30. 30 Tips After 30 Years of Living

One of the most oft asked questions on one of my favourite podcasts is “what advice would you give your 30 year old self?”. If you’re wondering, it’s The Tim Ferriss Show, which has over 1 billion downloads, so it’s not just me who’s taking note.

The reason I think of this today is because I turn 30 tomorrow. This being the case, I can’t help but contemplate the fact that for many of the world’s top performers across all arenas, 30 years old was barely the beginning. Personally, I find this incredibly encouraging.

I would say it’s the feeling of being at the start of a runway that I have right now. I feel like my feet are still on the ground and there’s a lot of speed that I need to gather if I want to take off and go anywhere. Currently, there’s a few different directions I feel I could end up going, but if you’ve been reading my blogs, you know that I’ve got to just gather some speed and go if I ever want to get somewhere meaningful.

At the same time, the only reason I’m encouraged by the lure of various possible futures is because of what I’ve already done and accomplished in 29 years. There’s much to come, and much to do, but looking backwards at a time like this has always been effective. Measuring backwards is a tool I learned from Dan Sullivan’s “The Gap and The Gain”, and if you’re ever at a point of reflection for yourself, I highly recommend you dive into that text to strategically frame what you’ve learned so far.

Taking what you can from everything you experience is an underused ability that we all have. Every day can teach us something, and even though I may still be on the runway, there’s plenty of things I’ve learned that have served me well up to this point. So, I’d like to share 30 of those things with you as I pass this milestone.

Before I get to that, you might be curious to know what answer is most commonly given to the question “what advice would you give your 30 year old self?”. Invariably, the answer is some adaptation of chill out. Naturally, I wonder if that’s what I need to do. There are things that are at a heightened awareness that probably don’t need to be and I spend time worrying about things that probably don’t matter. What do I know anyway, I’m only 30.

Whatever the case, I’m confident that the following 30 tips have paid dividends for me and that being the case, it’s reasonable to suspect they may be useful for you too. This isn’t a “how to be successful” list and what’s worked for me won’t work or even be applicable to everyone, so like my pal Jim Rohn would say (probably), read this list of tips, have a look around for others, circle the ones you like, cross out the ones you don’t, then make your own list.

Without further rambling, here are 30 tips for life I’ve found useful before my 30th birthday, in no particular order of importance.