Advice for Young Leaders

Time is the most precious asset, and for young leaders and young entrepreneurs, it’s on their side. ⏰

Using the Jeff Bezos’ Regret Minimization Framework Model’.

The amount of time a person has seems to diminish over time. So you start your job you get a bunch of responsibilities, you start a thing with your spouse more responsibilities, you have kids, have a family there are more responsibilities… Soon enough the time you have to educate yourself 📙, to travel ✈️, to experience the world, however, to be creative or pursue an endeavour that you’re interested in slowly but surely disappears.

I think this is something that young people don’t fully realize. They assume that the world as it is now and the amount of free time that they have to travel, educate themselves, make new friends, do all these things will somehow diminish by 10%. 🔻

It won't diminish by 10%, but it will diminish by 90% 🔻

And the remaining 10% you will be resting to get back to work and get things done. The best way to conceptualize it is that if over the next 10 to 12 years, the amount of choice you had about what you COULD do was cut down by 90%, what would you regret not doing at 80?

Having one of these mental models for decision making like the ‘Regret Minimization Framework’ helps you have this long-term view and make these decisions now that will help you get to a future that you can look back on and be proud of. If you ever get anxious, always know that we’re all in the same boat; nobody has it all figured out. ⛵️

You don’t need to get it right every time; you don’t need a home run on every pitch.

I’d advise you to very much cherish the free time and the discretionary time you have, especially from the age of 18–25 because at around 25, everyone’s going to start looking at each other and start asking okay ‘what have I achieved and what have my friends achieved?’ and by the time you’re 30 you’re gonna look at each other again and go well my friends have a family, or a company, or a Ph.D., or whatever, and what do I have? and the pressure will only just increase…and it will increase so much that even if you want to go do the fun thing it will not be fun because the pressure of comparing yourself to your friends at 25 or your peers at 30 will be so great that it will be no longer be normal for you to be in a hostel at 30 and livin’ it up.

Your ability to get an education will not improve over time. More responsibilities will take away your ability to get an education📘, so if you value having an education, if you value being deeply educated on a wide array of topics, capitalism will force you to specialize. It will fashion most people into a very specific tool and into a very specific set of tasks. So if you want to get an education, do it now. If you wanna travel, travel now. If you want to do a creative endeavour 🔧 that you doubt you will have time to do in the future, do it now. Generally, if you are serious with your life, you will get more and more responsibilities and more stuff to do.

So my advice to you is do not piss away this rare, unique discretionary time…and if your friends are, get new friends. Get smarter friends who use their limited time better.

This extends to broader things as well, not just about starting a company, but it will become progressively difficult for you to start a company the older you get. The more people rely on you for income, the more income you will need. Startups don’t generate income. 💸

You should start a company when nobody depends on you for an income.

You should start a company when you can comfortably sleep on the floor and eat ramen noodles and still have a great time, show up with a lot of enthusiasm and still be fine.

Thank You for Reading! 🌟