Your early 20s are some of the best and worst years of your life.

There’s a lot of exciting new things you haven’t tried yet and it often feels like you’re experiencing many things for the first time. However, it’s also a stressful time where you have to make certain decisions and choices that will determine the next decade or two of your life.

Today, I’m going to share with you the best decisions I made in my early 20s. These are things I can look back on and say, “I’m glad I did.” Genuinely glad, because my life would be very different if I chose differently - I wouldn’t even be sitting here talking to you right now.

So if you’re currently in your early 20s, I hope that hearing the way things have panned out for me can help you with the decisions you have to make.

Deciding to Travel Young

Throughout my life, I knew I wanted to travel. I had gone around the states many times with my family, but I’d never been outside the country alone or with my friends. So in 2019, when the opportunity came to go to Korea and Japan, I went.

But it wasn’t anything like I had expected it to be.

I’ll share one of the good things first. This trip to South Korea marked the beginning of my photography journey - which is basically why this entire channel exists. This was when I really got interested in photography and started to take photos with real intention. Now I sucked, mind you, but I was having a lot of fun and I was able to come back with a few gems. Some of the photos I took on this trip, I’ve been able go back, revisit, and sell as prints. So fast forward 4 years and here I am, knee deep in photography, building my first photobook, and sharing the things I learn with you guys. And it all started the moment I left to explore something new.

So that was one of the many great things that came from this trip, but there were a lot of down moments as well. During that trip, I spent a week solo in Japan and that was the first time I’d ever felt any form of “homesickness”. Now I’m typically a reclusive person and I enjoy being alone but being in a country where you know no one, all the streets are unfamiliar, and you don’t speak the language has it’s own kind of feeling to it. To make things worse, there was a typhoon happening at the time, and I can remember running, drenched in rain, trying to catch a bus to get to my hostel as I went from Osaka to Kobe because all the trains were shut down. It’s as if the weather was reflecting my mood at the time.

All of this is to say that traveling gives a window into learning about the world and learning about yourself. For me, it not only spurred my creative interests, desires, and motivations but it also taught me to appreciate the place I came from.

If you’re thinking about traveling, do it now while you’re young. Do it now before you become bogged down by the responsibilities of work and life. You might be thinking “I can always travel later”, but really there is only one opportunity to travel when you’re 21 or 22. Going to Japan when you’re 40 will not be the same as going to Japan when you’re 20. If you wait, the experience will be different, you will be different, and the world will be different.

Deciding Not to Go to Grad School

Back in 2018, I had just graduated college with a degree in exercise science. I was on route to be a physical therapist: I did the intern hours, took the tests, took the extra classes, and even started a Youtube channel to practice my speaking and teaching of dense information. I can even remember staying up one night, sitting in the room of my hostel in Korea, finalizing and submitting my applications. So I was basically there - knocking at the front door of my future life. But I didn’t get in… - which sucked.

So now I was stuck with a big decision of: do I take another year to reapply or do I try something new and do something else?

One of the caveats I had given myself when doing this grad school thing was that I only had one shot. I only get one round of applications - as a way to make sure I gave it my all. And I could have easily broken that commitment and went for another round but I didn’t want to turn my back on what I had promised myself. So maybe deep down I knew I wanted to do something different.

Ultimately, I decided to close the door on grad school and explore other things. The YouTube channel I had been focused on had been much more enriching and fun for me. And this was before I got any views. Making weekly videos spurred my creativity and when I got into photography, I wanted to make photography videos. Which is why I started this channel. And that’s when I began to receive a lot of support from you guys. It was something that felt like the first step in the right direction after many years of making videos that no one watched. So in many ways, your support is what really kept me going.

Obviously it wasn’t easy, but I think deciding not to go to grad school gave me a better path overall. One of the pains and struggles of making content and taking photos, is that it feels like a useless occupation. But it’s also one of the most rewarding things to build something that interests you on your own accord. If I think about what life would have been like had I gone the other route, it probably would have been interesting and fun in its own right. But things are so good now - I can’t complain.

So if there’s something you wanna do, something you wanna start, just take the first step. There is no path in life that is clear - but there is a path. And these things only make sense looking backwards. You’re in your early 20s. Meaning that this is the time to try those riskier things and aim for those riskier goals that may seem out of reach. If you want to start the YouTube channel, build the business, try anything else besides the path you’re “supposed to” be on, just do it. The consequences now are the lowest they’ll ever be.

Deciding to Focus on Myself (the most)

One of the big problems people face is worrying about what others think of them. And some people figure it out, but many never do. It’s especially hard if you’re in your early 20s, because that’s when you’re in college, surrounded by your peers, and you want people to like you. But the fact of the matter is, no one’s really thinking about you in the first place. Everyone’s just thinking about themselves. Which isn’t a bad thing. Really it just means that you have to be the one that takes responsibility for your own happiness and fulfillment and to not expect to get it from other places.

Much of this I’m still learning. I was always the type of person to care about self-improvement and becoming better at what I do but it wasn’t until I first deleted Snapchat that I realized just how much other people affected my life. This must’ve been way back in 2017, but I can still remember the cloud it held over me. I was constantly checking, scrolling, seeing what everyone else was doing. I wasn’t focused on my life and the things I was doing. I wasn’t present. And in reality everyone was just sending random pictures of their ceilings to each other to keep their streaks going. So when I finally deleted the app it was like a wave of clarity brushed over me. I could focus more on my life, how I felt, what I wanted to do, and the thoughts I was thinking.

It’s a real simple hack - limit your social media and you’ll focus on yourself more.

And when you focus on your own life - things get better. Your capacity to do more grows. You start asking important questions like: what do I want, where do I want to go, what do I want to do? And then you can actually begin to solve your own problems. Which helps others in an indirect way: when you solve your own problems, you can help others solve theirs. So it’s not even a selfish thing to focus on yourself. Because the more useful you become, the more useful you are.

All of this to say that perhaps the best decision I made in my early 20s was to focus on myself.

If you’re struggling in life right now, I’d encourage you to do the same. Stop avoiding the tasks and problems at hand and start solving them one by one. Social media, peers, etc are all distractions for the things you are avoiding. And if you just stop avoiding them, you’ll realize they’re easier to handle than you thought. And your life will get better.

To sum it up, travel young, take risks, focus on yourself.

Thanks for reading.