Speaker 1: I'm going to tell you something right now that's going
Speaker 1: to stay with you for the rest of the day.
Speaker 1: Every single thing you're currently stressed about, the career you're
Speaker 1: trying to build, the relationship you're trying to figure out,
Speaker 1: the body you're trying to fix, the money you're trying
Speaker 1: to make, the person you're trying to become, every single
Speaker 1: one of those things is being shaped right now by
Speaker 1: a set of invisible beliefs you've never examined, Beliefs you
Speaker 1: didn't choose, Beliefs you absorbed from your parents, your culture,
Speaker 1: your school, your feed, Beliefs that feel like truth because
Speaker 1: you've never held them. Marp to the light and asked, wait,
Speaker 1: who told me this? And were they right? I know
Speaker 1: people who spend the entirety of their twenties operating on
Speaker 1: beliefs that weren't theirs, They were inherited software, and that
Speaker 1: inherited software cost them years, not months. Years years of
Speaker 1: chasing things they didn't actually want, years of avoiding things
Speaker 1: they desperately needed, the years of measuring their life against
Speaker 1: a scorecard that they didn't build, playing a game they
Speaker 1: never agreed to enter, and wondering why winning didn't feel
Speaker 1: like winning. Today, I'm going to give you ten truths
Speaker 1: that I and others have had to learn the hard way.
Speaker 1: Some of them through failure, some of them through pain,
Speaker 1: some through sitting in rooms with people who were decades
Speaker 1: ahead of you and hearing them say one sentence that
Speaker 1: rearranged how I saw everything. These are not the obvious things.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to tell you to work hard, or
Speaker 1: believe in yourself, or start investing early. You've heard that,
Speaker 1: everyone's heard that, and if hearing it was enough, you'd
Speaker 1: already be doing it. These are the things no one says,
Speaker 1: the things that sound wrong the first time you hear them,
Speaker 1: and then keep you up at night because you realize
Speaker 1: they might be the truest things. Anyone's ever told you.
Speaker 1: Ten truths thirty minutes, and I'll tell you right now,
Speaker 1: number seven is the one that would have said, give
Speaker 1: me the most pain, and it's the one you're going
Speaker 1: to resist the hardest. Stay for it. Let's go truth
Speaker 1: number one. The things you're most proud of avoiding are
Speaker 1: probably the things you most need to do. Here's what
Speaker 1: nobody tells you about your twenties. You will become extraordinarily
Speaker 1: skilled at avoiding the things that scare you, and you
Speaker 1: will disguise that avoidance as something noble. You won't call
Speaker 1: it avoidance. You'll call it waiting for the right time.
Speaker 1: You call it doing more research. You'll call it being strategic.
Speaker 1: You'll call it not rushing into things. You'll build an elaborate,
Speaker 1: intelligent sounding vocabulary around the simple act of not doing
Speaker 1: the thing that frightens you. And because you're smart and
Speaker 1: you are otherwise you wouldn't be watching this, your rationalizations
Speaker 1: will be convincing, convincing enough to fool everyone, including yourself.
Speaker 1: I did this for you. I told myself I was
Speaker 1: being thoughtful, careful, measured, sensible. What I was actually being
Speaker 1: was terrified, and the terror was wearing a very sophisticated outfit.
Speaker 1: Here's the science that cracked this open for me. Dr
Speaker 1: Timothy Wilson at the University of Virginia ran a study
Speaker 1: where participants were left alone in a room with nothing
Speaker 1: but their thoughts and a button that would deliver a
Speaker 1: mild electric shock. They'd already tried the shock and said
Speaker 1: they hated it, said they'd pay money to avoid it,
Speaker 1: and yet, when left alone with nothing but their own mind,
Speaker 1: sixty seven percent of men and twenty five percent of
Speaker 1: women chose to shock themselves rather than sit alone with
Speaker 1: their thoughts. Think about that again. People preferred physical pain
Speaker 1: to being alone with what was in their head. That's
Speaker 1: not a fun experiment. That's a diagnosis of the human condition.
