I am now almost 31, with my 20s squarely behind me.
I accomplished a lot in my 20s, from building businesses that have made more in a decade than people make in their entire lives to travelling and trekking lots of destinations to being a “fuckboy” and then marrying a good woman and having children.
Even this hobby blog/writing habit has done well (~$250k a year) and has helped countless young men from all over the world.
I invested money into assets and skills that help me make even more money, and was extremely productive across my 20s.
In other words, I did a lot of things right and I can now choose to just coast and take it easy if I like to.
However, it is quite useful and interesting to list all the things I think I did wrong, so you can avoid my mistakes and get even better results (after all the big reason to read this blog is to take action and improve your REAL LIFE RESULTS and get ahead of your peers).
What I Wish I Had Done Differently in My 20s (in no particular order)
1) I wish I had made an Instagram account sooner.
I never had a personal Instagram until fairly recently and it’s helped me stay in touch with people I meet both in regular life and during travels.
Phone numbers are personal and I do not want to share them with everyone I meet.
An Instagram account on the other hand you can hand out like candy, and people you have small talk with for 5-10 minutes are generally far more willing to be added on Instagram than to exchange phone numbers.
If I had an Instagram across my 20s, I’d have a bigger network than I do now.
2) I wish I never did a big dreamer bulk.
As regular readers know, I did a big bulk during the 2020 COVID lockdowns and followed a pure barbell strength program (it was all I had available to me at that time).
I gained a TON of fat during the bulk (my heaviest was a bit over 100kg) and I had to lose it all back over the next year.
Cutting for over a year is not fun, and not to mention that the loose skin you get from bulking too much never fully goes away.
3) I wish I had trained smarter.
Another training related item. I made a lot of training mistakes in my early 20s that quite frankly resulted in me making very slow progress despite training a LOT.
I was lifting, playing sports, running, and trying to do everything at once.
I wanted results on ALL FRONTS, and I wanted them NOW.
I did get results but I had to put in 2x as much effort as I should have. Doing everything at once basically leads to very little recovery, and recovery is where actual gains are made.
It took me a while to come up with a sustainable level of physical activity:
- 10,000-20,000 steps per day or 1 hour of Zone 2 cardio per day (very little accumulating systemic fatigue)
- Daily stretching and mobility work
- 4-5 hard activity sessions per week
Hard activity means anything from:
- 45+ minutes of Zone 3 cardio and above
- 1 hour of high intensity sports like Squash
- A hard lifting session (say 10-15 total working sets to failure or close to failure)
- A 5k to 10k run, depending on your fitness level
Doing much more than 4-5 hard activity sessions per week is counterproductive for most people who have normal recovery capacity (non-exceptional genetics, no drugs or pro-hormones, etc.) simply because you CANNOT RECOVER.
Doing too much works for 3 months, and then you get constantly achy joints, low libido, feeling sleepy and tired across your day, etc.
It is NOT worth it. Learn from my mistakes instead of repeating them.
Life is long and you can get all the gains you want eventually. Just not all at once.
4) I wish I had realized that I needed to cut off stale relationships (dead weight) sooner.
This is a mistake many of you will repeat despite me warning you about it, simply because it feels terrible to cut off people you’ve known for a while.
As you become more and more successful, many of your “friends” will be friends simply because you’ve known them for a long while.
There is nothing they can offer you in terms of knowledge, connections, or growth and as such, they are a poor investment of your limited and valuable time EVEN IF they are otherwise nice people.
I stuck by some old friends far longer than I should have simply out of familiarity.
That time should have been spent on making new connections and friends with people who actually were on my level and could help me grow instead of having nothing of value to offer to me.
5) I wish I had purchased an air purifier earlier. And figured out my dust allergy sooner.
I spent almost all of my childhood and teens with a “cold” that simply had no cure. I was sneezing or coughing almost all across my childhood, to the point that I had just accepted it as normal.
I had no idea that I had a dust allergy and neither did my parents.
When I started hitting the gym at 16, a lot of it went away.
I didn’t know what the connection between my colds and hitting the gym was, but new research shows that this is because of constrained energy expenditure (exercise diverts some energy away from your immune system, and allergies are partly your immune system being overactive).
After I purchased an air purifier, my perma-“cold” almost disappeared.
If you live in a polluted country like India, BUY AN AIR PURIFIER. It’s a simple $150 device that will make your health much better with literally 0 effort.
All you have to do is install it and turn it on.
Exposure to an average PM 2.5 level of 22 for a day is equivalent to smoking 1 cigarette. In Indian cities, the PM 2.5 numbers are often in the hundreds.
Without an air purifier, you are smoking 10+ cigarettes a day without realizing it. You are basically causing the same damage to yourself that a chain smoker does.
It is not worth it. Invest in a good air purifier and keep it on 24/7 in your office and bedroom. This is the one I recommend.
My life would have been so much better if I was aware that the problem was a dust allergy.
I would have spent less time with an annoying blocked nose and a persistent cough.
If you have children, and you care about their health, BUY AN AIR PURIFIER. Do not be cheap. They are worth EVERY CENT.
This piece will be continued in Part 2.
Things I Wish I Did Differently in My 20s