3 Things I Wish I Had Done After Graduating

It’s been nine years since I’ve finished my college degree, and overall, life is pretty awesome. I got married, have two kids, and am hoping to self-publish a book in June.

Still, there are definitely things that I wish I could go back and change. Here are the three biggest things I wish I had done after graduating.

1. I Wish I had Started a Blog 💻

The year I graduated one of my good friends suggested that I start a blog. I really wish I had listened.

First of all, some of my favorite bloggers started in 2009 or later and are absolutely crushing it. There’s no guarantee that I would be a mega success if I had started back then, but I’d certainly be further along than I am now.

But the real reason goes deeper than that. Starting a blog would have been my first major experience facing my fears.

I still remember some of the specific fears that I had:

• I was afraid of being “that guy” who says he’s going to start a blog and then doesn’t follow through or fails.
• I was afraid of the work it would take to figure out the technical side of things
• I was afraid of success. That’s right, I said I was afraid of success. I was afraid of all the complications of success, of figuring out a business model and understanding taxes and all the other things I didn’t yet know how to do.

It’s easy to look at that list and laugh at it. Every one of those fears are so illogical. But fears are never about logic, they are deeply emotional. If you are going to live a remarkable life, you need to be able to win the emotional battles.

The last reason I wish I had started a blog is because of the skills that I would have picked up along the way. I would have learned how to create content, how to market my work, how to network on social media, how to build a following, how to sell.

If you just get started with anything you’ll be better equipped to deal with everything.

2. I wish I had Developed a Reading Habit 📚

I’ve always loved books.

I remember that as a kid I would keep a stack of books right next to my bed and would stay up as late as I could every night to read them. I would usually stay up until my my mom came in and told me I had to turn the light out. Sometimes even then I would keep reading with a flashlight under the sheets.

Reading came so naturally that it would be easy to think that the habit would follow me around uninterrupted for the rest of my life.

That’s not what happened.

It turns out that things change and you often have to consciously make an effort to do the things that are important to you.

When you graduate and get a job, the emotional energy required to go to work can leave you feeling exhausted afterwards. You come home wanting to just watch some Netflix or surf the web and go to bed. So instead of a reading habit, I developed a Netflix habit.

Here’s the thing though, I don’t know that watching Netflix is really mentally restful. It keeps your brain in the same reactive mode that it has been in all day. Your attention is captured.

Books allow you to proactively focus your attention and then withdraw it when desired. You can take your eyes off the page and allow yourself to think about what you have read, or pause and take some notes. Sure you can think when watching TV, but unless you are actually hitting pause, the show will keep playing, keeping your attention divided.

Watching TV seems like a mental break because unlike a book, you don’t need to use your thinking or imagination. The problem is that watching TV is the worst kind of mental activity, your brain is engaged, but not productive. The optimal situation is that your brain would have multiple cycles in a day of switching between being focused and productive at one moment, followed by being free to wander. TV doesn’t let you do either of these things.

I am a firm believer in being a lifelong learner, and I think reading lots of books is a great way to do that. In 2017, I renewed my commitment to my own lifelong self-education by reading 59 books. This year I am on pace for reading over 70. Books fuel my intellect and imagination and keep my creative juices flowing.

I really wished I had been reading this avidly every year since graduating.

If you want to read more books, here’s a helpful post I wrote with some suggestions:

And here are some good books to get you started:

3. I Wish I Had Created a Plan 📖✍️

Back when I was 22, I probably would have cringed at the notion of creating a plan.

My excuses would have been that I wanted to be flexible, spontaneous, not tied down by some rigid plan.

What utter nonsense.

I was unfocused and aimless and could have used a real plan. The real reason behind not coming up with a plan was being afraid of committing to something that might not work.

Here’s the big secret: the ONLY things worth doing are the ones that might not work.

If you don’t regularly get an uncomfortable feeling in your gut as the panicked thought “this might not work” floats across your brain, you’re doing something wrong.

Courage feel terrible the moment that you actually experience it, but it leads to the much better feelings of accomplishment and confidence.

I finally got around to creating a plan last year, my 10 Year Plan for a Remarkable Life.

The 10 Year Plan is a great exercise to give you clarity about what you really want. It involves answering a series of simple questions to paint a picture of your ideal life in a decade.

I go into more detail in my post dedicated to the 10 Year Plan:

So far, I’m over a year in and things are going incredibly well. I realized after creating my 10 Year Plan that my age 40 self was going to somehow be healthier than my age 30 self. I knew that there was no way that this could happen without massive action, so I went on the first diet of my life (The Slow-Carb Diet from Tim Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Body), lost 35 lbs and have kept it off for over a year.

This year, I wrote my first book. I finished the rough draft at the end of March, and just finished the final edits and sent it off for proofreading. I’m hoping to publish it on Amazon Kindle in June. I’ve wanted to write a book for a long time, why did I finally get it done? Well, one reason is because I took an online course that walked me through the process (like I describe in this post). But the reason that I took the course was because in my 10 Year Plan I had said that in 10 years I was living off of income that was coming in passively from work that I had already done.

In just over a year, the 10 Year Plan has forced me to step out of my comfort zone and do two things that people always talk about but never do: lose weight and write a book.

Imagine where I would be right now if I had created my 10 Year Plan after graduating. I would be nine years in at this point instead of just over a year. The early, small wins would have given me the confidence that would have lead to later, bigger wins. I would be on the steep uphill part of an exponential growth curve instead of the gentle slope at the beginning.

Final Thoughts

Don’t get me wrong, things have been pretty good. I’m excited about where I am going and am loving the journey.

But things could have always been better. If you’re just graduating right now, you have a chance to make the uncommon choices that I was to afraid to. I would recommend doing so. Failure to try is a million times worse than trying and failing. Regret is worse than embarrassment.

I really hope you can skip my mistakes and in 10 years we can raise a glass to our remarkable lives.

🥂

Your Next Move

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With that in mind, I wrote The Ultimate Daily Checklist: 13 Steps to Winning the Day.

Get it free here: http://thematthewkent.com/the-ultimate-daily-checklist/