Speaker 1: We will do almost any anything, including her ourselves, to
Speaker 1: avoid confronting what's actually going on inside us. And in
Speaker 1: your twenties, the version of the electric shock is busyness, scrolling,
Speaker 1: planning without executing, consuming content about doing the thing. Instead
Speaker 1: of doing the thing, you're pressing the button over and
Speaker 1: over and calling it preparation. The bugwet Gita has a
Speaker 1: line that hit me like a truck when I first
Speaker 1: read it. It is better to live your own destiny
Speaker 1: imperfectly than to live in imitation of somebody else's life
Speaker 1: with perfection. That's not a motivational quote, that's a warning.
Speaker 1: The thing you're avoiding is almost always the thing that's
Speaker 1: actually yours, the thing that's aligned with who you really are,
Speaker 1: and you're avoiding it precisely because it's yours, because doing
Speaker 1: it would mean stepping out from behind the mask of
Speaker 1: the person you've been pretending to be and standing in
Speaker 1: the open as the person you actually are. That's terrifying.
Speaker 1: Do it anyway. Your twenties will end. The right time
Speaker 1: will never come. And the only thing worse than failing
Speaker 1: at the thing you need to do is succeeding at
Speaker 1: the thing you don't want to do. Truth too, you
Speaker 1: don't actually know what you want. You know what you
Speaker 1: were told to want. This one is going to sting,
Speaker 1: but you need to hear it. Most of what you're
Speaker 1: chasing right now, the job title, the relationship milestone, the body,
Speaker 1: the lifestyle. You didn't choose, You absorbed it. It was
Speaker 1: handed to you by a combination of parental expectations, cultural programming,
Speaker 1: social media reinforcement, and peer comparison. And because it was
Speaker 1: installed so early and reinforced so often, it doesn't feel installed.
Speaker 1: It feels like desire, feels like ambitions. It feels like
Speaker 1: what I've always wanted. But here's a question that will
Speaker 1: break the illusion. If no one would know, if there
Speaker 1: were no Instagram, no family dinners, no friends to impress,
Speaker 1: no metric to hit, would you still want this? If
Speaker 1: you could never tell anyone about your achievement, would you
Speaker 1: still pursue it? If the answer is no, you don't
Speaker 1: want the thing you want, the reaction you want, the
Speaker 1: status you want the proof and proof is not purpose,
Speaker 1: proof is performance. Doctor Kennon Sheldon at the University of
Speaker 1: Missouri has studied what he calls self concordance, the degree
Speaker 1: to which your goals aligned with your authentic interests and
Speaker 1: values versus external pressures and internalized expectations. His research, spanning
Speaker 1: decades consistently shows that people who pursue self concordant goals
Speaker 1: goals they choose from genuine internal motivation, are significantly more
Speaker 1: likely to achieve them, and critically, when they do achieve them,
Speaker 1: they actually feel fulfilled. It's not about not having goals,
Speaker 1: not being ambitious, it's about it being aligned. People who
Speaker 1: pursue non concordant goals, goals absorbed from outside, achieve them
Speaker 1: at lower rates, and even when they do succeed, the
Speaker 1: success feels hollow empty. You think, is this ear? That's
Speaker 1: the sound of a non concordant goal arriving at its destination.
Speaker 1: The Taoist tradition calls this living in tay your authentic nature,
Speaker 1: your intrinsic power. The Tau tay Ching says, when you
Speaker 1: are content to be simply yourself and don't compare or compete.
Speaker 1: Everyone will respect you. This isn't passivity. It's the most
Speaker 1: radical act of your twenties to stop long enough to
Speaker 1: separate what you actually want from what you were programmed
Speaker 1: to want, and to have the courage to pursue the
Speaker 1: first one, even if the second one looks better on paper.
