Two days from now, I'll turn 25.
I don't know if that's supposed to feel like anything in particular, but it feels like a decent excuse to write down what I've actually learned instead of what I was told to expect. Some of this is practical, some of it is hard-earned, and one or two of these cost more than I'd like to admit.
In no particular order of importance, except the last one, which is the whole point:
Nothing will ever beat the feeling of turning 0 into 1. Be it a business, a painting, or whatever. Everything after that is refinement. The first time is the drug.
It's way easier to make more money than to save more of it. Get a promotion, change jobs, start a business, sell a product. Saving is a ceiling, earning is not. Focus on earning more.
Learning marketing and sales may not make you rich, but it will ensure you'll never be poor. Probably the highest-ROI activity I've dedicated myself to so far.
As knowledge and product get commoditized through AI, the only real differentiators left are competence and distribution. Everyone has access to information now, but fewer and fewer people are actually competent. Everyone can build, but building a distribution channel for what you build is getting harder every year. The people who win the next decade will be the ones who own the relationships, while the ones who only focus on product will lose.
Given how far AI and agentic workflows have come, betting on yourself now has a higher expected return than anything listed on an exchange. If you'd rather put your money into stocks than into yourself right now, you're either blind or stupid.
In 2026, not being on X means being left out. I wouldn't have the career, the audience, or the network I have now without the people I've met on this platform. It's directly responsible for some of the best relationships and opportunities of my life.
Reputation is the most important asset you will ever own. So much of what's now possible for me only became possible because of personal connections and reputation. A month ago I got to talk one-on-one with an entrepreneur who's exited five companies, purely because he's a close friend of a friend I met through X. That doesn't happen without reputation doing the work in the background.
Friends and business are not to be mixed, and if you absolutely have to, write the contracts black on white.Everyone thinks they don't need one. Everyone finds out otherwise eventually.
Stay away from cheaters. Not just for your love life, in business too. Someone who's shown you they can betray one kind of trust will show you again in another form.
Not pursuing a master's degree made my career unnecessarily difficult. But the difficulty is what forced me to work harder, get creative, and find ways around the system that rejected me. I honestly believe my whole path into business and self-employment is 30% personality and 70% "the system said no, so I built my own door". I don't know if I'd have the audience, the business, or the network I have now if Blackstone had just hired me out of university.
I used to judge people by how many long-term friendships they'd kept. I don't anymore. Not everyone grows at the same pace, and the further I get, the more I watch people around me outgrow their old circles: that's not a flaw, it's just growth. What I look at instead now: how long their business partnerships last, and if they're not in business, what their relationship looks like. I have a hard time trusting a man who cheats, or has cheated, and a total absence of any stable relationship, without a genuinely good reason, is a red flag I don't ignore anymore.
Time passes fast, and the gap between people who invest it well and people who don't becomes impossible to ignore. I work a lot, and my opportunities keep expanding because of it. Exponentially, not linearly. Meanwhile, I'm already watching people I grew up with clearly peak in high school.
I've become ruthless with how I spend my time. Between studying, MGCB, Quartz Sea, and building a personal brand, there's less and less of it to go around. Communication with me gets slower and more asynchronous the less someone's presence adds to my life.
I've reached the point where I don't argue with people anymore. They're not going to change their mind, and my energy is worth more spent elsewhere.
Studying for, and nearly finishing, the CFA taught me something, and showed everyone around me the same thing: if you actually want to do something, you find a way to do it.
There are only a few years after university where you can hyper-gamble your life into something big. The window closes faster than anyone expects, and the shift from "you're young, you'll figure it out" to "why haven't you figured it out yet" comes sooner than you think. It's not that failing in that window is the end, it isn't, but succeeding in a meaningful way only gets harder from there. I don't love that this is true. I just haven't found evidence that it isn't.
Quitting your job for your business makes no sense until the business is paying you more than your job, consistently. Your salary is the cheapest, lowest-risk capital you'll ever have access to. Use the runway it gives you before you burn the bridge. And it's more efficient to get fired, than to quit.
Meditating matters, and it matters more the more you work. It's the difference between reacting to a bad day and actually getting through it clear-headed. If you feel like you don't have the time to meditate, that's your sign you have to start doing it.
I haven't properly exercised since March, and the hit on my productivity, mood, and general enjoyment of life is obvious. Everything else costs more without it. I'm still not fixing it fast enough.
Having a girlfriend who genuinely loves you changes your quality of life more than almost anything else. Close behind: quality sleep, and being in control of your own time.
When you're a kid, most of your time goes to your parents. Then you grow up, and most of it goes to your friends. Then you start working, and most of it goes to being alone, or to your partner. I'm about to move in with my girlfriend, and this has never felt more true.
Your parents tried their best. Nobody teaches you how to be a good parent. They probably made mistakes, and we probably would have made more in their shoes.
Spending money on things never gives the same satisfaction as spending it on experiences. I bought a new motorbike this year, traveled, upgraded my life, moved into a new house. I love all of it. But the $20 grill with friends at the beginning of the Summer beats all of these.
One of my closest friends died this year. Nothing prepares you to watch someone you looked up to get sick, and then disappear. I don't know what he was thinking about in his final months. But I hope it wasn't the money, or the grades. I hope it was his mom and dad, and how much he loved his girlfriend. It's changed how seriously I let myself take the rest of this list. Memento mori.
Watch the sun rise, and be thankful you get another day. No problem is a real problem. Have fun. In the end, the people who have the most fun win.
25 down.
Here's to whatever the next 25 teach me.