- Thanks to Trade Coffee for sponsoring this video.
This month I turned 30-years-old.
Yes, how do you do fellow kids?
In this video we're gonna go over four
of the biggest regrets that I have from my twenties,
from that decade of my life.
This is a bit of a followup to a video
I did a few years ago
going over some of the biggest mistakes I made as a student.
And like that video the purpose of this video
is to impart some of the lessons that I learned
through making mistakes, and having regrets,
and sharing them with you,
so you can hopefully make better decisions
that help you optimize for the life that you wanna live.
So with that being said let's get into my first big regret
which has to do with a bad investment decision that I made.
Now, I would love to make this a very juicy story
by saying I yolo'd all my life savings
on GameStop calls last year,
but that's not what happened.
If you know me you'll know that for the most part
I have a pretty boring,
and pretty solid investing strategy
that I've stuck to for a very long time.
And I'll actually give you the context behind that
because it might be useful for you
if you're a beginner investor.
I started investing when I was 19-years-old.
I was sitting in a Java programming class in college.
I was bored out of my mind
so I went and figured out how to start investing my money.
I had about a thousand dollars that I could invest
which was fortuitous,
because at that time as far as investments
that didn't have high transaction fees
went a thousand dollars was the minimum buy-in
at least that I could find.
So I took my thousand dollars,
and I put it into what I thought was the only investment
that I could get into for that amount of money,
which was Vanguard's Star Fund.
Now this isn't a very aggressive fund
as far as the stock market goes,
it's pretty balanced, pretty conservative,
but I just wanted to get started with investing.
And after I had made that thousand dollars deposit
I started putting in money every single month.
When I was in college it was little bits at a time,
maybe 50 bucks or 100 bucks when I had it.
And then when I graduated,
and started making real money through my company,
I set up an automatic deposit that would deposit money
every single month.
So I basically had a robot doing my investing for me.
And that had the dual effect
of keeping my mind off of my investments
so I couldn't make a stupid mistake.
And it also utilized what's called dollar cost averaging
where you're putting money in every single month,
or at least on a regular schedule
instead of trying to time the market.
And over the long-term this strategy usually works better
for the vast majority of investors.
And because I've been following this strategy
for over 10 years at this point,
I've seen some great gains
partly due to the fact that the last 10 years
have been incredible for the market,
but also because I've been consistently investing,
and seeing that balance go up over time.
But I've always had this philosophy
where if I have a pretty decent nest egg already,
then I'm gonna take 99% of my investing capital,
and keep putting it into the boring stuff.
But also on the side maybe take 1%,
and put it into some things that either believe in,
or think are fun.
So a few years ago I started buying the one individual stock
that I now buy on a regular basis which is Nintendo.
I buy it not because I think I have some, you know,
super 40 chess strategy for winning the entire market
by buying a Nintendo,
I buy Nintendo because I believe in Nintendo.
I like the company, I love their products,
so I wanna own a piece of it.
And it just so happens that it's been doing pretty well
for me over the past few years.
But I started getting reinterested in investing
earlier this year,
and as a result I started following the market again,
and this is where the regret comes into play.
Because since I was following the market
I was seeing some of the incredible gains
that were happening in companies like Tesla.
So what did I do?
Well, I sold 1000 of my Nintendo stock
which incurred capital gains tax
because I sold it outside of a retirement account.
And I went and I bought Tesla with that thousand dollars.
So not only did I take a hit on the taxes that I had to pay
with selling my Nintendo stock,
but then I bought Tesla at a very high price,
and immediately saw that price crashed down.
And this is a regret not because I lost money,
but because I violated the fundamental principles
that I had been following as an investor for over 10 years,
which is don't try to get smart,
don't try to be cute,
don't try to time the market,
and don't be greedy when other people are being greedy.
Tesla was a rocket ship at the time
so I should have said to myself,
hey, that's probably going to come crashing down
instead of falling into this very common mentality
where people think,
hey, it's gonna keep going up.
This is called the hot hand fallacy,
in sports when a basketball player
has made three or four baskets in a row
people tend to think,
hey, they're gonna make the next basket.
When we see a trend line
we just expect that it's going to keep going up.
It's very easy to fall into this trap.
So that's my regret,
not necessarily that I lost money
but that I lost money because I violated my own principles.
So going forward into the future
I'm going to be sticking to my investing principles,
which are these,
number one for companies that I own,
like my own company, my YouTube channel,
my websites, or companies where I have an investment,
and an active hand in what happens in the business
like Nebula, swing for the fences, bet big.
But for passive investing,
if I'm just putting money into the market,
and hoping that it's going to grow
I need to stick to the tried and true principles,
low cost index funds.
Or if I'm going to go into, you know,
possibly riskier territory like individual stocks,
it needs to be for a solid reason,
believing in the company,
looking at the fundamentals,
not getting swept up in mania
that happens in a short period of time,
and leaves people burned.
