Dear 26 Year Old MeSample

April Pointer (Successful Entrepreneur) 

What would I say to myself when I was twenty-six? I would say, “Don’t wait until your midlife crisis to find out who you are.” 

What is a midlife crisis but the thing that happens to people who reach the age of forty-something and realize they don’t know who they are? They don’t know what matters to them. They don’t know what they’re good at—or what they could get good at. They don’t know what they want. 

All their lives up to this point, they’ve been just doing what seemed best to do next. Now they’re realizing they’ve lived this long and they have no idea where they wanted to be by now. Perhaps they’re seeing that they’re no closer to the dreams they had when they were young. They don’t know who they are or how they got here, and they go crazy. They think, Well, better late than never. I’ll just do it all now. And they lose their minds. They get divorced and buy motorcycles and have plastic surgery in a frantic effort to make up for lost time. 

I think that’s such a tragedy and such a waste. Why not wake up and have that conversation with yourself when you’re twenty-six ... or younger? 

If you spend time in your twenties diving into those questions, and you collect that data and the answers to those questions, you’ll be way ahead of everyone else. 

If you do this, by the time you’re thirty, you will have a really good sense of who you are, what you’re good at, and what matters to you. You will have a powerful foundation for when you do finally hit midlife and beyond. You’ll know what you want to do and be, and you’ll be sitting there with (hopefully) forty work years left. 

I hate to see people freak out in their mid-thirties or so. And if they do finally figure out what they want to be and do, it’s great, but they’ve lost years that they could’ve used to pursue their real goals and passions. 

No matter how old you are, though, it’s not too late to sit down and ask yourself who you are and what matters to you. List your strengths and values. Point the rest of your life in the direction you really want to go. 

Yes, if I could tell my twenty-six-year-old self one thing, it would be to collect that important data and answer those life questions while I’m in that window of time. Doing that in your twenties can get you to a good place of understanding what you want to draw from the world and what you want to contribute to the world. It will give you a much deeper sense of who you are, and you can apply that knowledge for decades to come. 

Why not start a couple of decades earlier and live a life of purpose?