What I Would Tell My 22-Year-Old Self

I've been reflecting quite a bit about life and death, because we all die, some sooner and others later. As I look back on my life, including how my personal and professional decisions shaped my career path, I wonder what bit of wisdom I would pass on to a younger version of me, fresh out of college.

Here are eight things I would tell my 22-year-old self.

(1) Invest in your company's 401(k) as soon as you get the chance.

Start this on day one. It's one of the easiest ways to build wealth, because your employer is essentially handing you free money by matching what you contribute, typically 3% to 5% of your salary. Walking away from that match is walking away from a raise you've already earned. The earlier you start, the more time compound growth has to work in your favor, so don't wait until you feel "settled" to begin.

(2) Open a brokerage account today, in addition to your 401(k).

Once you've maxed out your 401(k) contribution limit, open a taxable brokerage account (Fidelity, Schwab, Vanguard, Betterment, and Wealthfront are all solid options) and keep investing as much as you can. Stick with a low-cost, broadly diversified, market-tracking index fund, something like an S&P 500 fund, or a target-date retirement fund. You don't need to pick stocks or time the market. You need time in the market, and the discipline to keep contributing whether things are up or down.

(3) Take three or four business courses to understand how business actually works.

A community college is a smart, affordable place to do this. I'd recommend Financial Accounting, Marketing, Organizational Behavior, and Business Management or Strategy. Doing this will help you grasp the fundamentals of how organizations make decisions, spend money, and treat people. That foundation will serve you no matter what field you end up in.

Getting your financial house in order and picking up some business literacy will put you ahead of most people your age. But money and mechanics are only part of the story. The harder, more important lessons are the ones about how you choose to live, and those took me a lot longer to learn.

(4) Don't follow other people's recipes for your life.

My parents had my future mapped out before I even understood what I wanted: medical school, then a career as a physician. I spent much of college taking pre-med courses I hated, and my unhappiness bled into the classes I actually liked. I was lost, afraid, and too embarrassed to tell anyone I felt that way. It took me until my third year of college to finally call off the MCAT tutor and admit I never wanted to go to medical school. That decision cost me the comfort of a known path, but it opened the door to everything that came after, including a job on a small island in the Pacific that I never would have taken had I stayed on my parents' script, and where I met the woman who became my wife.

It's your life, and you must live it and follow your own truth, no matter how long the road takes or how many zigzags and U-turns you have to make along the way.

(5) Feel the fear and do it anyway.

Often, the answers to our problems are already inside of us. We usually know what we should do, we're just too afraid to do it. That was true for me in 2004, when I left a stable life in Dallas to take a crisis intervention training job on Saipan, a tiny island in the Northern Mariana Islands, thousands of miles from home. I had no guarantee it would work out. What pushed me forward wasn't confidence so much as recognizing that the fear of staying still had become worse than the fear of taking the leap. That decision changed the entire direction of my career and my personal life. Whether it's changing careers or making some other tough call, you already know what you need to do. Don't let fear and doubt talk you out of doing it.

(6) There's no shortcut to success.

There's no such thing as overnight success. Every version of it you admire from the outside was built on years of unglamorous effort, and it doesn't hurt to have some luck and good timing along the way. My own "overnight success" took more than two decades of confusion, false starts, and hard work to arrive. Success requires a smart plan, real dedication, consistency, and patience, but it also requires two things people talk about less: the willingness to adapt as the world changes around you, and a genuine openness to learning, even after you think you've figured things out. Layer in luck and good timing, which matter more than most of us like to admit, and you have a realistic picture of how success actually gets built. It's rarely a straight line, and it's never as fast as it looks from the outside.

(7) You will go through lots of no's before getting to your yes.

On the way to yes, there will be no's. You have to go through them to get to your yeses. I once flew across the country for a dream job interview, missing my daughter's Christmas program to do it, and sat across from a hiring manager who showed up in sweatpants and told me he'd rather be out shopping. I didn't get that job. A year later, almost to the day, I was in a role I loved, one that turned out to be far better suited to me than that first opportunity ever would have been. The mistake most people make is getting discouraged by the no's and quitting before the yes arrives. Every no you hear isn't a dead end, it's one step closer to the right yes.

(8) A positive attitude and expectation will set the right tone for your life.

You can change your life by changing your attitude and your perspective. I know this because I used to be a chronic complainer, the kind of person who noticed everything that wasn't working and made sure everyone knew it. It took a friend's blunt question, and years of deliberately retraining my thinking, to break that habit. In "The Happiness Advantage," Shawn Achor describes a technique called the Tetris Effect, a way of training your mind to notice the positive instead of the negative. Achor cites a study in which people who wrote down three good things each day for a week were still happier and less depressed one month, three months, and even six months later. Attitude isn't a minor detail. It's the lens that shapes how you experience everything else on this list.

Takeaway

Looking back across all eight of these, I notice they fall into two categories that reinforce each other. The first three items are about building a financial foundation early: contribute to your 401(k), invest consistently in a brokerage account, and learn the basic language of business. None of that requires talent or luck, just the discipline to start now instead of later, because time is the one ingredient compound growth can't do without.

The remaining five are about building the kind of person who can actually use that foundation well. You have to be willing to walk your own path instead of someone else's, even when that path is unclear. You have to act in spite of fear, because clarity rarely comes before the leap, only after it. You have to accept that meaningful success takes years, not months, and that luck and timing play a bigger role than we like to admit. You have to keep going through the no's, trusting that they are clearing the way to the right yes rather than proving you don't belong. And underneath all of it, you need an attitude that expects good things, because that expectation is often what gives you the energy to keep showing up.

If I could hand my 22-year-old self one sentence, it would be this: start investing in your future today, in every sense of the word, financially, professionally, and in who you're becoming, and trust that the zigzags along the way are not a sign you're off course. They usually are the course.

Written By: Steve Nguyen, Ph.D.

Organizational & Leadership Development Leader