Speaker 1: Do the audit seriously. Take every major all you're currently
Speaker 1: pursuing an ask if no one would ever know I
Speaker 1: achieved this, would I still want it? The ones where
Speaker 1: the answer is yes are your real goals. The ones
Speaker 1: where the answer is no are someone else's goals wearing
Speaker 1: your face? Let them go they were never yours. Truth
Speaker 1: Number three, the person you're pretending to be is costing
Speaker 1: you everything the person you actually are could have. This
Speaker 1: is the one that will save your relationships, your career,
Speaker 1: and your mental health if you lead it. At some
Speaker 1: point in our life, we're all performing in conversations, in meetings,
Speaker 1: on dates, in friendships online, in the mirror, you have
Speaker 1: constructed a version of yourself, let's call it the approved version,
Speaker 1: and you present that version to the world. Because at
Speaker 1: some point, probably very early in our lives, we learned
Speaker 1: that the real version wasn't safe to show. Maybe the
Speaker 1: real version of you was too emotional for your parents,
Speaker 1: and you learned to mask it. Maybe the real word
Speaker 1: of you had opinions that friends shut down, so you
Speaker 1: learn to agree. Maybe the real version of you wanted
Speaker 1: things that people didn't think were realistic, so you learned
Speaker 1: to want smaller. Maybe the real version was rejected, really
Speaker 1: rejected in the way only a child can be, and
Speaker 1: you built the approved version as armor. The armor worked.
Speaker 1: It kept you safe, It got you accepted, It got
Speaker 1: you through school and into jobs and past first dates.
Speaker 1: But here's what nobody told you about the armor. It
Speaker 1: doesn't just keep the bad things out, keeps everything out,
Speaker 1: including the connection, the recognition, the love, and the opportunities
Speaker 1: that can only reach you if people are interacting with
Speaker 1: the real you instead of the performance. Doctor Brene Brown
Speaker 1: spent over two decades researching vulnerability and connection, and her
Speaker 1: data leads to one conclusion that most people intellectually accept
Speaker 1: and behaviorally ignore. Genuine connection is impossible without vulnerability. The
Speaker 1: approved version of you cannot form deep connections because deep
Speaker 1: connection requires being seen, not being seen performing being seen.
Speaker 1: Here's the paradox that can ruin your twenties. The thing
Speaker 1: you think will get you rejected, your real self, your
Speaker 1: real thoughts, your real desires, your real weirdness is actually
Speaker 1: the thing that creates belonging, and the thing you think
Speaker 1: keeps you safe. The performance, the mask, the approved version,
Speaker 1: is the thing that guarantees loneliness, because even when people
Speaker 1: accept the approved version, it never satisfies you because you
Speaker 1: know somewhere deep down that they didn't accept you. They
Speaker 1: accepted the mask, and being loved for a mask you're
Speaker 1: wearing is the loneliest kind of love there is. In
Speaker 1: the Zen tradition, there's a concept called Shoshin beginner's mind,
Speaker 1: it means approaching life without pretense, without the need to
Speaker 1: appear as an expert, without the armor of having it
Speaker 1: all figured out. The master said, in the beginner's mind,
Speaker 1: there are many possibilities, but in the expert's mind, there
Speaker 1: are a few. Your approved version is the expert. He
Speaker 1: knows exactly how to behave, what to say, how to
Speaker 1: be acceptable. And in that expertise, it has eliminated the
Speaker 1: possibility of being surprised, of being discovered, of being genuinely known.
Speaker 1: Take off the armor, not all at once, not with everyone,
Speaker 1: but start. Start with one person you trust, show them
Speaker 1: one thing about you that isn't approved, and watch what happens.
Speaker 1: What usually happens is the opposite of what you feared.
Speaker 1: They excel, they lean in, and they say me too.
Speaker 1: Because everyone's wearing armor, and the person who takes theirs
Speaker 1: off first gives everyone else permission to breathe. Truthful discipline
Speaker 1: is not what you think it is. It's the art
Speaker 1: of discs appointing the wrong things. Every piece of advice
Speaker 1: about discipline makes the same mistake. It frames. Discipline is
Speaker 1: the ability to force yourself to do hard things, to
Speaker 1: override your desires, to push through resistance with willpower, as
Speaker 1: if discipline is a battle between the good you and
Speaker 1: the lazy youth, and success goes to whoever grits their
Speaker 1: teeth the hardest. That model doesn't work, and it's the
Speaker 1: reason most people's relationship with discipline is an exhaustion cycle
Speaker 1: of motivation, effort, collapse, guilt, and restart. Here's a reframe
Speaker 1: that changed everything for me. I didn't hear it from
Speaker 1: a productivity expert. I actually heard it from a monk.
Speaker 1: Discipline is not the ability to say yes to hard things.
