Today is my 26th birthday (www.venmo.com/flickman — woah how’d that get there).
And I’ve noticed that adult birthdays have a bad reputation.
Everyone kinda hates them.
After 23, the agreed-upon mentality is that birthdays are just a reminder of how old and washed-up we are.
This is not a very fun way to think about birthdays and so I’m giving adult birthdays a rebrand.
The Adult Birthday Rebrand
You can choose what your birthday means to you.
And if you choose “Welp, this sucks I’m another year older,” then that will become your reality.
I’ve chosen a different route and I’m inviting you to do the same.
The rebrand makes birthdays fun and meaningful regardless of age.
Here’s how it goes down. Each birthday I try to do 3 things:
Some sort of challenge (something I haven’t done before) — It can be physical, mental, emotional, whatever you want, just something that is genuinely challenging to you — the reason behind this is that you feel so good about yourself after you complete something you’ve never done before. What better way to kick off the year than a big W?
Get your people involved — This is a must. Getting my friends & family involved is a great way to make your birthday shine — You can either invite them to be part of the challenge or you can organize something later with them
Yearly reflection — I’ve answered the same reflection questions on my birthday for several years now. I’ve also written a blog about what I learned in the past year (that is what you are reading now). Doing this is a great way to really understand how far you came and where you fell short. This allows you to feel like you are directing your life, not just letting life happen to you (if you want my journal prompts HMU and I’ll send them to you).
Doing these 3 things usually results in a pretty awesome day or weekend. And I think that’s how birthdays should be: awesome.
But enough about birthdays, it’s time for my annual list of life lessons. So without further ado, here’s what I learned last year.
26 Life Lessons
Have a vision that excites you. Think of the last time you were excited about something. Whether it was a trip, a date, a project, an assignment, whatever it was. It probably didn’t take much effort to take action towards that thing. When we are excited about the vision of the future it becomes easier to act.
Prove it to yourself. I used to do a lot of weird shit to prove to myself that I could turn my thoughts into reality. For instance, when I was living near the beach in San Diego, some mornings I would wake up and think to myself “If I really wanted to, I could be in the ocean 30 seconds from now” and then I would get up out of bed, run to the water and jump in. And as I was in the water I’d think “Wow, you ran really turn thoughts into reality.” Sounds stupid. But I did this to train my brain to believe that I could turn thoughts into reality. If I could do it on a small level, I could also do it on a larger level. Everything you’ve ever done as started out as a measly little thought. Nurture the thoughts you want, get rid of the ones you don’t.
Media breaks. Taking media breaks (including social media, newsletters, podcasts, YouTube, TV, etc.) has been really helpful for me to realign with my own vision for my life. It can be really hard to hear your own voice when you are constantly drowning it out with
Joe Rogan’sother people’s voices and opinions.End date. When you know that something is coming to an end it makes you grateful for every second you’ve got left. When I knew I only had a couple of months left in San Diego, I really was way more observant and grateful for every little moment.
Don’t lose the passion. Always have a passion project going, something you are working on because it is fun & exciting. If you can also make this your career, more power to you, but be wary, sometimes when you put commercial pressure on your passion project it can taint it. Not always though.
Extreme Accountability. This one is easy to preach, but way harder in practice. The idea is to adopt the mindset that all of the problems in your life are your fault as they are a direct result of your actions. Adopting this mindset gives you some sense of control over your life. If you blame the world for your problems, then you must wait for the world to act differently in order for those problems to go away. If you blame yourself for your problems, then all you have to do is change your own actions to fix them. It is a lot easier to change your own actions than it is to wait for the world to change. I’m not saying that everything actually is your fault (for instance, if you get robbed at a 7/11, is that your fault? Not really) But the idea is that if you can default to thinking “What could I have done differently to have prevented that?” vs. “Wow I just have the worst luck, the world hates me.” You end up in a way more productive headspace and can actually make some progress.
Long-term thinking. If you aren’t doing something that you’d want to be doing for the next 5-10 years it will be hard to invest time & resources into it. Try to find people, cities, habits, projects, and values that you can hold onto for a lifetime.
