7 Things I Wish I Knew Before Turning 20

“I feel so old.”

I thought to myself as my 20th birthday started banging on my back door. How can I turn 20 and not accomplish half of what I wanted?

There are some mistakes I’ve made in my teenage years that I take back whole-heartedly. We all wish we could take it back. The best we can do is take a long hard stare at a granite countertop and try to carve ourselves into the best person we can be.

So for any struggling adolescent that feels like they are going through a mid-life crisis or an older person who still feels lost, here are some things I wish I knew before I turned 20.

1. Managing Finances

I didn’t learn how to do shit like balance a checkbook or open up a 401K until now. Of course, there were little sprinkles of it in high school if you’ve ever taken a financial literacy class, but most schools don’t stress the importance of financial literacy. So you forget everything you learned after you take it.

Next thing I knew, college hit me like a brick. Fortunately, I had enough luck to get zero dollars in student loan debt, but in all honesty, it made me quite lazy with finances.

I have two more years of college and possibly another three years of law school to worry about. You have to plan out everything to a T unless you want to worry about miscellaneous finances on top of a car note, mortgage, gas money, etc.

Take it upon yourself to learn about basic finances like saving and opening up bank accounts. If you just do this one thing on the list, you’ll be good, trust me.

2. Basic Cooking Skills

At first, I didn’t think this was a big deal — until I cooked my first meal.

You’re going to live alone more in your 20’s and as much as you might be excited for that, mom won’t be there to cook your favorite blueberry pie.

I’m on a meal plan for college right now (thank god) but I have friends who aren’t on one because they live off-campus and let me tell you, it’s like a death sentence by starvation. Even I sometimes give them food from the local campus cafe because they don’t have the money to grocery shop every week.

And even then, once they have the money, who wants to spend 45 minutes to an hour cooking a meal when they have two midterms tomorrow?

Please, please, please go on YouTube and watch some basic cooking videos with cheap ingredients. You’ll learn some hacks that will help you out.

3. Find a passion

I wish I found this before 20. Well, I kind of found it at 19 but same idea.

The earlier you develop a passion for something, the better off you’ll be. Even though it’s okay to take longer to find it, you don’t want to keep exploring potential passions for years on end.

Thank god I found mine by the skin of my teeth before 20 or the mid-life crisis I had would be on steroids.

My passion is writing. How did I find it?

Well, one, nothing else I tried gave me joy. Two, it’s something I’ve loved since I was a kid. I want to get better at it and make a business out of it.

If you find a passion, you’ve found your path, and that makes everything clearer for you in the end.

4. Journal

A lot of people still don’t utilize this. But I get it, journaling is dead because of the internet. Oh well, more for me and you.

Journaling changed my life because I could document my experiences and turn them into life lessons, therefore, making myself a better person.

A simple pencil and paper can go very far when you need to vent. Instead of going to your friend who probably doesn’t care to hear you complain but will listen anyways because they’re your friend, take out that energy on a blank canvas.

Paper is your best friend. It’s the best thing you can vent to for hours with no judgment in the world.

Don’t take all of those dying trees for granted, use their gift wisely.

5. Establish a Healthy Routine

In college, I changed up my routine.

My last one kicked me in the but multiple times. Sleep deprivation, no studying, and late-night writing while calling my family on Facetime.

So I decided to wake up at 5:30 am every day and go to the gym at 6 am because my work out routine reeked of inconsistency. After that I’d write for an hour, go to class, study, eat lunch, etc.

The main thing I’m trying to say is a healthy routine is a life-saver. Literally. If I never started waking up at 5:30 am, I don’t know how I’d ever make it through the school year, or the year in general.

I had more energy and I felt like a life coach.

A happy routine is a happy life. Do it every day and never stop.

6. Challenge Yourself

One thing a lot of people regret when they get older is not challenging themselves as much as they should have.

If only I had played one more basketball game. If only I had filmed for one more hour. If only I lifted one more weight in the gym.

If only you did this one thing, you’d excel at your craft.

For me, I never started challenging myself until I began to write one blog post per day, every day. I used to think it’d be insanely hard to pump out that much content, but as I get further along in the process, I’m realizing my writing skills are improving.

A lot of times, we need to jump on that stepping stone or leap over that hurdle to get us where we want to be. We need to challenge ourselves every day of our lives to keep that constant flow of improvement brewing.

You can’t jump into a boxing ring without getting punched in the face a few times. But that’s why you keep getting punched, because you want to get better every day.

So yeah, I’ll take a couple of punches, as long as I evolve as much as possible, the punches are welcomed.

7. Read Like Hell

Unless you’re a die-hard prolific book fan who yearns for the chance to go to Hogwarts and the opportunity to curse out the creators of the Percy Jackson movies, you’re someone who doesn’t read much.

If you’re like me, your love for reading got stunned during high school because you had a lot of required reading assignments that turned you off from the experience.

I didn’t start reading at all until I discovered platforms like Medium. Long books were never my forte, I’d get bored within the first fifty pages if It wasn’t something that grabbed me from jump.

So start small first.

Read little articles online. See what piques your interest.

Then take a few minutes out of your day to read. I’ll be honest, I have a couple of books lying around that I haven’t finished yet. But I’m working on finishing them anyway because I like to learn.

You can pull out some of the best life lessons from reading a few pages of a book. So buy that book you’re interested in and start reading.

Books are creations from the trees of knowledge.

Final Thoughts

Adolescence is weird.

You get some of the best and worst times of your life in one 5 year time span. Of course it’s daunting when you turn 20 and you enter the playing field with the varsity team.

Trust me when I say, you’ll be in a much better headspace if you learn how to manage finances, basic cooking skills, find a passion, start journaling, establish a healthy routine, challenge yourself more, and read.

It may sound like a lot to do, but the people who aren’t reading this will have way more work to do than you.

So let’s keep this momentum going and here’s to the next 10 years of life.