Speaker 1: Discipline is the ability to say no to easy things,
Speaker 1: and more specifically, discipline is the art of disappointing the
Speaker 1: things that don't matter so that you can show up
Speaker 1: fully for the things that do. Every day you have
Speaker 1: a finite amount of energy, attention, and willpower. This is
Speaker 1: not a metaphor. Every decision you make, every temptation you resist,
Speaker 1: every distraction you fight, draws from the same tank. The
Speaker 1: person who spends their morning resisting the snooze button, deciding
Speaker 1: what to wear, answering non urgent emails, scrolling through notifications,
Speaker 1: and navigating a chaotic environment arrives in their most important
Speaker 1: work with an empty tank. They didn't lack discipline, they
Speaker 1: spent it all on things that don't matter. The stoic
Speaker 1: philosopher Seneca wrote something two thousand years ago that reads
Speaker 1: like it was targeted at our lives right now. It
Speaker 1: is not that we have a short time to live,
Speaker 1: but that we waste a great deal of it. Life
Speaker 1: is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been
Speaker 1: given to us for the highest achievements if it were
Speaker 1: all well invested. But when it was wasted in heedless
Speaker 1: luxury and spent on no good activity, with forced at
Speaker 1: last by debt's final constraint to realize that it has
Speaker 1: passed away before we knew it was passing. You don't
Speaker 1: have a discipline problem. You have an allocation problem. You're
Speaker 1: investing your best resources, your mourning energy, your deepest focus,
Speaker 1: your most creative hours into things that give you zero return,
Speaker 1: and then you're trying to do the things that actually
Speaker 1: matter with what's left over. And whatever's left over is
Speaker 1: never enough. Here's the practical shift. Identify the three things
Speaker 1: that drain you the most while producing the least to
Speaker 1: scrolling the email checking the people, pleasing commitments, the performative business.
Speaker 1: Now disappoint them, say no, withdraw your energy. Let them
Speaker 1: be undone, unanswered, unattended, not forever, just long enough to
Speaker 1: redirect that energy into the one thing that actually moves
Speaker 1: your life forward. You're not being selfish, You're being solvent.
Speaker 1: You're refusing to go bankrupt funding things that give you
Speaker 1: no over time Proof number five. The people you spend
Speaker 1: time with are not influencing you. They're programming you. You've
Speaker 1: heard the Jim Rone quote. You're the average of the
Speaker 1: five people you spend the most time with. Everyone nods,
Speaker 1: Nobody acts on it, because acting on it requires something brutal,
Speaker 1: looking at your actual five people and honestly evaluating what
Speaker 1: they're programming into you. I say programming deliberately because it's
Speaker 1: not influence. Influence implies a conscious process, someone persuading you
Speaker 1: to think or act a certain way. What actually happens
Speaker 1: is far more invisible and far more powerful. Dr James Fowler,
Speaker 1: in his landmark research published in the New English Journal
Speaker 1: of Medicine and expanded in his book Connected, demonstrated that behaviors, emotions,
Speaker 1: and even health outcomes spread through social networks like contagions.
Speaker 1: If a close friend becomes obese, your own likelihood of
Speaker 1: becoming obese increases by forty five percent, not because they
Speaker 1: convince you to eat more, but because their behavior unconsciously
Speaker 1: recalibrated your sense of what's normal. If a friend of
Speaker 1: a friend, someone you may not even know, gets divorced,
Speaker 1: your own likelihood of divorce increases. These effects ripple across
Speaker 1: three degrees of separation. Your environment is not a backdrop.
Speaker 1: It's an operating system, and the people in it are
Speaker 1: not passive characters. Their active inputs that are reshaping your
Speaker 1: neural pathways. Your default behaviors, your ambition, and your sense
Speaker 1: of what's possible, every single day without you being aware
Speaker 1: of it. The ancient texts understood this with striking precision.
