I recenty turned 30.

I know, I know.

You must be thinking: "GOD Simon, you're such and old man now"

And in truth, I am.

I can only imagine what being 40 must feel like.

OR MORE

Oh god, the horror.

Anyway.

Since I've spent roughly 38,45% (I'm optimistic about my life expectation) of my time on this planet, it's only fair that I share my vast wisdom with you.

Behold:

Track what you want to improve.

It's cliché, but just the simple act of monitoring what you want to improve, makes it improve. Your behaviour changes (for the better) once you start monitoring what matters.

Most people care somewhat about their health, finances and relationships. So proxies for those are a good place to start.

Your weight, your income, your expenses, ... .

Optionally expand to others you care about: time spent on screens, kcals eaten, hours/times of exercise, number of times you take a poop, bristol stool chart score, ... .

You get the picture.

https://loophabits.org/ is great for this

Get in shape

As early in your life as possible and stay there.

Maintaining an in-shape state is a lot easier than having to get there. The body you graduate with - for many - is often the one you get to maintain later in life when there's less time to prioritize this.

Being in shape makes all the rest easier: Moving, walking, playing, talking, thinking, social activities. You're just more able to fully enjoy the depth and breadth of activities in life.

That doesn't mean you need the body of a greek god and carbs are forbidden, it just means that you're not tired after 1 flight of stairs.

3-5 hours per week of working on your health is a good number IMO.

80% of your diet should be 1-ingredient foods.

Also called "whole foods".

This is basically when you look at the ingredients list and you only see one thing.

Like happy mr cucumber man here.

There's many ways to approach food, but this golden rule pretty much sums up all best advice on nutrition.

Learn a rare and valuable skill

Skills pay bills

To escape the race to the bottom, be able to do something that others cannot.

You can't negotiate yourself out of a bad bargaining position. No-one hires someone that has nothing to offer to the world.

If the only thing you're able to do, can be taught in less than a day, you'll compete with the entire world.

If you can paint, plumb, lay electrical wire, you'll compete with far less people and get a better deal from the world.

Learning a skill ensures an above average income and upward social mobillity and has significantly improved my quality of life.

Thank you capitalism! 🤑

After that, you should capture more of the value you're providing by cutting out the middle-men and (ideally) removing yourself from the equation. This puts you in the drivers' seat of your career and finances.

Go from employee -> freelancer -> business owner

Instead of listening to the "follow your passion" advice, focus on:

1. Learn what your personality is/strenghts are by doing some personality tests like MBTI, the big five or read books like Strengthsfinder 2.0 by Tom Rath or Managing Oneself by Peter F Drucker
2. Learn a skill you have a natural edge in
3. Work for someone else to get some experience and build a portfolio
4. Start your own company by solving a problem you deeply understand.

Learn how to learn

The world is advancing fast, whether you like it or not. The only skill that you really need is the one to learn new ones.

It's infuriating, exhausting, but the truth.

It might feel as if everyone else knows what they're doing and you're the only one struggling. But that's nowhere near the truth. Everyone else is playing infinite catch-up as-well.

Some just hide it better.

Control your environment as early as possible in life

What I mean by this, is that it's a lot easier to make "good" choices if you can control the options. When you remove the bad options from your environment, it's easier to stick to the actions you want to take.

We all fight this eternal battle against our monkey brain/lower self to push our life in a better direction (eating healthier, exercising more, less screen-time, more focused work, ...).

The best way to go about this is to control the environment and make the good options plain and visible and simply remove the bad ones;

You eat less cookies if the cookie jar isn't in front of you the entire time

• You don't eat cookies if you don't have them in the house
• You watch less television if it's not in the living room
• You read more books if you have a portable e-reader with 1000 books on it
• You scroll less on social media if you have 3 chrome extensions blocking them
• ...

Read The Power Of Habit by James Clear.

Have a goal-setting, goal-tracking and feedback loop to build a life by design.

Lead a life by design by writing down your goals. Find a way to keep that plan in front of you, come back to it regularly, do and track the actions needed to achieve them and correct-course as you go along.

Be a boat heading in a certain direction, not a leaf in the wind living life in default mode.

I usually set 3 month goals and think about them sunday morning and list some next actions for the week to take.

There's many ways to go about this. Read up on goal-setting.

Trying to figure out where to spend your time is the biggest challenge in life. It's worth spending some time really getting a system going for this.

Take ownership of your life.

When you're sad, depressed, angry or feeling victimized nothing positive happens and nobody really cares.