It’s not about the outcome, it’s about who you have to become to achieve that outcome. The joy you feel from receiving the reward at the end is always fleeting. The lasting fulfillment comes from becoming a more capable version of yourself. You use goals as a way to force yourself to grow, but the goals themselves are relatively meaningless. People don’t value winning championships because they get a trophy, they value them because they understand the challenges they had to overcome to win that championship.
Tell the world how to treat you. The world doesn’t really know how to treat you until you tell it how. For instance, if you want to be seen as a painter, but you introduce yourself as a school teacher (your day job), people will see you and treat you as a school teacher. We set up boundaries with reality with our words and our actions. If you tell the world you are a painter and spend your days painting, the world will see you as a painter. I must note that there is a fine line here between speaking something into existence and just being psychotic. In my opinion, the difference lies in the action you are taking towards making the thing come true. If you are just saying it but not taking steps towards it, you are living in a fantasy world. If you are saying it but taking action towards it, you are on your way. For instance, when I wanted to start making money with my camera I would introduce myself as a freelance videographer (even though nobody had ever paid me for my work). Soon enough, I bumped into some people who needed video work and so when I told them I was a videographer, they were interested. Had I told them I was a student, they never would have hired me.
American food is crap for the most part. I’ve started reading this book called Deep Nutrition which is my first experience in really learning about the food that I’m putting into my body. My advice to you? Don’t start reading about this stuff unless you are ready to make a change, because after you read it you’ll realize how shitty most of the stuff we eat is. You will then be forced to either knowingly fill your body with crap or start eating different foods. Don’t get me wrong, I still eat crap, but I’m working on weaning off of it.
All cliches are true (or have a kernel of truth). There have been times when I thought I had found a great life lesson and I would go to put my learnings into words and all that would come out is some cliche I had heard a million times: “Trust the process.” “You get out of something what you put into it.” The reason these cliches have stood the test of time is because they take insightful learnings and put them into simple one-liners. We tend to get desensitized to them because we’ve heard them so many times, which is a shame because they typically carry some true wisdom with them.
The value of coaching. I grew up playing sports. I loved having somebody outside of myself that could tell me what I was doing wrong. They could see things I couldn’t. Once you get into the real world, the infrastructure for mentorship becomes way less formalized. You have to seek out your own coaches and mentors. I’ve recently started seeking mentors again and have found that finding somebody who is exactly where you want to be and figuring out how to learn under them is a great strategy. Whether it be by working for them, paying them to be a coach, or just getting into their world in some other way.
Choose how to find meaning in things. Doing meaningless tasks sucks. It feels very empty and pointless. To avoid this feeling, you can choose to make the task meaningful. Here’s an example: the easiest way I’ve found to make anything meaningful is to try to do your very best at it. The meaning you can pull away from that task is that you are training yourself for excellence. Now you aren’t just washing the dishes, but rather getting a rep in at doing excellent work, thus priming you for doing more excellent work down the road.
I know more about the Kardashian family than I do about my own family. I’ve come to realize that I don’t know much about my own family lineage relative to how much I know about random TV show characters or the families in different movies. Which is wild, because there are likely a lot of answers in my family history that would help me understand myself better.
Everything is made up. All the rules, all the expectations, everything. It’s all just made up. I’m not saying they aren’t real, but rather saying that they were all made up by other people who aren’t necessarily any smarter or more capable than you and me. Don’t get me wrong, there are still rules. And there are still consequences to your actions. But there is some much room to just make things up in your daily life. Sometimes I like to just do little weird things to help remind me that everything is made up. For instance, I’ll say hello to every single person I walk by on the street, or ask for 10% off at a coffee shop for no reason. The more you do these little things, the more you realize you can do things that seem “outside of the norm” and watch how the world reacts. You can poke life and see what happens. And you can do it as much as you want. You can keep taking shots. Keep getting reps in. Until something works.
A new definition of learning. Alex Hormozi gave the simplest definition of what it means to learn something. In short, “Same condition, new behavior.” The idea is that you have only really learned something if you are presented with the same conditions as you’ve seen before but you choose a new behavior. Thus, if you want to learn or progress in some area of your life, all you must do is think about the behaviors you normally do, and don’t do those anymore! Do something else. In order to know which new behaviors to do you need to read something new or find a new perspective or listen to somebody new.