Speaker 1: The Dharmapod, one of the oldest Buddhist techs, says, an
Speaker 1: ignorant person is like a log of wood. If they
Speaker 1: associate with the wise, they become a flame. If they
Speaker 1: associate with the foolish, they remain a log. That's not poetry,
Speaker 1: it's neuroscience, expressed a metaphor. Mirror neurons first discovered by
Speaker 1: doctor Rizzolatti and his team at the University of Palmer
Speaker 1: fire both when you perform an action and when you
Speaker 1: observe someone else performing it. Your brain literally rehearses the
Speaker 1: behaviors it witnesses in others. You don't have to agree
Speaker 1: with what the people around you are doing. You don't
Speaker 1: have to admire it. Your brain will pattern match to
Speaker 1: it anyway. Here's the harsh truth. If your five closest
Speaker 1: people are comfortable, you will become comfortable. If they complain,
Speaker 1: you will complain. If they've stopped growing, you will stop growing,
Speaker 1: not because you're weak, but because you're human, and human
Speaker 1: brains sync to their environment, with or without permission, and
Speaker 1: you don't have to leave them behind. If you start
Speaker 1: making better choices for yourself, you too can have a
Speaker 1: positive impact to everyone else. The most important decision of
Speaker 1: your twenties is not what career to pursue or who
Speaker 1: to date. It's who you allow into your daily environment.
Speaker 1: Curate it like your life depends on it, because neurologically
Speaker 1: it does. Troof six. Being busy is the laziest thing
Speaker 1: you can do. This one is going to make some
Speaker 1: people feel defensive. Good defensive usually means accurate. Busyness has
Speaker 1: become the default data symbol of our generation. How are
Speaker 1: you busy? Said with half a smile. That kind of
Speaker 1: says I'm important, I'm in demand, I'm doing things. We
Speaker 1: wear busyness like a medal, and we judge rest like
Speaker 1: a crime. But here's the truth that took me years
Speaker 1: to see. Being busy is easy, terrifyingly easy. Anyone can
Speaker 1: fill a schedule, Anyone can reply to every email, turn
Speaker 1: to every meeting, say yes to every request, maintainer to
Speaker 1: do lists so long it could wallpaper a house. Being
Speaker 1: busy requires no thought, no strategy, no prioritization, no courage.
Speaker 1: You just say yes to whatever shows up and call
Speaker 1: the exhaustion hard work. Being effective, Actually moving the needle
Speaker 1: on the things that matter is hard because it requires
Speaker 1: you to think, to choose to say this matters, and
Speaker 1: this doesn't to disappoint people, to sit with the discomfort
Speaker 1: of an empty calendar and the terrifying question it produces.
Speaker 1: If I'm not busy, who am I? That question is
Speaker 1: the real reason we stay busy. Business is a hiding place.
Speaker 1: It keeps us from confronting the things we're avoiding. The
Speaker 1: relationship we need to fix, the career change we need
Speaker 1: to make the creative work you keep saying you don't
Speaker 1: have time for You don't have time for it because
Speaker 1: you filled every available minute with low value activity, specifically
Speaker 1: so you can say you don't have time for it.
Speaker 1: The business is not the obstacle. The busyness is our
Speaker 1: false strategy. It's the most socially acceptable way to avoid
Speaker 1: your own life. Stop being busy and start being honest
Speaker 1: about what you're hiding from inside the busyness. Truth seven.
Speaker 1: You will not be rewarded for your suffering. This is
Speaker 1: the one I said would save me the most pain.
Speaker 1: This is the one we all resist and I have
Speaker 1: to somewhere deep in your operating system, and I don't
Speaker 1: know exactly when it got installed, but I know it's there.
Speaker 1: Is The belief that you're suffering is an investment that
Speaker 1: if you endure enough, sacrifice enough, push through enough pain,
Speaker 1: put yourself last enough times, that eventually the universe or
Speaker 1: life or God or something will notice and reward you.
Speaker 1: That there's a cosmic ledger keeping track of how much
Speaker 1: you've struggled, and at some points the balance comes to
Speaker 1: you and you get what you've earned. This belief is
Speaker 1: ruining our lives. It's invisible because it disguises itself as virtue.
Speaker 1: You stay in the job that's destroying your health because
Speaker 1: leaving feels like giving up, and you've been taught that
Speaker 1: giving up is the worst thing a person can do.
