To celebrate my birthday I decided this week that it would be fun to talk about ten important
lessons I learned in my early twenties when I moved out and had to start the whole adulting
thing on my own.
The first thing I learned is that I don’t like cooking as much as I want to like cooking.
Although I do it on a very regular basis, I fantasized with the concept of daily cooking
as a way to express my creativity and create new recipes every single day.
However, my experience showed me that cooking is only fun when I do it for other people.
If I have to eat something for lunch, I prefer to make a sandwich or heat up leftovers because
the whole process of producing a meal from scratch just to eat it during a work break
is just not worth it for me.
Secondly, separating accounts in terms of goals changed my entire mindset about money.
Instead of having a main saving account, I decided to divide my money into an emergency
account, an account for my student debt and my other goals, just like saving for a PhD.
The visual impact of seeing those numbers rise or fall creates a big sense of accountability.
The third thing I learned is that automating bills doesn’t work for me.
I prefer to individually transfer everything in the same day of the month instead of having
to wait for the cable, electricity and water companies to deduct that money from my account
in different days of the month.
Also, managing expectations from everyone is hard.
Since now your decision-making is almost entirely yours and there are way more things and more
people to manage, some times you'll find yourself in a conunmdrum about some of your choices
you make and the effect they have on your life and the life of the people around you.
That sensation of responsibility is there to stay and will become an inevitable part
of your life.
Learning how to be productive at home is the key to a balanced life and it will be especially
useful and important if you work from home.
This can be even harder if you live in a relatively small space that forces you to work or do
most of your productive tasks in the same space where you live or sleep, or you have
to hang out with other people.
Managing that balance takes a lot of time and also requires some rebalancing but it's
nevertheless a key aspect of your life, and the soon you master that, the better.
Tip number six is that sharing a schedule with a partner can be made easy with the right
tools.
For instance, sharing a calendar or a worskpace in a productivity app like Notion will allow
you to have some things aligned.
Of course this doesn't eliminate the need to talk and be in touch with whoever you live
with, be it a romantic partner or not, but it makes life much simpler, especially in
things concerning household chores, paying bills and things like that.
Tied to this last one is the next lesson.
Basically, splitting household chores and rotating that routine on a weekly or monthly
basis is a bad policy overall.
In my experience it's much better to simply decide, on a first stage, what are the things
that you absolutely hate to do and the things that you actually take some pleasure out of
doing (and in my case that's anything related to laundry) and see if your dislikes match.
Than decide exactly what's the part of the house assigned to each of you, establish a
schedule that works and that's it.
It grants you autonomy, each person can become better at their specific task and it's overall
less confusing.
Lesson number 8 is that managing plans for the future will give you trouble sleeping
at night.
And as much as I would like to tell you that it will all be over soon, I can't lie.
As soon as you become fully independent, pondering and weighing your life choices and future
plans will be a constant basis of your daily life.
The trick is to make things a little more relative and understand that everyone is going
through the same.
Also, learning to admit defeat, say no and delegate tasks is a crucial skill to learn.
Sometimes we would all love to be supermen and superwomen but as soon as tasks and expectations
start piling up it's impossible to keep up with everything that's happening around you.
That's why it's so important to learn how to prioritize your time, your relationships
and your projects, and learn how to say no, how to say you're simply not capable of doing
something or simply reaching out to someone you trust and ask for help.
Finally, maintaining a fitness routine is hard and although there’s no reason for
it to be hard you should give yourself a pat on the back when you actually accomplish things.
I remember that when I was in my early college years I was incredibly regular at the gym
and nowadays I find that it's so much harder to keep up with it.
There's always something to clean, a meal to cook, more projects to work on.
Any time I am actually able to progress in my fitness routine I have to give myself a
pat on the back and congratulate myself for keeping up with it and I think you should,
too.
And here's an extra tip for your adult life: there's nothing worse than someone hacking
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I hope you enjoyed today's video and i will see you next week.
Bye guys!