Regret number two,
I wish that I had taken more breaks and more vacations.
So the context here is that I absolutely had the ability
to take more vacations over the last 10 years.
And on many occasions my fiance Anna had asked,
"Hey, can we go to Europe?
Can we go do something?
Can we take a break?"
And the response in my brain almost every time was,
you can't do that.
You have too much work to do,
and if you take this vacation
you are not going to be able to get all your work finished.
So you better just bow out and keep working.
This despite the fact that number one,
even though this is a productivity channel
I know for a fact that I waste a lot more time
than I need to.
And number two,
whenever business trips came up,
opportunities where I saw the ability to grow my business
I always jumped on those.
And by jumping on those
I knew that I was putting my current workload on hold.
There's no way I'm gonna be able to fly to VidCon,
or fly to New York City to film a collab
with another YouTuber,
and also be able to do all the work
that I'm supposed to be doing.
So what I've realized over the last 10 years is, you know,
it's important to be ambitious, it's important to work hard,
but it's also important to be very clear
on what your values are.
And there is a common pitfall here because some values
are intangible while other values are very tangible.
But in many cases the intangible values
are actually more important
than the ones that we can see and track more easily.
Spending time with my fiance, taking breaks,
avoiding burnout, going on vacations, you know,
laughing and just making dumb jokes
with Anna and my friends,
these are things I value a lot
but they're hard to track.
And I have to consciously remind myself of how important
these things are to me when I'm constantly bombarded
by the more tangible values,
things that have metrics attached to them,
the money, the income, and the business,
the subscribers and views.
And this reminds me of something that my fiance herself
struggled with back when we were both in college,
she was in design school
which admittedly had a much heavier workload
than my business degree had.
And she often felt like she could not take a break
from her work to do something substantial
that she wanted to do,
like playing a video game, or going out with friends,
because she felt guilty,
and felt like she had to keep working.
Yet she will readily admit
that she found herself procrastinating,
going on social media a lot of the time,
and that procrastination time ended up adding up
to pretty much equal the time she would have spent
playing a video game,
taking a real substantial break.
These little sources of procrastination
are like a productivity equivalent
of the death by a thousand paper cuts.
And that's because they don't bring in that sense of guilt
that we feel when we consider something more substantial,
like a night out with our friends,
we think checking Twitter or checking Facebook,
it's only gonna take 30 seconds so it's harmless.
And these social networks are designed to make you feel
that checking them is harmless,
but also to keep you coming back multiple times a day,
and to suck you in,
and keep you there for longer than you intended to be there.
So the net result is that you end up wasting
just as much time as you would have
if you had truly taken a break.
So when I look back 10 years from now on my thirties
I would love to say, hey, I took more real breaks,
and I use the time pressure created by those breaks
to work more effectively during my real work time
instead of getting distracted,
and looking at Twitter.
Regret number three,
and I always do this three for some reason,
I think I saw it in Inglourious Basterds,
and it just kinda got stuck in my head.
But anyway regret number three is buying a house
in the suburbs.
So last year my fiance and I started looking
for our first house,
and ended up buying it in the late fall.
This was caused by me meeting another YouTuber
who lives here in Denver, Charles Cornell.
You might know him,
I did a call that video with him,
and he does these amazing jazz piano videos.
But I met him and he's like,
"hey bro, my girlfriend and I are looking for a house.
The interest rates are great right now,
you should go look for a house."
So Anna and I started looking for houses.
We've got a great real estate agent.
We tour dozens of houses,
and I was determined to make the right decision
on my house purchase the first time.
So we didn't go into this all willy nilly,
we went hardcore like high often do with many things,
and we did a ton of research.
We toured around a lot,
and I learned a ton about mortgages, and how's financing,
and the expenses to the point where I literally built
a spreadsheet tool where you can put in multiple properties,
put in their purchase price,
put in your interest rate, your down payment,
and see pretty much exactly what you're gonna be paying
every single month.
Which incidentally helped me avoid the biggest
millennial home buying regret there is.
I was actually watching a video from Graham Stephan
earlier today,
and he was reporting on this bank rate study
that found that millennials biggest home buying regret
is actually underestimating
how much they're gonna have to pay per month.
Because they see the mortgage amount that they get,
and they think, hey, that's what I'll have to pay.
And they don't realize there's property taxes,
homeowners insurance, maintenance costs.
You maybe have to fix the boiler sometimes,
there's a lot of hidden costs.
So actually if you're looking into getting your own home,
keep watching because I really wanna impart this regret,
and lesson I learned to you.
But also my spreadsheet template is absolutely free,
and I'll link that in description down below
so you can get a more accurate picture
of what you would pay per month
given a particular houses purchase price,
and your down payment amount,
and all that cool stuff.
What I regret is the area in which I moved.
It's a nice neighborhood but it's very suburban.