Speaker 1: You stay in the relationship that diminishes you because you've
Speaker 1: invested so many years and walking away would mean all
Speaker 1: that suffering was for nothing. You deny yourself rest, pleasure, ease,
Speaker 1: and joy because somewhere in your programming is the message
Speaker 1: that those things are earned, not given, and you haven't
Speaker 1: earned them yet. This is what psychologists called the sunk
Speaker 1: cost fallacy. Applied to your entire life, the tendency to
Speaker 1: continue investing in something because of how much you've already invested,
Speaker 1: regardless of whether the future return justifies it. Doctor Hallar's
Speaker 1: and doctor Catherine Bloomer's foundational research on some costs showed
Speaker 1: that this bias operates even when people are explicitly told
Speaker 1: that past investment is irrelevant to future outcomes. The brain
Speaker 1: can't let go of the suffering it's already paid, so
Speaker 1: it doubles down and then triples down and calds it perseverance.
Speaker 1: The Buddhist tradition is devastatingly clear on this. The Buddha
Speaker 1: identified upadhana attachment clinging as the mechanism that perpetuates suffering,
Speaker 1: and one of the most pernicious forms of clinging is
Speaker 1: clinging to suffering itself, clinging to the identity of the
Speaker 1: one who endures, clinging to the narrative that your pain
Speaker 1: has a purpose that will eventually be revealed. The Buddha
Speaker 1: didn't say suffering builds character. It says suffering is what
Speaker 1: happens when you cling, and the first thing most people
Speaker 1: cling to without realizing it is suffering itself, because letting
Speaker 1: god of The suffering means admitting it might have been unnecessary,
Speaker 1: and that admission is almost too painful to bear. Here's
Speaker 1: the truth. Some suffering is unavoidable, loss, grief, the genuine
Speaker 1: pain are being alive. We all have difficulties that we're
Speaker 1: going through, but the suffering we manufacture staying in things
Speaker 1: that aren't working the tolerant of conditions. You have the
Speaker 1: power to change. That is optional, and we can change truth. Eight.
Speaker 1: Your twenties are not a rehearsal. There are live performance
Speaker 1: and the audience is your thirties. There's a lie your
Speaker 1: brain tells you in your twenties that is so comforting
Speaker 1: and so dangerous that it deserves its own truth on
Speaker 1: this list. The lie is I have time. You do
Speaker 1: technically statistically, probably, but I have time is not a
Speaker 1: fact you're operating from. It's a sedative you're taking. It's
Speaker 1: the thing you tell yourself so you can postpone the
Speaker 1: difficult decision for another month, delay the launch for another quarter,
Speaker 1: stay in the wrong city for another year, table the
Speaker 1: conversation for another day. I have time is the lie
Speaker 1: that transforms your twenties from a decade of building into
Speaker 1: a decade of intending now. I also don't want you
Speaker 1: to be the opposite end, where you put you pressure
Speaker 1: on yourself and you don't realize you do have time. Right.
Speaker 1: That's unhealthy too, so the laziness. I have so much
Speaker 1: time it doesn't matter to Oh my god, every day
Speaker 1: counts and I'm old. Both of those are inaccurate. Here's
Speaker 1: what I wish someone had told me with enough force
Speaker 1: to actually land. Your thirties are not a new chapter.
Speaker 1: They're the consequences of your twenties. Every relationship you stayed
Speaker 1: in too long, every skill you didn't develop, every financial
Speaker 1: habit you didn't build, every hard truth you postponed, every
Speaker 1: morning you traded for a scroll, and every evening you
Speaker 1: traded for a binge. Those don't disappear at thirty because
Speaker 1: you want them to. They compound in the wrong direction.
Speaker 1: Albert Einstein reportedly called compound interest the eighth wonder of
Speaker 1: the world. But compounding works on everything, not just money.
Speaker 1: Your habits compound, your knowledge compounds, your relationships compound, Your
Speaker 1: health compounds. And here's what nobody tells you. The compounding
Speaker 1: curve is nearly invisible in your twenties. The difference between
Speaker 1: the person who reads for thirty minutes a day, and
Speaker 1: the person who scrolls for thirty minutes a day is
Speaker 1: undetectable at twenty five twenty five, it's noticeable at forty five.
Speaker 1: It's a canyon. The ancient Indian concept of karma is
Speaker 1: grossly misunderstood in the West. It's not cosmic punishment. It's
Speaker 1: not what goes around comes around. In its original Verdantic context,
Speaker 1: karma simply means action, and the teaching is that every
Speaker 1: action creates a consequence, not as a moral judgment, but
Speaker 1: as natural law, like gravity. You don't get punished for
Speaker 1: jumping off a building. You just hit the ground. That's
Speaker 1: not justice, that's physics. Your twenties and when you're building
Speaker 1: the trajectory, the angle, the initial conditions, and because the
Speaker 1: results aren't visible yet, it feels like the angle doesn't matter.
