Ask HN: If you could go back in time, what would you tell your 20 year old self?

9 points by gamechangr ↗ HN
What things do you see differently now?

21 comments

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Don't follow your biggest passion for work, it just kills the passion.

Follow your 2nd biggest passion, so that you enjoy your work but you still have something to enjoy when you aren't working.

Stop hanging out with people who you know aren't good for you.

Start believing in yourself more and more.

Remember no one is watching you because they are too busy with themselves.

>Stop hanging out with people who you know aren't good for you. How does one recognize them?

>Start believing in yourself more and more.

I can't because of Dunning-Kruger

What do I see differently - just about anything.

What would I tell myself? I wouldn't bother at all. Any advice that I can tell to my younger self was probably also available at the time. And I was really bad at listening to it. Sometimes you have to earn your own experience - other people's advice only goes so far.

Bitcoin goes to 19665 before crashing.
Amazon becomes a trillion dollar company. Google and Apple come close.
Love and trust are mass hallucinations.
What might be detrimental is expecting unconditional and eternal love/trust from someone. If you enter the game with realistic expectations it's a smooth sail.
Wake up at 4 or 5 AM. Every preventable bad thing in your life happens because of lack of sleep. Waking up early makes you go to bed early.
Does it? I have to wake up early and unfortunately, still go to sleep very late. Granted, its only been a week since I have needed to do that so may adjust over time but I just can't sleep at 9/10.
I think it's how you look at it. I'm more like "I can play games and look at Facebook at 4 AM so I'll go to bed now".

If you have to wake up early, you'll still get the late night internal struggles plus deal with being overtired.

I would tell him how I was able to go back in time. It would revolutionize physics.

As to life advice, there's no point — you can't tell 20 year olds anything.

At age 68, I learned the true meaning of "a pain in the ass".
If it seems like you can get by in university without too much effort, maybe consider that you’ll be happier if you switch up your attitude, seek out professors and older students to work with, or maybe even change your major to something that would get you in a more inspired mood perhaps because it’s less familiar. Slacking off and having it easy isn’t really all that great for you.
Not joking, I would give myself the winning numbers of a very large Powerball jackpot along with the date associated with those numbers.
I like you and you're alive for a reason.