Focus solely on the things you can do to change your situation. Be able to bounce back quickly from negative events; To catch yourself when you fall down instead of smacking your face on the ground.

Look for a way to make things work. Believe you have agency over your own life. That your actions can make the difference.

Find a way.

Focus on wins, gratefulness and excitement in your life

We all want many things. But in the pursuit of wanting, we often forget that what we already have. Always pushing forward and not really savouring the moments as they pass.

Focusing on gratitude will make you feel more at ease instead of this frittery anxious gremlin.

I keep an irregular journal where I write the things that went well for that day, the things I'm grateful for having already and what I look forward to in the future.

Incorporate a journal for some "memory happiness".

To enjoy your past, is to live twice.

Flinch forward

Whenever you're scared of something but you're able to do it anyway, you'll get the confidence to do hard(er) things.

Most things in life aren't that impactful and nobody really cares that much about what you're doing anyway.

Be the person that's able to do the scary or uncomfortable things in life: make the call, pick up the phone, give the presentation, ask a question in a large crowd, have the difficult talk, start the conversation, ... . Have the courage to be a bit unconvential.

There's plenty to fear in life, but we're mostly scared of the wrong things.

If you're not courageous to do the small unimportant things in life, you won't be ready for the important things when they appear.

Have a low information diet

There is nothing happening on social media that's important in your life. We all get sucked into this attention seeking black hole of crapness optimized to trap us a few milliseconds longer.

Especially now with all the AI-slop that's being automatically generated it's more important than ever to guard your attention.

Few social media accounts are worth owning (if any), own as few screens as possible, especially the addictive ones made to line the pockets of others instead of serving you.

Mute the nitpickers, block the outraged, like the kind, follow the insightful - Naval Ravikant

Here's some tips:

• Use blockers
• Time limits (on laptop and phone)
• Grayscale on your phone. Only have 1 home screen
• Turn off all notifications
• Remove social media accounts and apps from your phone
• Have distractionless devices (e-reader, daylightcomputer, ...)
• No news

The days I manage to be clueless of the world are so damn blissful. Join the quiet side.

Beware of lifes' traps

This mainly comes down to avoiding what I think are some of the main "traps" in life that even smart people fall for.

High fixed expenses

The smartest thing I’ve done over the past few years is to avoid raising my expenses dramatically. I lived in a co-housing after college, bought an older second-hand car, ate in most of the time which enabled me to build a savings buffer to take larger risks. It's insidious how an advancing career path can push you each year into a slightly bigger flat, slightly nicer restaurants, a slightly nicer car, watch, gadgets or whatever to impress others.

After a while those add up and you're chained to your income-level which limits your flexibillity in the future. You can't "quit" anymore because you're chained to the expenses of your inflated lifestyle. If I hadn't done that, I might not have had the financial buffer needed to start freelancing (eg taking a risk).

There's no amount you can earn that can outrun your spending.

Hedonic treadmill

This one is closely linked to the one above. By continuously upgrading your lifestyle, you'll keep needing bigger and bigger stimulants to top the previous ones. It's a race you can't win since you need to increase the pace everytime.

If you keep your life on a "normal/ok" level and spend your money on highlights/experiences that really stand out, you'll be happier in the long-term. Live a simple life.

Status games

Go for wealth instead of status; Don't pick a job because the title is cool or the company looks great in the eyes of your friends. Do it because it pays well. Status games where prestige, power or authority is the prize are not rewards worth having.

Get rich enough to be able to quit any game.

Prioritize the important: your health, finances and social life

It's fine to let the dishes grow mold and attract rats in the sink for a week if it means you'll meet up with friends and get an additional workout in. At least that's how I feel about it.

Balance is tough, but if happiness and life quality is the goal, most of your focus should be relentlessly on these 3. Chores and admin can wait.

Don't perfect what's already above-average either. Your life quality won't improve dramatically from reducing 8% body-fat to 6%, by growing your wealth from 100 million to 200 million or from 100k followers to 200k followers.

Look for what will move the needle.

Read and walk daily.

Yes those are two, but this is my list and my site + I have a permit:

Reading and walking are arguably the best habits for your mind and body respectively.

Read non-fiction in the morning for learnings and fiction for relaxation in the evening.

Have a (social) hobby

If you're not an outgoing person. You know, the strange type of person that reads (or writes) articles online: Have a social hobby.

Having a hobby forces you to level-up your leisure and (more importantly) minimizes the evenings spent netflix binging or browsing reddit.

