30 Tips From a 30 Year Old

Published: May 25, 2025

Common sense isn't common practice

I recently turned 30.

That means I've spent roughly 38,45% of my time on this planet.

(I'm being optimistic about my life expectancy)

Since round numbers are always great for reflections, I've compiled a list of tips.

A bunch of advice I would give to my younger self.

Not that I would've listened to any of it..

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 it.

Most people care somewhat about their health, finances, and relationships. So, those are good places to start: your weight, your income, your expenses, etc.

Optionally expand to include time spent on screens, calories eaten, hours of exercise, weighted average bristol stool chart score, etc.

You know, the essentials.

https://loophabits.org/ is great to get started

Get (and stay) 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.

3–5 hours per week doing a sport you like is a good number, IMO.

Take care of your health sooner rather than later.

Combine this with:

Eat whole foods

80% of your diet should be 1-ingredient foods. Vegetables, eggs, meats, nuts, seeds, fruits, and others.

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

The keto-paleo crowd is mostly right.

Look at the ingredient list on the packaging. The fewer, the better!

The other 20% of the time, do whatever you like - I still eat a 1kg bag of chicken nuggets almost every saturday and it's great;

Learn a skill

Skills pay bills

The first level, to escape the race to the bottom, is to be able to do something that others cannot.

You can't negotiate yourself out of a bad bargaining position. No one has use for someone that has nothing to offer 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, persuade, repair,... you'll compete with far fewer people and get a better deal from the world.

Learning a skill that's difficult and high in demand ensures an above-average income and upward social mobility. It has saved my life.

Thank you capitalism!

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

Strive to go from employee ⇒ freelancer ⇒ business owner

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

Learn about your personality and strengths by doing personality test (MBTI, the big five ) or by reading books like Strengths finder 2.0 by Tom Rath or Managing Oneself by Peter F Drucker
Learn a skill you have a natural edge in, is difficult and high in demand
Work for someone else to get some experience and build a portfolio
Work for yourself by selling your time with that skill
Start a company solving a painful problem you've personally experienced with that skill. Either by building a product or hiring a team and delegating the actual work.

To remove your income from your time.

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 are just able to hide it better.

Scott H Young has some good resources on this topic and with chatGPT you can ask for "learning lists" that breakdown complex topic in smaller steps;

Low information diet

There are few things happening on social media that impact your life. We all get sucked into this over-engineered attention-seeking black hole of crapness optimized to trap our attention a few milliseconds longer.

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

Few social media accounts are worth owning (if any), own as few screens as possible, especially the addictive ones that don't serve you.

Read mostly pull-based, long-form information. Or don't read and just do. Aim for a life of output over input. Better to be the source of news than the consumer of it.

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

Here's some tips:

Use blockers. I use 3 separate social media blockers at the same time 🤷‍♂️
Install time limits (on laptop and phone)
Activate grayscale on your phone. Only have 1 home screen. Delete most apps
Make your phone more inconvenient. Remove or disable the browsers on your phone (Android, IOS).
Turn off all notifications and sounds
Remove social media accounts and apps from your phone. Delete accounts that don't add value. Quit social media
Have distractionless devices (e-reader, daylightcomputer, ...)
No news - I hate the news with a passion.

Join the quiet side.

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

Overall just;

Slow down

Single task

Eat without doing anything else

Drive slower

Go for a walk

Breathe.

Schedule big empty blocks in your calendar

Just less of everything.

Control your environment

It's a lot easier to make "good" choices if you set 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 mind to delay instant gratification for a better tomorrow.

The easiest way to achieve this, is by controlling the environment and making the good options plain and visible and removing the bad ones;

You watch less television if it's not in the living room
You read more books if you have a charged, portable e-reader with exciting books
You eat less cookies if they are not in the house
You scroll less on social media if you have 3 chrome extensions blocking them or if you don't have any accounts nor browsers;
You exercise more when it's close-by and your clothes are already in your car.

It's about stacking the odds in your favor instead of relying on willpower all the time.

Atomic Habits by James Clear is a great book on this.

Limit bad habits

It's almost impossible to completely eliminate bad habits: alcohol, junk food, smoking, porn, binge-watching, gambling, 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 temptation 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 watching television alone, not going on social media 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. To nudge yourself towards better options.

Have a plan

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, execute 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.

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

Research "productivity system" and the book "Getting things done" by David Allen

Be resilient

When you're sad, depressed, angry or feeling victimized nothing positive happens and nobody really cares. It's no use to throw a pity party for yourself.

Hardship is inevitable: financial disaster, death of loved ones, health issues, divorce, ... . But sitting there feeling sorry for yourself is not the solution. Temporary it's ok, but it's no place to remain.

Focus solely on the things you can do to change your situation, even if it's just changing perspective. Be able to bounce back from tragedy.

Look for a way to make things work. A new direction to invest mental energy into.

Believe you have agency over your own life. That your actions can make a difference. Do something, even if it's the wrong thing.

Sometimes at a low point, the best thing to do is bundle your limited energy and just do something.

To get the ball rolling and start to turn hardship around.

"Leashing the black dog" is a great article on resilience.

Look back - Look forward

Focus on wins, gratefulness and excitement in your life.

