26 Lessons Learned Turning 26 Years Old

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I turned 26 a little less than a month ago. I was recently looking through my older blog posts and realized that I had written a lesson learned post for my 24th birthday and one for my 25th birthday, but I hadn’t done one for my 26th this year.

I figured I should make one for this year because of how much I learned and read. (In 2020 I read 85 books. The year before I only read 10 books.) Not to mention 2020 happened…

So here are 26 lessons I learned turning 26 years old.

1. Choose people who choose you and share your core values. Surround yourself with people who get it. Avoid people who purposely choose to misunderstand you.

2. Have and know your core values. Decision making is easier when your values are clear to you.

3. Critical thinking skills and media literacy are essential to a healthy and functioning society, and should be taught to everyone at a young age

4. Critical thinking is also essential to healthy relationships. Not just “love”.

5. Intellectual humility is probably one of the most important elements of intelligence. The Dunning-Kruger effect demonstrates this perfectly.

6. Overconfidence can lead to poor decisions, inaccurate knowledge, a lack of effort, and can attract blind following.

7. Grand conspiracy theories are fear-based and not based in logic, reasoning, or strong evidence. They are mathematically impossible.

8. Blind distrust is just as bad and no different than blind trust.

9. Humans are incredibly irrational and make terrible decisions based on emotions. If we didn’t experience emotions, decision making would be nearly impossible.

10. What you feed your brain is just as important as what you feed your body. Practice awareness of your input and choose wisely who you learn from.

11. Narcissism is a huge problem in society, especially in the US. Many people misunderstand narcissism to be a high level of confidence, but that’s misleading. Narcissism not only affects our close relationships and individual health, but as we’ve seen from how people acted during a pandemic, it affects the whole as a whole. Narcissism has disastrous consequences, including death.

12. Respond. Don’t react. Always.

13. The importance of adaptability and flexibility when it comes to external change. Those who survive and get ahead are not those who resist uncontrollable change, but those who adapt to the change around them and do so quickly.

14. When it comes to your health, your money, or your life, it’s better to overreact than to underreact.

15. Human beings are incredibly resilient. We can adapt and overcome anything.

16. I already knew the importance of reading, but the true power of it has been immensely reinforced after I read 85 books in 2020.

17. Instead of trying to read faster, spend more time reading.

18. Happiness is not over there. Goals are just for fun. They shouldn’t serve the purpose of  becoming happier.

19. Toxic positivity is the belief that you should always be happy or positive. It’s incredibly damaging to your emotional health and your relationships.

20. Experimenting is essential for success in reaching goals.

21. Approach everything with curiosity, instead of judgement and dismissiveness. This is one of the most important mindsets you can implement.

22. Everything starts with awareness. Even if it’s ugly at first, it’s crucial to change. I like to think of 2020 as the year of awareness. We became aware of many ugly issues which can then help us bring about change towards those issues.

23. Taking control of your technology is essential to better work, relationships, and health.

24. One of the most important things you can do to create lasting change is to change your identity and show up now as the person you want to become in the future.