Speaker 1: It does. A one degree difference in trajectory is invisible
Speaker 1: at one hundred meters. At one thousand miles, it's the
Speaker 1: difference between continents. This is not about panic. It's about respect,
Speaker 1: respect for the decade you're in, respect for the fact
Speaker 1: that the choices you're making right now, including the choice
Speaker 1: to postpone, to wait, to figure it out later. Are
Speaker 1: not neutral, they are active. They're shaping a future you'll
Speaker 1: live in, whether you planned it or not. Truth nine,
Speaker 1: The relationship you have with yourself is the blueprint for
Speaker 1: every relationship you'll ever have. Every relationship problem you've ever had,
Speaker 1: every argument, every betrayal that cut too deep, every time
Speaker 1: you gave too much, every time you couldn't receive, every
Speaker 1: time you chose someone who was wrong for you and
Speaker 1: stayed anyway, was not only a relationship problem. It was
Speaker 1: a self relationship problem that found a stage to be on.
Speaker 1: This sounds abstract until you see the machinery. If you
Speaker 1: don't trust yourself, your judgment, your instincts, your ability to
Speaker 1: survive hard things, you will attract people who reinforce that distrust.
Speaker 1: Not because the universe is conspiring against you, but because
Speaker 1: your tolerance for mistreatment is calibrated to your self worth.
Speaker 1: You will accept from others what you believe you deserve,
Speaker 1: and what you believe you deserve was set long before
Speaker 1: this relationship began. Doctor Kristin there for the University of
Speaker 1: Texas at Austin has spent over two decades researching self
Speaker 1: compassion and its effects on relationship performance. And mental health.
Speaker 1: Her findings are unambiguous. People with higher self compassion have
Speaker 1: healthier relationships, set better boundaries, recover faster from conflict, and
Speaker 1: are less likely to stay in harmful dynamics. Not because
Speaker 1: they're selfish, but because they have a baseline of internal
Speaker 1: regard that prevents them from outsourcing their sense of worth
Speaker 1: to someone else. Here's the mechanism. If you don't give
Speaker 1: yourself approval, if your self worth is contingent on external validation,
Speaker 1: then every relationship becomes an approval seeking mission. You don't
Speaker 1: show up as a partner. You show up as an
Speaker 1: applicant performing auditioning, trying to earn a feeling that you
Speaker 1: should be generating internally, and the person across from you
Speaker 1: can feel it. They feel the weight of being your source.
Speaker 1: Some people will exploit that, some will try to fill
Speaker 1: the role and burn out need. The dynamic is love
Speaker 1: both the transactions. The Sufi poet Roomy, before Instagram turned
Speaker 1: him into a greeting card, wrote, you wander from room
Speaker 1: to room looking for the diamond necklace that is already
Speaker 1: around your neck. Your twenties will likely be a decade
Speaker 1: of wondering from person to person looking for them to
Speaker 1: give you the feeling of being enough. They can't give
Speaker 1: it to you. It's already yours. It's been yours the
Speaker 1: entire time. But no one modeled that for you, so
Speaker 1: you keep searching for it in other people, something that
Speaker 1: can be found in yourself. Trooth ten. You will not
Speaker 1: figure out your life. You will build it, and it
Speaker 1: will look nothing like the plant. You'll get the where
Speaker 1: you want in life, just not in the way you
Speaker 1: imagine it. This is the last one because it's the
Speaker 1: one that holds all the others together. You are currently
Speaker 1: trying to figure out your life, and the effort feels
Speaker 1: like it's destroying you, because figuring out your life implies
Speaker 1: that your life is a puzzle, that all the pieces
Speaker 1: exist somewhere right now, and your job is to find them,
Speaker 1: put them in the right order, right now, and reveal
Speaker 1: the picture on the box. Once you find the right career,
Speaker 1: the right partner, the right city, the right purpose, click click, click,
Speaker 1: the picture will appear and you'll finally feel settled. That's
Speaker 1: not how it works. It's never worked that way for
Speaker 1: anyone who has ever lived, and the belief that it
Speaker 1: should is the single greatest source of anxiety. In your twenties.
