Your Parents Don’t Have Everything Figured Out, Neither Do Your Teachers, Neither Do Your Bosses
Don’t wait for life to hand you answers.
The Misconception
There I was, young, dumb, and full of naivety and blind optimism about the world and how everything worked. I was in high school learning about how the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell and was still operating based off the misconception that as you got older, you naturally got smarter and acquired skills to help you continue your path to success! What’s a mortgage? Doesn’t matter, I’m sure somebody will teach me that down the line. Taxes? No idea how to do those, but I’m sure that knowledge comes with age. What skills will make me a valuable employee in the future? Hmmm not sure of that either but probably whatever they are teaching us in school, right? What’s the best way to make a lot of money? I have to imagine it’s somehow based off how good I am at algebra because we’ve spent a lot of time on that so far.
To reaffirm my intuition that all adults know everything important, I started asking adults all sorts of questions. Some easy, some hard, some about finance, some about relationships, some about the world, some about school, some about love. As I began to dig, my intuition started to fade, and I wasn’t so sure of my hypothesis anymore. And then finally, after talking with enough adults I came to the realization: your skillsets and knowledge of the world are not determined by your age. I learned that after school there was little to no guidance anymore and that people were either curious and determined enough to go find answers for themselves or they kind of just waited around to see what life would throw at them. This was an important realization, and one that I think could benefit us all.
Flip the Switch
Once I realized that adults don’t have it all figured out, I went through a couple of phases. At first, I freaked out because its my plan to just coast through life and have all the answers handed to me had been soiled. But then, I realized the power in what I had discovered. I had always been waiting until adulthood to start figuring out stuff about the world, how money works, to start traveling, to start making my own big boy decisions, but I was only waiting because I thought I would have more information by then, and be smarter. But now I realized that I would have roughly the same amount of info when I became an “adult” as I did right there in high school, so what’s to stop me from just starting to figure out life right then. And that’s what I decided to do.
I started to see the possibilities I could create for myself if I started early. Giving yourself a head start is never a bad idea. I started working on stuff that none of my peers were working on, I would have talks with adults about problems they were going through and then do my best to start solving those early on for myself. I began reading quite a bit, especially in the personal development genre. I felt as though I had found a cheat code to a new type of life, one where I could get ahead just by being early to the party. I also found a lot of what I was reading and learning about very fascinating, and I will be sharing in this blog a lot of those life lessons that I have learned and am still learning everyday.
Wrap Up
What I want you to take from this blog is this: the answers to life are not handed to you in little gift-wrapped packages as you age. In fact, growth is not bound to age at all, so you might as well start now. I like to think of finding some of these answers as a scavenger hunt. The answers to your questions and problems are scattered all around, some in the external world and some inside of yourself. And only those who are curious and bold enough to search for them will start to get ahead. We will never figure everything out, and that is okay, but the act of trying is what leads us to a more fulfilling life.
If you made it this far, thank you for reading all of my words. This is my second blog ever so if I come off as a pretentious douche or anything I’m sorry, still working on finding my writing style. I really do appreciate you all for reading though. More to come!
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Also, I’m thinking that one of your siblings might enjoy this type of writing, you should share it with them!