And the reason this is a regret is because every time
I've made a list of pros and cons,
or a list of things that I've wanted in a house
earlier in my life say five, six years ago,
I've always put things like, you know,
ability to easily walk to a coffee shop,
ability to easily walk to a grocery store.
In short what I wanted was walkability.
And I think we just got so excited looking at houses,
and thinking of what we were gonna be able to do
inside a house that we owned ourselves.
And I also got excited at the prospect
of being able to build a big new YouTube and music studio,
where I could customize everything I wanted
that that priority, the walkability
sort of took a back seat to space.
And now we've realized, hey,
we're in a neighborhood where pretty much everyone
drives everywhere.
It's not walkable,
there's just nothing within walking distance.
So we kinda regret the area in which we moved.
And the lesson that I would impart to you
is that if you're looking at buying a house,
and you already have a walkable lifestyle
but maybe you're annoyed about other things
like dogs barking, or neighbors, or whatever.
And you're thinking, hey, I could give up that walkability,
really question that choice.
Because I've come to believe that walkability
is actually one of the fundamentally most important things
for a lot of people's happiness,
and for making a place truly lovable.
There's a great book by a guy named Jeff Speck
called Walkable City.
And I would highly recommend reading that book
if you're at all interested in urban design,
and walkable neighbor hoods.
Regret number four is failing to stick
to a small number of commitments
so I could get very good at them.
So looking back over the past 10 years of my life
I see a ton of hobbies, skills,
and different pursuits that I picked up,
and then eventually dropped.
Training for Ninja Warrior, learning to build iPhone apps,
learning to sing, learning to play piano.
I'm the kinda person who gets easily interested
in a lot of different things.
And when I get interested in something
I go hard on it.
I get obsessed,
I go learn as much as I can,
I have like 50,000 browser tabs open.
And the result of that is I kind of know a decent amount
about a lot of different things that I tried,
which is useful for pulling creative insights for videos.
But it also means that I get easily interested
in new things,
and end up dropping the old thing
that I had just made a little bit of progress in.
And looking back over the past 10 years
I look at certain pursuits like music in particular,
and I wish I would have been able to stick with it
a bit more.
I'm pretty proud of the music I've put out.
Over my music channel I've got three songs
that I've released so far,
but I've released like one song per year at this point.
And I can't help but wonder if I had just committed
to maybe putting out one song a month where would I be?
And I talked about this in my podcast before,
you kinda have this dilemma with hobbies where you either
allow yourself to just pick things up, drop them,
and do things at your leisure,
or you commit to something,
and you push through the dip as Seth Godin calls it.
Where you get past that novelty period,
and you go through the slog where it's actually hard
before you get to mastery.
You have to do that
if you wanna get truly good at something.
So it's kind of this choice you have,
do I let myself have fun, and have a casual life?
Or do I sacrifice and push through the hard times
to get really good?
And if I ask myself, you know,
at 40-years-old, 50-years-old,
60-years-old, what would I really regret?
I would regret not putting more effort into music,
I would regret not going harder on it
than I currently have already.
And I know from my experience as a YouTuber,
that the only way that I really stick to something
for a long period of time even when it gets hard
is when I create external systems
that keep me accountable.
With YouTube it started out with a tool called, Beeminder,
where I would basically bet money
that I would publish on a weekly schedule.
And it would look at the RSS feed which existed back then,
and it would charge me money if I didn't publish a video.
And at some point that got replaced with sponsors
sponsoring my videos,
and the deadlines for those sponsors spots
kept me accountable with real deadlines
instead of fake ones on Beeminder.
But in both ways I've always had deadlines
that have forced me to keep publishing
on a pretty regular schedule
instead of getting marred and perfectionism on one project,
or eventually dropping this pursuit
when I get needlessly interested in something else.
So when I make this video again at 40-years-old,
I wanna look back and say,
you set up systems of accountability,
and you put out more music.
That's something that I care about
which is why this new set exists actually.
I spent the weekend setting up all my music gear
so it's much easier to turn on and start creating.
And that's really all we can do with our mistakes.
We can take action using the lessons they impart to us
to not make those same mistakes in the future.
So whatever your own regrets are own them,
own your mistakes, learn from them,
and use that knowledge to make better decisions
going forward.
Now, one decision that I definitely don't regret
is making this delicious cup of coffee
that had been drinking while filming this video.
And this roast in particular
it's called The Bowery from a roaster called Oren's,
is my favorite coffee in the world,
and I get it from Trade.
Trade is a great way to try new coffees
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Instead of rolling the dice trade
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so it's super duper mega fresh.
And because you are a very discerning viewer of my channel,
if you are one of the first 100 people to sign up,
and link in the description down below,
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Just use that link down in description, take the quiz,
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get free shipping, and to support my channel.
If you enjoyed this video
hit that like button for the YouTube algorithm,
and I will see you in the next one.
Stay cute.