Do it deliberately.

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

It's worth remembering the days where we prayed for what we have today.

Focusing on gratitude will make you a better, more relaxed person instead of this frittery anxious grumpy 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.

During dinner we go around the table and sum up "the wins of the day". It helps turn bad days around and makes good ones even better.

Take risk early

When you're young, you have the most time and energy left to recover from bad decisions.

As you get older, you should become more conservative to avoid (financial) ruin.

Start a business, start a crazy project, invest in stocks, buy bitcoin, travel the world, live in a different country, ... .

Some choices are only available when you're young and you aren't burdened with responsibillities.

Avoid ruin

That being said; never bet the farm.

Find assymetric bets where the upside is large or unlimited and the downside is capped or limited.

Look for the small levers that can move big loads and work on these as early as possible:

Starting a business
Personal branding
DCA Investing
Reading
Coffee calls/networking

Avoid

Gambling
Excessive leverage
Health risks
Jail-time
Fatal career/reputation risk

Make backups

As more and more of our lives become digital, it's important to ensure we don't lose critical files like pictures, home movies or work references.

Google drive and icloud are great solutions for this.

Few things are worse than losing memories or large chunks of work. Your brain is a horrible place to store information.

To enjoy your past, is to live twice.

Flinch forward

Whenever you're scared of something but you can force yourself to do it anyway, you'll build 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. We're all mostly pre-occupied with ourself. The spotlight effect.

Strive to 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, post an article or video, ask a question in a large crowd, have the difficult talk, start the conversation, ... .

There's a lot 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.

Beware of lifes' traps

These mainly come 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 a lot 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 give ourselves the feeling we're progressing.

After a while, those expenses 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 and buying my first house (eg taking a risk).

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

Low expenses and buckets of leisure is the ultimate freedom; Not needing income.

Hedonic treadmill

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

Keep your life on "normal" mode and spend money on highlights that stand out, you'll be happier in the long-term.

Live a simple life.

Status games

Go for wealth and fulfillment instead of status;

Don't pick a job because the title sounds cool or the company looks great in the eyes of your friends. Do it because it pays well or is meaningfull. Prestige, power or authority are not rewards worth having.

Aim for wealth, set a target and quit when you've reached it.

Prioritize the important

It's ok to let 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.

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

Aim to live a life where most of the time is spent on the most important things.

Don't relegate your life to the margins, the leftover parts after doing the unimportant.

Read and walk daily

Yes I combined two here.

But this is my list and my site.

So I can pretty much do what I want.

sue me

Reading and walking are without a doubt the best habits for your mind and body respectively. No second best.

I go for a walk rigth after lunch and read in the morning.

Walking is great to clear your head and stop overthinking.

Reading makes me feel like there are no unsolvable problems, only books I haven't read yet.

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

Hobbies seem a thing of the past for most adults. Removing the defaults (phone, social media and television) creates the space for meaningful leisure.

I used to be heavy into video-games when I was younger, but over the years replaced this with playing boardgames.

It scratches the same itch but it's a much healthier alternative to relax.

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. Sleepy is great.
Invest in the right bedroom temperature, air quality, eye mask and ear plugs.
Have a consistent wake-up and bed time, even on weekends and holidays.
Read before bed
No phone/blue lights in the bedroom and no screens 1 hour before bed
Take naps

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.

Hey - I've worked for the Belgian tax office before - we all make mistakes.

But at some point in your career you'll be able to steer more towards a net-positive direction for the world. How small that might be.

Pick a problem you find important and help others solve it.

Reach out more

This is one of my weaknesses. Walking through life with blinders on, 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. The moments we shared as children and in school become increasingly scarce.

This is just a reminder that you should call or stop by. Take and pay for vacations together, live closer, remember birthdays, remember events, make an effort to remember names, send the damn text, make the call.

If needed, put it on the calendar.

Externalize your thinking

through writing or speaking.

The quality of my thinking improves when I write what's floating around in my head.

I make better decisions, can connect the dots better, am able to form better arguments for my beliefs.

I arrive at truth faster.

The less I write, the less I think.

And I'm not sure if it's even possible to do any less.

already hit rock bottom

Live a slightly uncomfortable life.

Get up a bit earlier than you want, eat a bit healthier than you want, do an extra rep in the gym when you don't feel like it, feel hunger, endure cold and rain, face exhaustion, overheat, ... .

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

Break the rules

It's true that it's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. Stop living as a sacrifice for others.

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

Figure out what is important, what is needed to achieve it and do it. Because people who do that are the only ones that make the difference.

Remember you're going to die

Ah yes, the "Memento mori"

Sit still for a moment and project in your mind the moment where your life will end.

Embrace the void of non-existence. Where you simply stop being.

Forever.

That moment is not that far away. For me only 60% left, at best.

Sit with that feeling for a few seconds every day and realize the utter insignificance of anything you fear.

Now go live .

That's all folks!

It's relatively common advice and that's for a simple reason; it's true. But I guess we all need reminders once-in-a-while to actually make common sense, common practice.

All these things are easier said than done and probably will take another 30 years to master. Surely the much smarter 40-year old Simon will have figured it all out by then.