Seven Things To Do While You’re Still in Your Twenties

My friend Bob, who is about ten years older than I am, told me recently that, at least in our culture, your twenties are about getting educated, your thirties are about accumulating resources (becoming financially sustainable), your forties are about building (families, houses, careers, ministries, impact) and your fifties are about enjoying what you’ve built (and perhaps pressuring your kids to get married and make babies)…

He did not intend this as advice. He was only making an observation.

But I tend to think it’s a pretty good path.

It takes time to build influence, to establish connections, and to build confidence in others at your abilities. Delay the process and, well, you are in what psychologists call “suspended adolescence.”

Most of my friends who are in their twenties are seriously ambitious and enormously accomplished.

Honestly, it’s hard for me to see twenty-somethings as kids

(unless we start talking about music, in which they trade in bands like children with baseball cards, hardly taking time to actually listen to the music! Call me an agist. I know I am an agist) but apparently the phenomenon is real. 20-somethings these days are taking longer an longer to grow up.

Photo Credit: erin leigh mcconnell, Creative Commons

So if you’re in your early twenties and it’s just after noon and you’re crawling out of the bed you grew up sleeping in, and surfing internet sights with a laptop on your belly, here’s some tips:

1. Lose your friends.

If your friends aren’t ambitious, if they don’t have clear plans, you probably won’t either. This doesn’t mean to reject them, but it does mean if your friends want to lay around doing nothing all day, get some new friends. The single greatest influence playing on you is your friends. You will become like the people you hang around.

2. Read books.

Try to read a book a week for the next six weeks. This alone will stimulate your mind and you’ll start being bored with being bored. You’ll want to explore ideas. Your conversations with friends will become boring. You’ll wonder how many more conversations you can have about what happened the last time you guys were drunk.

3. Write down your goals for the next five years, one year, one month and one week.

Do this now. If you don’t know what you want, that’s a very serious problem, so just write down anything and start moving. A body in motion stays in motion. It doesn’t matter if you change your mind later. You can’t change your mind about what you want until you start moving forward.

4. Ask your parents for criticism.

Criticism from people who love you is a gift and a blessing. It’s going to be hard to take, and the first thing you are going to want to do is criticize them back, but don’t do it. Just soak it in, then act on whatever they say. Nobody is perfect, but people who don’t accept criticism end up worse off in the end.

5. Accept hardship.

Hardship is part of every life, and God intends it to purify you and prepare you. If you reject hardship, you reject life.

6. Cut the cynicism:

Leaders don’t roll their eyes, children do. Is the Dave Matthews band so yesterday? Great. You and the kids in the high school cafeteria can talk about it all day. People work very hard to do what they do, and when you roll your eyes, you’re being insulting.

Children are insulting, adults appreciate craftsmanship over fashion.

That said, the last Dave Matthew’s record really wasn’t that bad.

7. Accomplish something.

Nothing builds true confidence like success. Want to be a filmmaker? Make a short film and enter it into a contest. Want to write? Write an essay and submit it to a journal. Pick something and practice and work until you’re good at it. You can only change direction if you are in motion.

And of course there are a million more. But this should get the ball rolling, or at least get you out of bed.

Seven Things To Do While You’re Still in Your Twenties is a post from: Storyline Blog