You don’t have to figure out that many things on your own. A lot of people have lived before us and they had similar issues. In fact, somebody has had the exact problem you are going through right now. And they have written the answer in a book, blog, article, or TikTok. So if you are struggling with a problem, you don’t need to figure out the answer on your own. Somebody else already solved it. Imagine if our generation had to figure out how to make electricity so we could light our houses. We’d be f*cked! Luckily, somebody else already figured that out, so we can just use their solution.
People just want to be seen. I’ve had a number of experiences this year where I’ve listened to somebody for literally a few minutes and they have been over the moon with gratitude. It has shown me that people really just want to be heard and seen. You can make people feel seen by just giving them a couple of minutes of your undivided attention. Pretty wild.
The words you choose can make or break you. Try to be aware of the words you use to speak about yourself. It may seem insignificant, but the way you talk about yourself can show you how you really feel about yourself. You might be able to see your limiting beliefs shining through if you are careful enough.
A million ways to win. You can find two successful people who have “made it” that preach opposite approaches. This can be confusing as you try to figure out what to do. What we can learn from this is that there are a million ways to win, you just need to find yours.
Competitors are a gift. Facing competition puts you in a situation that is going to pull out the best version of yourself. Example: I run on Sundays with my friend Jason. Jason runs marathons. And he runs them fast. When I started running with Jason I could barely run 5 miles. Today I ran 14.5 miles at a 9-minute mile and felt pretty good. I don’t say this to brag (yes I do) but rather to show how surrounding yourself with competitors, or just people who are better than you, is a tool for making yourself better.
Garbage in, garbage out. If you give a system garbage inputs, you are going to get garbage outputs. A system can be anything. It can be your body. Your life. Your friend group. Your neighborhood. These are all systems. Let’s take your body for example. If you put garbage into your body, you are going to feel like shit and have low energy. Garbage in, garbage out. Let’s take your career. If somebody gives you bad career advice and you put in half-assed effort, you will get mediocre results. Garbage in, garbage out.
Feeling fulfilled. One of the most fulfilling feelings in life is pushing past boundaries you thought you had. It makes you feel like you could accomplish anything because you just shattered one limiting belief. “I thought I couldn’t run a marathon, but then I did. What else do I not think I could do right now that I actually could do?” This is a fun way to start thinking.
How to allude success. The easiest way to make sure success dodges you is by focusing on trying to be successful. If you can focus your energy and attention on doing good work, learning, and pushing past your previous best, you’ll end up doing super well in life as a byproduct of that focus.
Sometimes things have to get worse before they get better. The Region-Beta Paradox is a phenomenon where a person will remain in a state of mild discomfort and act only when the state changes to one of intense discomfort. The idea is that sometimes we are actually better off in a horrible situation than we are in a mildly uncomfortable situation because the horrible situation will give us enough motivation to actually make a change whereas the mildly uncomfortable one we could tolerate for a lifetime. So sometimes if you want to force yourself to change, making things harder on yourself is one way to get there.
Lack of direction. If you don’t know where you want to go, it can be really hard to know what to do, because you’ve got no goals to base your decisions on. I have listened to this recording from Earl Nightingale probably 50 times. I find it really helpful. Earl talks about how our minds are incredibly powerful machines that we use to do mostly basic tasks. He argues that clear goals are the key to living a successful life. Our lives are like a boat out at sea and our goals are the destination we are trying to reach. If we have no destination we just get blown around in the wind forever. And not because we lack the ability to sail to a destination, but because we haven’t chosen a destination in the first place.
Wrap Up
Alright, that’s all for this year’s roundup.
Let me know if any of these are resonating with you.
Also, if you’ve made it this far, could you share a life lesson you’ve learned this year with me?
Love you, thanks for the support.
Until next time,
Flickman
Meant washed - not trashed. Well, maybe that too.
As always, great post. Most resonated with me. You are a smart 26 year old. Sister Sanna has never had a problem with birthdays. Friend Karl struggles as well. Maybe a bit Eyeore. Glad you didn’t get trashed away. Karl has a reference for an acquaintance. Follow up - it will be interesting if you are open.