January 9, 2020

Key Takeaways From The Last Decade

The 2010s took me from my mid-twenties to my mid-thirties. Being the free spirit that I am, I made a few resolutions over the years, but lacked the discipline required to meet the goal within a specific timeframe.

Instead, I lived the decade with a “go with the flow” mentality. However, I came to the conclusion that this was not a bad thing. Reflecting on 2019 and the decade as a whole, the macro view revealed I made leaps and bounds in my personal growth.

I attribute the following as driving factors behind this growth:

2012 – I got married and moved overseas.

2016 – I gave birth to my first child.

2019 – This transition year taught me resilience.

Here are the lessons I’m taking into the next decade.

With pain, comes growth.

Life decided to give me a taste of my own procrastinator medicine by cramming a ton of painful events in one year, at the end of the decade.

2019 felt as if every challenge I overcame was met with yet another challenge, with no end in sight.

I do have to give credit to Mark Manson, who convinced me that pain is necessary to mature in life and be a better human. His latest book, Everything is F*cked, reminded me that everyone will experience pain in life. However, suffering is always a choice.

The following quote also resonated with me:

“Material progress and security do not necessarily relax us or make it easier to hope for the future. On the contrary… by removing healthy adversity and challenge… people struggle even more… They see mountains where there are molehills.”
Manson, M. (2019). Everything is f*cked: a book about hope. New York, NY: Harper, an Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers.

Moreover, he mentions that most million dollar lottery winners don’t end up happy in the long run – on average, they end up feeling the same.

That being said, I’m teaching myself to accept pain in my life, learn from it, and be a better human because of it.

Hustle culture is cancelled.

I’m over the notion that success is a product of long working hours and doing “whatever it takes” at the expense of your physical health, mental health, and personal relationships.

Hustle culture can be motivating for some, but my experience in startups lead me to believe that it only benefits a select few – specifically, entrepreneurs who are working for themselves.

I did my fair share of hustling in the last decade. While I benefitted professionally some of the time, in reality, I was simply advancing someone else’s dream.

Job hunting will be my main focus in the first quarter of 2020. This time, I’m choosing to settle for more. My priorities have changed; my job no longer defines who I am.

Don’t over-optimize.

In the last decade, I was exposed to a lot of productivity and life hack articles on social media.

This resulted in me wanting to optimize certain aspects of my life to maximize efficiency and productivity. Who doesn’t want to live to their full potential? Who doesn’t want to achieve all of the things?

But because I’m extra, I feel pressure to not only find the optimal, but to produce perfection while I’m at it. In the end, I waste all this energy trying to make things perfect when it doesn’t even matter to people.

Avoiding perfection continues to be a work in progress for me. I look forward to accepting imperfections throughout the next decade.