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Build your intellectual capital. I’ve known so many people in my life who have enormous intellectual horsepower, but who were in such a ferocious hurry to get somewhere that they never built their intellectual capital. So when they got to wherever they were hurrying … they had nothing to say beyond the narrow confines of their day job. And they knew it. It’s one of the most disappointing outcomes in life – to be very successful in your chosen field, but to find it AND yourself to be oddly empty. Can you catch up? Can you be a late-in-life learner? Sure. But just like losing 20 pounds on a diet gets exponentially harder the older you get, so does adding meaningfully to your intellectual capital. Build it NOW.

Get your passport stamped. We live in a world of credentials. I’m not saying that’s a good thing or a bad thing. I’m just saying that it IS. The most important credential you can have today is some sort of degree from an elite university. It doesn’t matter if it’s an undergraduate or graduate degree, and I’m not going to argue with anyone about whether a school is “elite” or not. The second most important credential for a young person is a 2+ year stint with an elite institution in an elite city. Again, don’t @ me. There are work-arounds and effective substitutes for both of these credentialing mechanisms. But your path will be immeasurably easier if you get your Team Elite passport stamped NOW.

Train your voice. And use it. Again, it’s one of the most disappointing outcomes in life – to know that you’re a creative person, to have something Important that’s going to burn you up inside if you don’t share it with the world … but to lack the words or the music or the art to do so. In my experience, the unhappiest people in the world are mute creatives. To paraphrase Langston Hughes, sometimes they shrivel. Sometimes they fester. And sometimes they explode. Every creative person should start a blog to express and develop their art. Do not distribute it. Do not publicize it. Do not play the ego-driven Game of You. Erase it all every six months if that’s what you need to do, because odds are you have nothing interesting to say! But start training your voice NOW, because one day you will.

… Burning yourself on a stove because you made a bad decision in the immediate game is getting the Answer wrong. It is an idiosyncratic event error specific to your life. There may be surface similarities to the node mistakes that I have made, and certainly we feel the pain of the burn in the same way. But my burns are my burns. Your burns are your burns. And that’s exactly how it should be. We all need some burns. But they have to be OUR burns… Ending up in a less than satisfying life because you made a bad decision in the metagame is getting the Process wrong. It is not idiosyncratic to your life, but has been shared and endured by unsatisfied humans for thousands of years. It is not an event error. It is a category error. Getting the Process wrong leads to an entirely different sort of regret than getting the Answer wrong. It creates profound regret, a regret that can’t easily be fixed without damaging yourself and damaging others.