thirty or something

I don’t really know what the canonical advice for your twenties is supposed to be. Here’s a short list of ones i’ve personally encountered.

1. Use your twenties to “discover” who you are.
2. Grind as hard as you can because you’ll never have the same level of agency and can rest in your thirties.
3. Date in your twenties, but don’t get married cause you’re too young.

None of these really stuck with me except for some advice I got back in 2017. I was an intern at code2040 and the cofounder Tristan Walker had decided to give a talk. He said that you can roughly think of your life in 3 phases. To start, you learn. Then you earn. And finally, you return.

In the moment, I got the sense that he meant each phase was mutually exclusive, but in reality, life is nonlinear and I often found myself doing some blended mix.

Despite that being the only time he spoke to us, or maybe because it was such a rare occasion, it stuck with me. In my twenties, I dedicated my time to trying to learn as much as I could about all the things I cared about.

I learned about startups by building and joining my own. I learned about what it means to be a great partner, by being in a long term relationship. I learned about real estate by buying a home, and then later investing in others.

But I also earned too! I earned battle scars and pain that only experience can teach. I earned my 1500 ELO in chess by losing thousands of games. I earned the right to call myself a baker after many failed attempts at making the perfect brownie. I even earned a new title: husband

So I guess the one thing I’m looking to do in this next phase of life is return what has overflowed from my community back to others.

Part of that is through teaching programming. But I also want to help people in other ways too. I’ve been thinking a ton about scholarships and will share more soon. All this AI talk these days makes me realize I should try and touch grass more and plant some trees. Most of all, I just want to do stuff that’s authentic to who I am. I’m not 100% sure what that looks like yet, but i’m figuring it out.

My hope is that this next decade will bring even more interesting opportunities to return time, energy, and effort into those I love and cherish most, as well as those i’ve never met before. I’m writing these words both as a prophecy for the future as well as a personal and public accountability mechanism to anyone else on the other side of the screen kind enough to read what I have to say.

God has immensely blessed my life, and I feel nothing but absolute gratitude, peace, happiness and joy to live the life that I do and I want nothing more than for those around me to feel the same.