The willingness to be disliked is a superpower.
If you don’t care to be liked, they can’t touch you.
In the adult world, you will quickly discover that to do anything notable or important, you must be willing to be different and that means you must be willing to be disliked.
(youtube)
If you develop the willingness to be disliked, you will inevitably have the courage to do the hard things that most people are not willing to do.
This will then imbue your life with a sense of meaning and importance.
It will also likely lead to success that others will be too intimidated to go after.
But I would go even further than this.
I would argue that until you're comfortable with the disapproval of others, you are not truly a free individual yourself.
You must develop the ability to be disliked in order to free yourself from the prison of other people's opinions.
Learn to do what's right even if others might think it's wrong.
Learn to tolerate criticism and negative feedback because that's what will make you better.
Learn to be laughed at, hated on and trolled, because if you can become comfortable with the hate, you'll be fucking unstoppable.
You can’t fundamentally change yourself or others,
so stop trying.
We can’t fix people, We can only love them for who they are.
When you get older, while you realize that some things can change, there are a lot to our personalities and identities and cultures that really can't be changed.
People who have trauma in their history will never not have trauma in their history.
People who struggle with addiction will never not struggle with addiction.
People who are highly emotional or unemotional will never not be highly emotional or unemotional.
As you get older, you realize that improving your life is less about completely changing yourself and more about adapting and becoming comfortable with who you already are.
This is especially true in our relationships.
When we're young, we naively believe that we can fix people and we waste a lot of time in tears trying to do so.
But again, a healthy relationship is not about changing someone.
It's about accepting and loving them for who they already are.
If you’re not embarrassing yourself regularly, you are not trying hard enough.
If everything seems under control, you’re not going fast enough.
Your 20s is the optimal time to take life's biggest risks.
You have the most to gain and the least to lose.
You likely have little to no work experience, no kids, no house, or car payments, no professional reputation to protect.
So the cost of failure is pretty low.
Conversely, the benefit of success is extremely high.
Successful moonshots in your 20s will continue to pay off well throughout the rest of your life.
Yet, people in their 20s avoid taking risks for the dumbest possible reason.
They don't want to embarrass themselves in front of others.
They worry what their friends or coworkers will think, not realizing that most of those friends and coworkers will be dead to them in a few years anywhere.
They worry what their parents and family will think when the whole point of being a fucking adult is being able to decide what's best for yourself.
Look, this is the time to embarrass yourself.
This is the time to pack up the car and move across the country on a whim.
It's the time to sell everything and go spend six months in Asia, to chase that crazy business idea that everyone thinks is insane.
To stay up all night fucking around with AI.
It's the time to walk across the room and ask that attractive stranger out on a date.
It's the time to create a dumb YouTube channel about your passion for clowns or something like that.
Jeff Bezos Regret Minimization
Most relationships are supposed to end, and that’s okay.
When you're young, nothing feels more important than your friendships and romantic relationships.
So it's easy to overestimate how significant these relationships will be for the rest of your life.
You aren't old enough yet to realize that most relationships end.
Many are forgotten, and very, very few actually make a lasting impact.
Most relationships in life exist for a specific reason.
This reason can be very deep and profound, like the girlfriend that taught you how to love or the friend who taught you to respect yourself.
But the reason can also be entirely superficial.
Like that old after-work drinking buddy or that girl in college who used to let you copy her notes from the classes you slept through.
Most of these reasons come and go.
And therefore, most of your relationships in life will also come and go.
Very few will end up lasting forever, and that's perfectly fine.
In fact, that's actually healthy and normal.
But most young people resist this.
They hang on to bad relationships for too long and they overly rely on good relationships too much.
They procrastinate putting themselves first because they overestimate the length and importance that other people are gonna have in their lives.
Yes, you will have some lifelong relationships and they will matter a lot.
But they will be few and far between, and you don't necessarily get to choose them.
Put simply, you can't force a good relationship and you don't want to force a bad relationship.
So the best strategy is to simply don't force anything.
Your dreams are overrated.
Excitement helps you start. Discipline helps you finish.
Watch any award ceremony and you're likely to be subjected with a bunch of deliriously happy people telling you to never give up on your dreams.
Think about this: for every person on stage telling you to follow your dreams, there are tens of thousands of people who had the same dream worked just as hard and didn't win a fucking Oscar.
Don't get me wrong, dreams are great.
They help us get out of bed in the morning.
They keep us excited and focused from week to week, but we tend to overestimate the power of our dreams.
We have this big, bold vision of how we want our life to be, and we tacitly assume that if we somehow achieve that vision, then we're gonna live happily ever after.
But as you get older, one of two things happens.
Either one, you achieve the dream and despite the initial joy, it doesn't make you nearly as happy as you thought it would.
Or two, you don't achieve the dream and you spend the rest of your life being a fucking bitter asshole about it.
Either way, the dream only helps you early in the process and it likely hurts you late in the process.
So my recommendation, hold on to your dreams lightly.
Dreams are great.
Pursue them, follow them, care about them, tell everybody about 'em, but never forget what they are.
They are just imagined endpoints in your head.
You invented them so you can uninvent them at any time if necessary, and it probably will be necessary.
The only way to feel better about yourself is to do things worth feeling good about.
When we feel bad about ourselves, our natural inclination is to believe that some external thing will make us feel good.
If I just had a nicer car, I'd feel okay we say it. Or if I wasn't single, then I'd finally be happy. Or if I had a 100,000 likes on a YouTube video, my parents would finally be proud of me.
“They ask you how you are and you just have to say that you're fine when you're not really.”
This assumption puts us on a treadmill of chasing something, achieving it, realizing it doesn't change anything and then choosing another thing to chase after.
The truth is, nothing will make you feel better about yourself other than the meaning behind your actions accomplished or not.
The only way to feel good long-term is to do good things and these good things can exist on multiple levels.
They're the daily good things, like making your bed, going to the gym, talking to your partner.
And they're the long-term good things, like building a career, or raising a family, building an app that solves starvation in Africa, or growing out long, luscious hair.
The point is, stop looking for happiness in the things you have. And instead look for them in the things you do. Then get to work doing them.
If you're lucky by your 30s, you'll have something remarkable to show for it.