea of enjoyment is probably a bit distorted.
Even so, we believe that our 20s are the best time of our lives, or at least that they should be. But that idea may not be entirely right.
I’m 37. I enjoyed my 20s, but it is in my 30s that I have really been enjoying life consciously. I have friends in their 40s who say that now is when they are enjoying life far more than in their 20s and 30s. And some people say their 50s are turning out to be the best years of their lives.
We always say that your 20s are the ideal age to take risks and make mistakes, because you can fix the mistake and you have plenty of time ahead of you to recover from those failures.
A divorced friend once told me: “At 20 you cheat on a girl, she finds out, she leaves you, and nothing happens. Tomorrow you meet someone else. At 40 you cheat on your wife, she finds out and leaves you, and you lose your house, you can’t be with your kids, and on top of that it’s hard to meet another woman for a serious relationship.” (Yes, I know, my dear friend’s values leave a lot to be desired.)
If we apply this to taking risks in business or in your career, at 20 you can invest in a business, fail and recover. At 40, that failure could leave you unable to get back on your feet.
It is not true that if you don’t have a clear future by the end of your 20s, everything goes wrong. At 30 I changed my life radically in every sense. In fact, it was at 30 that I started working professionally on things that had never crossed my mind before.
Your 20s are the ideal age to acquire all kinds of knowledge and skills. It is the ideal age to start shaping our future, not to indulge in the excesses that seem to be what so many people in their twenties are after these days.
The point is not to make mistakes that will follow you for the rest of your life.
Warren Buffett once said: “You only have to do a very few things right in your life so long as you don’t do too many things wrong.”
That applies both to life in general and to money. I know of a girl who got pregnant at 22 by the least suitable guy. She decided to have the baby and marry him.
She entered a possessive, abusive marriage that lasted ten years. Then she decided to leave him, but she will carry that man with her for the rest of her life because he is her child’s father. With the decision she made at 22, she cut short her studies, her professional future and her self-esteem. Fortunately, she has reacted and is doing very well, although she says she threw ten years of her life away. She will never get that time back.
I always insist that your 20s are not the age to take on a mortgage for a home, because that mortgage will wipe out your ability to save. That said, nowadays there could be exceptions, since some mortgages are being granted with payments lower than rent. If, in addition, the payment is no more than 30 or 40 percent of your income, it might not be a bad idea. Even so, if you understand the power of compound interest in finance, you will know that if you manage your money well at that age, financial freedom will be relatively easy to reach.
You don’t notice a bad habit until you try to give it up. That’s when you realise you have really messed up. As another well-known saying goes, the chains of bad habits go unnoticed until you try to break them; only then do you see how thick they are and that they can’t be cut so easily.
While your 20s are an ideal age to experiment, I think many of the habits our young people are picking up can’t be called experimentation, but addiction. And some addictions acquired in your 20s follow you past 30 and 40.
In reality, your 20s are a constant balancing act in which it is easy to fall, and, with a good philosophy, easy to get back on your feet on that precarious path full of uncertainty.
As we get older, we gain more experience of life and learn very valuable lessons that we wish we had known much earlier. That is why someone in their twenties who is able to listen to and put into practice much of the advice they will receive from older people could really catapult themselves towards success in every sense, and avoid many minor mistakes and some fatal ones.
Success and failure are not experiences a person stumbles upon overnight. It is all the small decisions you make along the way that cause people to succeed or fail. One thing is clear: as Lou Holtz used to say, without self-discipline success is impossible. Without setting goals and objectives, success is impossible. It is setting goals that forces us to plan a strategy to achieve them. If you have no plan for reaching your goals, what you have planned and guaranteed is failure. So you need somewhere to get to (a goal or objective), a strategy with very concrete steps to reach that goal, and constant discipline. Having these three simple things doesn’t guarantee success (at least not the first time), but if you are missing any of these three ingredients, failure is assured.
Why do people think their 20s are the best years of their lives?
The truth is that many people stop living and stop having anything to strive for from the age of 30. Some even stop living in their mid-20s.
Some people believe the best of life has already happened to them, when the right philosophy is that the best is always yet to come. Many people finish a university degree they don’t particularly like (but they had to study something, given the state of the job market), and then end up in a job that, well… pays a salary. They work five or six days a week waiting for their day off. They work all year, excitedly planning what they will do during their month of summer holidays.
As soon as they land the job they start buying things they don’t need and save almost nothing, because after all, you only live once.
Some people get married because that is what you are supposed to do once you are past 30. In many cases, the sad reality is that the passion is missing and they do it because they would rather be with someone than be alone. There are also those who marry for the right reasons.
House, kids, loan repayments, insurance, bills, and before you know it you have built a lifestyle you can no longer get out of. What’s more, you don’t even think about getting out of it, because you are too busy working.
You may not be happy in your job, but you need it to pay your debts. You may not be happy in your marriage, but where are you going to go at this stage, with children involved? You may want to quit your job to build your own project, but you have a family and repayments, so you can’t take that risk, especially since your savings are non-existent or scarce.
Once we have settled into this comfort zone, all we can do is pray that nothing unexpected turns our life upside down and breaks our “apparent harmony”.
That is why people love their 20s: because you think you have no responsibilities, that life is there to be enjoyed, and that your 20s will never come back. But your 30s don’t have to be like the picture we’ve just painted, and neither do your 40s.
You can do what you love in your 30s and 40s, you can live outside the monotony, you can give free rein to your projects, and you can take risks. You can keep having goals in life, new objectives, new challenges, and you can certainly feel much more alive than you did at 20, because if you have done your homework, at least now, with experience, you know what it means to feel alive.
What’s more, in your 30s and 40s, and even in your 50s and 60s, you can keep learning and experimenting.
The truth is that by being responsible in our 20s, working hard, acquiring knowledge and skills, and sacrificing some of those years, we could gain an advantage over everyone else that would help us in our 30s, 40s, 50s and beyond. But any time and any age is perfect for turning your life around completely.
So which are the best years of our lives? Ultimately, every year in which you choose to be happy.
See also: 24 things to do in your 20s and 30s that will improve your life in your 40s and 50s
Featured image: R4vi, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Flickr.
