How to make the most of your 20s

From a freelancer of 14 years, artist, lifestyle brand founder, corporate renegade, and 3x college dropout.

Over a steaming bowl of Korean bone broth soup, I had lunch with a recent 24-year-old college graduate. We caught up on three years worth of life updates.

My young friend was concerned that she wasn't using her hard-earned degree. And after having worked two jobs outside of her field of study, wasn't sure if she wanted to continue.

She asked me, "How did you make working for yourself sustainable?"

The question made me smile. Because the truth is, I'm still working on it. In fact, I’ll be working on it until the day I die.

But since she asked, I made my best attempt to share what I know.

I realized that what’s gotten me here are the countless experiments and mistakes I made in my twenties.

How to make the most of your 20s

From a freelancer of 14 years, artist, lifestyle brand founder, corporate renegade, and 3x college dropout.

Expand and explore

Your twenties are a time for expansion and discovery. Being anxious about not knowing your place in the world is a waste of time & energy.

Yes, you've studied something for many years, but for most college grads, there isn't a lot of first-hand experience to inform your world — yet.

So use your twenties to pursue different interests and find out everything you can about the world around you. Travel if you can. And if you can't go very far, take small adventures to different neighborhoods where you can see how other people live.

Go to the nicest neighborhood you can find and post up at a park or coffee shop and eavesdrop on conversations. Then take the bus in a rougher neighborhood and listen to what the people on the bus are talking about and how they live.

Explore as much as possible without putting yourself in danger. If riding the bus sounds scary to you, don't do that right away. The point is to get out of your comfort zone and immerse yourself in someone else's life.

Do something hard

Some of us are presented with huge challenges starting from the time we were born. Others have it a bit easier. But in any case, your twenties are a time for challenging yourself even further.

A reminder: Because everyone starts from a different place, challenges look different for everyone. So never compare your challenges to someone else's.

If it feels difficult and scary to you, it's a good challenge.

For me, I was always awkward and shy. So one of my biggest challenges was just making conversations and being friendly. And that was honestly really hard and scary.

For someone else, their biggest challenge might be making peace with their parents for not being there for them as a kid.

And for another, it might be climbing a huge mountain in record time, making a YouTube video, or writing 100 blog posts.

Don't take on something so hard that you give up. Increase your tolerance for challenges by doing small challenges at first until they don't feel so hard. Follow your own compass and pursue the things that make your heart flutter.

Know yourself

Every philosopher from Socrates to Sun Tzu teaches self-knowledge. And maybe you're tired of hearing it, but it’s the most important skill you can cultivate in your twenties.

However, there's a small problem. If you're a young college graduate, chances are you haven't had the time or the opportunity to explore all that much. And I don't just mean destinations, I mean emotional and spiritual places too.

Think about it: from the moment you're a functional human being, you're put into the school system for nine months out of the year. You have supervised summers where you're told what you can and can't do, and then you go to college where you live in a bubble with other college students and immerse yourself in learning the same stuff as everyone else.

And you think you're going to come out of that knowing what you're made of? I certainly didn't.

I got so sick of being in the bubble that I left the country to study abroad. When I got there, I made friends with the locals instead of sticking with our little group of exchange students. It's true, I got the side-eye from a lot of other students because I was living a totally different experience than they were. But I learned so much about the place and saw all these different perspectives that the university exchange program never could have offered me.

By getting to know different places and the people who occupied those places, I also got to know more about myself. I understood more about who I could tolerate, my responses to certain emotions, and what I should consider "normal."

But just because I understood myself didn't mean I was this great person who was tolerant and had appropriate responses, I still had to work on all that. Knowing and understanding are half the battle, and then you need the humility and courage to get to work on yourself.

It's all connected

All three of these points work together and are part of an endless cycle. As you pursue your interests and take on new challenges, notice your motivations and see how your emotions affect your behavior. Now you've learned something about yourself and you can carry that lesson on to the next challenge.

By continuing to pursue what you think you're interested in, your interests will change as you move along. You'll find that you're interested in a great number of fields much wider than what you initially thought, and the more you learn about each one, you'll begin to understand how they relate to one another.

‘Til the next steaming bowl of delicious broth,
Keep climbing.