I used to be heavy into video-games as a means of escapism but was able to replace this by regularly playing boardgames. It scratches the same itch but it's a much healthier alternative to relax.

Your spare time is more than the prologue or epilogue for your work-time.

Maximize your sleep.

Having good sleep changes everything for the better. It is is the single most important thing you can optimize your days for.

Here's some tips:

• Buy a great mattress. Invest into the right bedroom temperature, air quality, eye mask and ear plugs.
• Have a consistent wake-up and bed time, even on weekends and holidays.

Be an optimist.

Life inherently is pointless and we make it meaningful by just choosing a direction to walk in. But many don't start walking, complaining about what is, instead of building what could be.

It's easy to discount the future based on current trends and under-estimate the solutions we can make through innovation.

• Oil reserves were predicted to run out before fracking was discovered
• The hole in the Ozone layer was predicted to cause more cancers before innovation replaced HFC's with CFC's

Be hopeful - Force yourself to be hopeful. It's needed to enjoy life to see the future as worthwhile and better than the past. There's always a direction you can grow in.

Be a techno-optimist. See the positives that come from innovation and build the change you want to see in the world;

It's never the critic that counts, nor the one that's making the difference.

Be useful - do good

Be a net asset to society. You don't have to revolutionize the world, but don't strive to make it worse if you can.

This isn't always easy when you're focused on just putting food on the table, but at some point in your career you'll be able to steer your towards a net-positive direction for the world.

Whatever "good" means to you.

Nestlé, McDonalds and Coca Cola, I'm looking at you.

Fence in your vices.

It's almost impossible to completely eliminate all temptations: alcohol, junk food, smoking, drugs, ... .

God knows I've tried.

And everyone is entitled to at least one way to escape when life becomes overwhelming, because eventually it will.

But it's more about adding boundaries for yourself to not let any individual one completely consume you.

• Substitute non-ideal habits for better ones. eg; replacing video games for boardgames,
• Create simple rules: only watch x number of episodes of a serie, not eating desserts, not touching your phone before lunch, ...
• Add friction to bad habits (move the television out of the living room, make a separate closet with all the unhealthy food, add blockers to reduce social media)

It's about putting boundaries and rules between you and your temptations.

Take risk early

When you're young, you have the most time and energy left to recover from bad decisions. As you get older, become more conservative to avoid (financial) ruin.

Start a business, invest more in stock vs bonds, buy some bitcoin, try new experiences, move out of your country, ... .

Live laterally, try many things before you dive deep into 1 thing.

Make backups.

Especially pictures are irreplaceable. Or trust a cloud provider to handle that part for you. Nothing is worth losing precious memories over.

Google photos or icloud storage are really cheap these days.

Few things are worse than losing all your memories.

Reach out more

This is one of my weaknesses. Living with eye shutters looking forward, failing to notice my surroundings.

Tim Urban explained it well in his article "the tail end" . As we grow older, we increasingly have less moments left with family and friends. People die, move away and overall get more busy with their lives.

This is just a reminder that you should call or stop by. Remember birthdays, remember important events, make an effort to remember names. If needed, put them in the calendar.

People with strong social ties live longer, healthier and happier lives.

Being part of a community is a better survival strategy then focusing solely on yourself. People look out for each other, but nobody helps the unhelpful.

Know how things work

You'll be able to save a lot by just knowing basic DIY skills: Basic electronics, painting, hanging cabinets, basic car/house maintenance, first aid, camping.

It's great to be able to pull back the curtain on things that otherwise feel like magic to us.

Crystallize your thinking by writing or speaking.

The quality of my thinking improves when I write the things down that are floating around in my head. I make better decisions, can connect the dots better.

It's basically a way to think better by externalizing your thoughts. Sharpening them to a point.

Live a slightly uncomfortable life.

Get up a bit earlier than you want, eat a bit healthier than you want, do a repetition extra in the gym when you don't feel like it, skip a meal, endure some cold or rain ... .

It's better to be used to discomfort and be suprised by comfort than the other way around.

Break the rules.

You know, break the mold once in a while. When people expect 30 tips, give 'em 31.

I'm talking real crazy stuff

Overall, just do what you think is needed. It's true that it's easier to ask for forgiveness than permissions for actions on the edge. Stop living as sacrifice for others.

Agressively pursue what you want out of life and ignore the rules that stand in the way.

That's all folks!

All these things are easier said than done and probably will take another 30 years to master.

Good luck!