What Are Your Most Important Life Lessons as You Get Older?

The basics of life lessons distilled by a pro athlete.

In the movie Dead Poet’s Society, John Keating (Robin Williams) said, “Oh, to struggle against great odds. To meet enemies undaunted…

Show me the heart unfettered by foolish dreams, and I’ll show you a happy man.”

Here are some of the oldest, most useful life lessons I know.

The goal of life isn’t to be perfect. It’s to be useful and do something meaningful for yourself and others with the time you have left.

Most of my life has been spent trying to overcome perfectionism.

As you get older, whether it’s in business or relationships or raising your dog (or kids), there’s nothing more detrimental to progress than perfectionism.

No dream or goal happens in a perfect vacuum. Even NASA blows up rockets. Even LeBron makes turnovers. Even Donald Trump and Joe Biden forget to put on their makeup.

Just start the thing you want to do. Be the thing you want to be. This imperfect American life hides how everyone is cobbling it together the best they can (even if they look like they got it perfect).

Just start imperfectly, keep trying day after day, and you’ll figure it out.

As you get older, you forget to dream about reinvigorated mountain tops to climb (for fun or ambition). As a kid, I constantly dreamed about playing pro sports and then worked backward on my daily process to achieve that dream.

This year, let’s pinky swear to make more time to dream and work backward to get where we want to go. Let’s dream late at night, let’s mindmap at sunrise, or sneak away for some visualization on a lunchtime potty break.

Without dreams, there’s no foundation for making a better life; without a blueprint, there will be no tangible plan for taking small steps toward achieving your dream.

Maybe your dreams are covering your monthly expenses with passive income (after taxes), making a fun side hustle work, traveling the world, or…

Related posts:

The banking and finance industry has been looking after the needs of the economy and individuals. In order to meet the needs of 21st-century customers, banks have evolved. The aspects count the…

I grew up poor. Today, I run several successful businesses which collectively turn over several million a year. I chuckled to myself when I read Start it Up’s submission guidelines, talking about…

There once was a girl named Lee, who had an imagination of at least a 100 different people and was always labeled as a perplexing character. She would walk around with her journal as her armor, an…