Being lost in my career, making financial mistakes, and committing foolish choices – sounds familiar? I would have appreciated it back then if someone older gave me honest and sound advice about money and career.
So, if I were to write a letter to my 20-something self, this is what I’ll say:
Find yourself fast
Don’t waste a decade trying to find yourself. Yes, it’s common to have a quarter-life crisis. But get over it soon. Read more career guides, take personality tests, and go through self-assessments. Find out what you’re very good at, what you really enjoy, and what will pay well. As soon as you figure out the intersection of these three areas, you can start focusing on building a successful career much earlier.
Focus on a niche
It’s good that you’re a Jack-of-all-trades, but don’t be a master of none. You have to specialize in something. Mastery and expertise grow over time. You’ve been a CPA, a systems consultant, a desktop publisher, a trainer, a journalist, a magazine editor, an online publisher. Dude, you’re all over the place! But don’t worry, when you hit your early 30s, you will finally find the niche that works for you.
Be a big fish in a small pond
You should have figured out sooner that you don’t belong in big, bureaucratic firms, no matter how nice their names look in your resume. You’ll feel like a square peg in a round hole. So, it’s good that you later decided to work for smaller companies, since you love to multi-task and make a bigger impact. That was actually a better experience for you to become an entrepreneur.
Drop the MBA
You became a CPA just because it’s nice to have a title beside your name. And there is always a demand for a CPA. But you were not made to be a CPA. So why did you later on take up an MBA program? It’s almost an overlap of your undergrad degree. Sure, feeling like a college student all over again is fun. And yes, it may help if you’re pursuing a corporate career. But you will soon realize you don’t like working in corporate. You prefer smaller companies, startups. In fact, you actually prefer working for yourself. You should have used that MBA money attending workshops, conferences, and certification courses related to your niche instead.
Move out
It’s good that you bought your first car yourself. Very adult behavior. But you should have moved out instead of living in your parents’ house until you got married. That would have trained you on so many levels – being more responsible, more independent, and more driven – much earlier.
Stick to being an entrepreneur
Your parents are entrepreneurs. Your siblings would later become entrepreneurs. That should have given you a clue. Look, you don’t like structure, you like flexibility, you want to be your own boss, you have lots of ideas, you’re good at spotting opportunities, and you’re willing to take risks. Yes, you did start a small business, which failed. But that should not have driven you to take an MBA. You should have learned from your mistakes and tried again sooner, instead of going back to corporate and realizing all over again that you really don’t like it.
Invest early and often
It’s good that you got hooked on personal finance early on. It’s good that you’re generally responsible with finances. And it’s good that you started investing in stocks and a mutual fund. But you just didn’t invest enough. You will know in the future that the share price for that mutual fund will grow more than 10 times in a little over a decade. Imagine if you invested 10 times the amount you put in, or if you couldn’t afford it, invested small amounts regularly, you would have made millions. The same with those stocks that you sold too soon. You should have just held on to them.
All in all, your 20s weren’t so bad. It’s good that you experimented and took risks instead of being stuck in one place. What you learned you would later use well. You will become an entrepreneur with a successful business in a profitable niche. But if you had only figured all these things out at half the time, you would definitely have me, your 40-something self, to thank for.
Photo by Alice Donovan Rouse on Unsplash