Speaker 1: Doctor Ibara at London Business School has studied career transitions
Speaker 1: and identity formation for decades. Her research shows that people
Speaker 1: who successfully reinvent themselves do not do it through introspection
Speaker 1: and planning. They do it through action and experimentation. Here's
Speaker 1: my four step system. Experience, take action, do things, try things,
Speaker 1: make mistakes. When you experience things, experience leads to competi
Speaker 1: You develop skills, You learn things, you learn lessons. Competence
Speaker 1: leads to evidence. Once you can do things again and
Speaker 1: again and go through challenges. With that competence, you get
Speaker 1: evidence of what's possible, and that evidence leads to confidence.
Speaker 1: We think we start a confidence, You start an experience,
Speaker 1: Then you get competence, then you get evidence, and then
Speaker 1: you build confidence. You try things, You have experiences that
Speaker 1: surprise you, You stumble into interest that you didn't predict.
Speaker 1: The self is not discovered through thinking, it's discovered through
Speaker 1: doing and then thinking. And the person you become at
Speaker 1: thirty five will be shaped by things that haven't happened
Speaker 1: to you yet, things you cannot plan for, predict or control.
Speaker 1: The ancient Taoist concept of the uncarved block captures this beautifully.
Speaker 1: The uncarved block represents pure potential before it has been
Speaker 1: shaped by expectation, definition, or limitation. Your twenties are the
Speaker 1: uncarved block, and the worst thing you can do is
Speaker 1: carve it into a fixed shape too early, based on
Speaker 1: incomplete information, external pressure, and the desperate need to have
Speaker 1: an answer to So what's the plan. You don't need
Speaker 1: a plan. You need a practice. A practice of paying
Speaker 1: attention to what makes you come alive and doing more
Speaker 1: of it, A practice of noticing what drains you and
Speaker 1: doing less of it. A practice of following curiosity, even
Speaker 1: when it leads somewhere that doesn't make sense on a resume,
Speaker 1: A practice of allowing your life to be built iteratively
Speaker 1: through lived experience, rather than designed theoretically through anxious planning.
Speaker 1: Your life will not go according to plan. And that's
Speaker 1: not a warning, it's a promise. And it's the best
Speaker 1: news you'll hear all day, because the plan you're clinging
Speaker 1: to was based on who you were when you made it,
Speaker 1: and you're not that person anymore. You're not the person
Speaker 1: you were when you started this video. Every experience, every failure,
Speaker 1: every surprise, every heartbreak, every late night conversation that changed
Speaker 1: your mind about something you thought you were certain about.
Speaker 1: All of it is carving the block, and the shape
Speaker 1: that's emerging is more interesting, more beautiful, more complex than
Speaker 1: anything you could have designed from scratch. Stop trying to
Speaker 1: figure out your life in one year. Start building it
Speaker 1: brick by brick, one honest decision at a time, one
Speaker 1: brave conversation at a time, one day of doing the
Speaker 1: thing that matters, not the thing that's urgent, expected, or
Speaker 1: that people want you to do. The plan is not
Speaker 1: the point. The practice is the point, and the practice
Speaker 1: is simple, even when it's hard. Stay curious, stay honest,
Speaker 1: stay building The life start's waiting for you on the
Speaker 1: other side of your twenties isn't the one you planned.
Speaker 1: Thank you for watching today's video or a bit helped.
Speaker 1: I hope you'll share it with a friend or family
Speaker 1: member who needs it, and I can't wait to see
Speaker 1: you here on the next one. I hope that these
Speaker 1: ten truths allow you to break through some serious barriers
Speaker 1: in your life and create the shift you're looking for. Hey, everyone,
Speaker 1: if you love that conversation, go and check come my
Speaker 1: episode with the world's leading therapist, Lorie Gottlieb. You are
Speaker 1: exactly where you need to be if you are doing
Speaker 1: the work. If you're not doing the work, you're going
Speaker 1: to be behind. If you are not in a place
Speaker 1: where you want to be With a relationship, you have
Speaker 1: to understand why