1. Spend time with your girlfriends ~ Don't let your boyfriend or love interest monopolize all your time. Now's the time to enjoy your youth, your freedom [from heavy-duty commitment and responsibility] and your friends. As time passes, and you grow older, and grow into family life, you'll find less and less time for yourself and for time spent with your friends.
2. Start saving your money now ~ Its never too early to begin saving. Saving = good. Spend-thrifting = bad. Think of saving as paying yourself first.
3. Live by yourself [i.e. on your own] ~ It may seem lonely and solitary, at first, but it will prove a invaluable experience that will pay dividends later in your life. Make sure that you can meet the challenge of self-sufficiency, before entangling your life with someone else's.
4. Use birth control ~ Its definitely not as glamourous and easy as it seems to go through pregnancy and raise a child. If you want to get pregnant so you can have someone to love you unconditionally, then get a pet.
5. Travel, work abroad, spend time living abroad ~ Now - when you have none of the heavy-duty family responsibilities - you can afford the time, energy and cost of such an trip. Do it ~ you won't regret it.
6. Pay cash for everything, and if you can't, don't buy it ~ You will have hundreds of companies [department stores, banks, etc] convincing you that you need to get a credit card, a loan, or a line of credit from them. Ignore them. Refuse them. Bankruptcy and/or a poor credit rating will follow you around for longer than you can imagine. Don't mortgage your future opportunities for the present's tempting frivolities.
7. Forgive your parents for whatever you think they did wrong ~ They did the best they could. Parenting looks easy, until you get there. And, really, you'd end up wasting so much time and effort being angry. Get over it.
8. Take the career path that YOU want ~ Its likely going to make some waves when you tell your parents that you don't want to study X, but you want to study Z. Or when you tell them you have no interest in learning the family business. But, in the end, its your life. In the future you must live with the consequences of the choices you make now. Choose wisely and for the right reasons.
This means challenging my self to compassionate, encouraging, genuine and hostile-free exchanges. It also means contemplating my reaction to the thoughts, feelings and expressions of others, prior to acting upon them. 
2 comments:
aside from 2 and 7, i'd call that stellar advice.
the saving money bit i'm questioning now, unless you mean save it in a sock drawer. i guess i'm a bit pessimistic of our economy. it's not that i think it's getting worse, so much as i think it's going to collapse, sooner or later. i don't expect my savings to be there when i retire, so i've got to figure out a way to use them in a positive way before then. maybe i should give them all away to someone who really needs them.
on forgiving your parents, well, i guess it's a very individualized thing. some things really shouldn't be forgiven, regardless of good intentions. i think for me personally, forgiving my parents is a good thing, because they did alright by me. but i know too many people whose parents have been useless if not really harmful in their lives and they are better off without them.
great advice for any young person in their twenties ..
maybe i should show this to my 17 1/2 year old ..
actually i did do a lot of that ..
...which means in my late 40s i still have young 'uns ..
well, one's about to go off to university, but the other is only 11.
Post a Comment