30 Lessons I Have Learnt Over 30 Years

Today's post will be a reflective ones - looking back at all random things that I have learnt throughout my journey in life.

Here's the top 30 things I have learnt (or maybe, the first 30 that popped up in my heads ?) as I officially turned 30 years young this year!

They say 30's the turning point in our life, for the better (and worse). I'm curious how the tides will turn in the next decade of my life.

p/s the list are randomly sequenced based on where my train of thoughts take me to

1. Know when to seek help - especially when you're going through a depression. There's absolutely nothing wrong in seeking medical help - be it for physical or mental.
2. Love yourself more. It's okay if you need to re-prioritise your life and focus on yourself more, for once, in your life, before others. Without self-love there won't be any energy left to love others.
3. Self-awareness can really be a blessing in disguise - for it helps you to better understand your true self, who you truly are within. But it can also be a curse IF you are held back by your own beliefs (or disbelief) and being inaction towards it.
4. Everybody will shape their own opinion about you. No matter how loud they talk about you, most people don't really care about you - for what they want is to enjoy the process of gossiping. Know to differentiate those whom are there FOR YOU vs. those whom are there FOR GOSSIPS.
5. Don't live under other's shadow. People who likes you, will like you. People who hates you, will hate you no matter what you do. You don't need to live your life to constantly please others. Live your own life the way you want it, as long as it does no harm to others for life is too short to be wasted. Why care so much about societal expectations or others' view about you?
6. Rage and anger breeds hatred - and blind ones' sight. When you are angry, sometimes it is better to shut up and chill over the pillow rather than saying things that make you regret your entire life.
7. Your mindset shapes your behaviour. Our minds are truly powerful - it can unlock new possibilities for you, but can also limit your options. Rather than saying "I can never get there", ask instead "How can I get there?"
8. Compete with nobody else but yourself. It's perfectly okay to be inspired by others and try to mimic their successes, but never follow blindly and lose yourself in the process. Take inspiration, then create your own path toward successes.
9. It's never too young, too early, or too late to start learning - for learning is a continuous journey from the day we're born to the day we leave the world. Strive to be 1% better version of yourself every single day and it will compound greatly over time. When you look back, you'd realise how far you've come! You'll never know when the additional knowledge gives you an edge when you needs it the most.
10. Action speaks louder than word. Dreams are crucial as it helps to shape our thoughts in building our own future - but nothing is more crucial than taking action itself to fulfil the dream. Mental conceptualisation is just an image if nothing is constructed physically.
11. Your life is in your hands. Take full responsibility of your own life. While you can never control 100% of what's happening to you in your life, you can however control 100% of your responses toward it.
12. Sometimes it is inevitable in life that we have to take a fall. No matter how steep the fall is, what's more important is to learn to pick ourselves up as quickly as possible.
13. Just because every Tom, Dick and Harry is doing something doesn't make it right. Never follow the crowd blindly - and always be guided by your own inner compass. If something doesn't feel right, it probably is.
14. Be the change you want to see. If you see something in life that bothers you, then start stepping up first from you yourself and make little changes.
15. You are your own worst enemy. It is extremely difficult to please ourselves and we tend to only see the worst version of ourselves. While a healthy dose of self-doubt helps us to challenge our thoughts process making sure that we don't take things for granted; too much of it does more harm than good.
16. Repetition builds habit. Choose wisely on what we want to make into our habits for our time is limited. If you spend your entire free time building up bad habits, you'll forever be in the loop of doing the exact same thing. Break out the habit and do a 30-days challenge if you need to.
17. Remember to take days off and recharge. We have worked hard enough in our workdays, and sometimes even the weekends doing side projects, side hustles, or household chores. Allow yourself to recharge from time to time - and don't guilt trip yourself for doing nothing once in a while!
18. It's good to plan for worst case scenarios. But never let the fear of these scenarios hold you back - as long as we're well prepared to handle whatever life throws as us, why stop along the track?
19. Persistence triumphs everything else in life. Forget about big dreams if you don't persist - if you give up along the journey before reaching the destination, you will never reach your destination. The persistence to continuously move forward regardless of challenges are vital to successes.
20. Seek to understand first. Otherwise, tolerate and respect others. With advanced revolutions the human race has today, there will be thousands and millions of different opinions on the same subject. Some are scientifically proven, some are pure myth - there won't be a day in the foreseeable future where all human races will have a single shared belief, vision, or ideologies. Learn to co-exist with others and always respect the differences, even if you do not agree. No need to take it personally.
21. Think from others' shoe. Easier said than done - sometimes all we need is just to take a step back and to put ourselves in others' shoe, to understand where they are coming from and why they said/did certain things. Over time it helps to broaden your perspective to see things in thousand different ways.
22. Learn to prioritise your life. You can't have everything in life - that's how the world works. You get something, you lose something. Learning to properly prioritise your life will be a huge step forward. Just as Mark Manson said: "Most of us struggle throughout our lives by giving too many f*cks in situations where f*cks do not deserve to be given."
23. Learn to appreciate small things in life. Sometimes we spent too much time thinking about things we yet to have, but have completely forgotten about what we already have. Learning to appreciate things in life, no matter how small it is, will make our life more fulfilled. Especially things we usually take for granted.
24. Experiences shape perspectives. Always be courageous to take on new challenges outside of your comfort zone. Whatever you have learnt is kept in your own pockets, building up your breadth of perspectives and ready to help you when you least expect it.
25. Pay Yourself First and always spend responsibly. It's okay to spend on things you like as you have earned it - but never neglect your future just to satisfy your current self. You don't have to live frugally and starve yourself today either. Strike for a healthy balance between spending today vs investing for future. After all this is a financial blog, how can I not include these!?!
26. Lifestyle creep is the beginning of endless spiral. If you get stuck in it, you'll forever be caught in the rat race trying to chase after the next-shiny-things. When you're too busy keeping up with the Joneses, you slowly eat away your future peace of mind.
27. Never spend what you cannot afford to lose. Be it taking up a loan beyond what you can financially commit, knowing the differences being able to afford the monthly instalment vs. if you can actually commit financially, or taking up margins to invest into something you are clueless because everyone else is making easy money from it.
28. People say money is root of all evil. I don't buy this notation. That's like saying medicines (drugs) are root of all addictions; weapons (guns) are root of all terrorist attacks; or entertainments (games or videos) are root of degraded society. It all boils down to how we prioritise our life and what do we do when the power is in our hands. Money can be used for charitable causes, as it can also be used to breed war, hatred, and all other disgusting things in life.
29. Don't sell your soul to your Company. No, I am not saying that you should slack off at work. In fact, give it 125% of your efforts and do your best that you can at work, even if it is something new to you and requires learning-on-the-fly - everything you learnt in the end is kept in your own pockets. However, remember to draw the line between your work and your personal growth, and always leave room to grow yourself personally. If the work is no longer fulfilling or challenging, perhaps it's time to move on.
30. Not planning at all, is planning to fail. No matter how care-free we are in life, we need some sort of planning to carry us through, just like a compass. Whilst the granularity of the plan varies by individual, we need something that keeps us going and move forward in life. Otherwise we'll be like a headless chicken trying to navigate through life, without a single clue.

I hope you have enjoyed reading the short piece this week! Don't hesitate to share this to your friends too! What do you like / agree / disagree the most amongst these 30 lessons? Leave a comment below.

As always, thanks for reading and I will see you again in my next post! If you haven't already, be sure to follow me on my Instagram, Facebook and YouTube for latest updates!

Cheers,
Gracie