If You Want To Be Happy In Your 40’s…

Learn from the subtle “life” mistakes of your 20's

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood — Ralph Waldo Emerson

It’s a common trope in sitcoms, movies and plays. A supernatural being gives you a chance to go back in time and change an event from your past. Most choices center around a missed opportunity, the avoidance of a painful experience or a decision with devastating consequences.

If someone gave me that choice, I would try a different approach. Instead of changing a past event, I would transfer my accumulated wisdom to my twenty-one-year-old self. Perhaps that would have enabled me to make better decisions in my twenties and thirties.

The most important lesson you learn as you near fifty is that your worst mistakes aren’t those individual decisions where you turned left instead of right.

Arrogance, stubbornness, fear, and closed-mindedness caused the most misery for me in my youth.

I feel fortunate to have recognized these problems and rectified them. I see other people my age clinging to the same arrogance they possessed as young twenty-somethings, fearing the same things, closing their minds to new ideas and perspectives…