I'm 43. If You're In Your 20's or 30's, Watch This!

I'm 43 now, and if I could go back and speak to my younger 20-year-old self and maybe give him some advice, here's 10 things that I would say to him. Well, was wondering who I'm talking to. I'm talking to the little fluffy thing. Yeah, you smell that. Good boy. Number one, stop working so hard. I've grown up with parents who worked incredibly hard throughout most of their lives and quite frankly struggled. And I guess for me, it's become a learned behavior throughout my life. And in my 20ies when I first started working and running businesses, I assumed that I would just have to follow in their footsteps and work hard and that would give me some kind of success. However, all it's ended up doing several times in my life is resulting in some kind of burnout. And what I've come to realize is that hard work does not equal success. Um ultimately if hard work meant financial success especially but just success in life then every police officer, nurse and doctor out there would be enormously successful and have absolutely everything which they ever wanted. So I wish it hadn't taken me quite so long to learn this but as a little tip um one of the things which I've discovered is the parto principle 80/20. So there are 20% of inputs which you can do which attribute towards or contribute towards 80% of the outputs. And ultimately the quest in life that I've discovered is to identify what the 20% is. What are the things the small number of things which contribute towards the greatest impact in your life. You could take that a step further and um there's something called the 4% rule which is where you find the 20% of the 20%. And if you can find the 4% of things that contribute towards 96% of the outputs and your future success, well then quite frankly, you're going to be winning in life. And so what I've learned is that as I've come towards my 43rd year on this little piece of rock floating around in space that actually what you need to do with the 4% rule is just find a couple of a few things and take some calculated risks. And generally speaking, the outcomes from those are astronomically um outweigh that. the hard the approach to hard work. Sometimes you do have to brute force your way through life. Especially when it comes to business, it's just not worth it because the goal of business is to stay in in life really is to stay alive and in business for as long as you possibly can do. It's not to be success is not derived from short-term wins and losses. And so, you know, Usain Bolt couldn't run, you know, even an 800 meter race at the same pace he runs his 100 meter sprints at. And it's the same with life. You've just got to figure out what you can do in a sustainable format. And that means doing little and often but small things which have a large impact and taking a few calculated risks that create massive impact and make massive changes to your life. Number two, and this one's really not very glamorous, not very sexy at all, but essentially I would uh spend a little bit more time thinking about my financial future. When I was in my 20ies, I had a couple of very successful side hustles and businesses. And one of them in particular, I used to buy and sell grade two listed laptops. And then I would buy them in for about £500 and shift them on for 3 4 5k in some instances. And this lasted about 9 months before the bottom dropped out the market. But I ended up with a ton of cash during those nine months. And I did what any very nonsensible 20-year-old would do when you come into a significant sort of five figure sum of cash. You'd uh buy a couple of cars and go on loads of fancy holidays and blow your money on champagne down at the pub trying to impress your friends and things like that. And I look back on that and it was good times. I wouldn't say that I didn't enjoy it necessarily. Obviously got lots of fruits out of that labor, but I'm here at 43 now and recently I I looked at my pension pot and it was barely like 12k thinking criy well what if I want to retire in 15 years time or 20 years time or something like that. That money is not really going to go very far at all. I wish actually now looking back in my 20ies when I had that lump of cash if id just taken even a small portion of that and dropped it into a pension fund what the potential or what potentially it could be worth now obviously I'd have significantly more in my pension pot than I've currently got at the moment. So going back to my 20s if I could tell my 20-year-old self something and give him some very boring advice but hopefully very sensible advice I would suggest to him to start putting aside £200 a month into a a pension pot. At the end of the day, we don't know what life holds in our future. And there is a part of me and many people know about my recent history where I've been diagnosed with a tumor growth on my brain stem um which kind of brings your life very sharply into focus. And um yeah, I would tell him to start putting some money aside for a rainy day. Pension being the first thing, making sure that there's no, you know, pay off your debt as soon as you could. I've literally only just finished paying down my student loan this year. um which I'm very proud of. But equally, I wish I'd start not started out my life with debt. I think um it's a whole thing for another video potentially, but starting life off in your 20s, coming out of university with debt and then having to struggle through life in order to kind of move forward um it's just not a great way to live. So, I would encourage my former self to and you to um start paying some money into a pension pot. And I would even recommend as well like setting some money aside in a rainy day fund. Even if it's starting with £10 a week or £50 a month or £100 a month, accumulate some money in a savings kitty just so that when life comes around and life will show up and beat you on the uh around the back of the head sometimes that you have some money that you can actually fall back on and so life doesn't feel like it's a constant struggle when you're trying to play catchup. If you're earning £2,000 a month, say in a job or £3,000 a month in a job, setting aside £100 or £200 a month is really not that much out of whatever money it is that you're earning. And if you have any windfalls, take those windfalls and put them to one side. Yeah, there are things which you need to buy in life, cars to get around, phones to communicate, insurance just in case anything happens to you, maybe paying a rent or mortgage. There's these things which you do need to pay for. But if you're earning 3K a month and you set can set aside £100 a month and learn to live off the £2,900, I know for me personally, I'd have been far better off and far more financially savvy as a result of just making that small sacrifice way back then. So yeah, number two, put some money into a rainy day fund and definitely pay into a pension because that money over the course of a 30 40 year career as an adult will accumulate quite significantly. and I wish I'd started paying paying into my my pension pot sooner. Number three, I wish I'd traveled more in my 20ies. I'm very fortunate now that I'm 43 and my wife and I, we get to go to lots of different countries, take our kids on these most wonderful holidays, um, and explore the world a little bit. Um, we've flown quite a bit over the last few years and it's been one of my greatest pleasures. But it's also reminded me that I didn't do enough of that in my 20ies. I was very much head down focused on work, work hard. You know, I made some money, but then I also spent all of that money. And I didn't spend it on things like creating experiences for myself. You know, a lot of the time it was spent on fun uh things, but actually I've learned that kind of exploring the world and seeing different cultures and seeing the amazing places that are outside of this little triangle triangularshaped island that I live on called the United Kingdom. What's interesting is that growing up um my parents never took us on an airplane. We never went on a family holiday abroad. We did I remember like one holiday where we all went down to Bournemouth together sort of as teenagers. And I think my parents had they realized that me and my brother were very quickly growing up. So we weren't young at the time. And um you know prior to that a lot of our holidays involved my dad you know shipping me and my brother off down to my grandmother's down in Devon you know which was incredible. It was lovely. You know I got to spend time with my grandparents. But some of the memories I think of the four of us, you know, if we'd had the opportunity, the four of us, uh, to be able to go and explore the world together, jump on a plane and have that those adventures, I think would have set me up far better in my 20ies. And I I found out too late in terms of, you know, um, no, no, that's wrong. Actually, it's never too late. Um, you know, I've been able to now we can go on wonderful holidays. we can afford to do it because my wife and I work incredibly hard still, but earn good money and it means we get the opportunity to to now pass this on to our two daughters. But I had some news in in August last year around my health. And it brought life incredibly sharply into focus cuz my wife's been one of those people who's always said, you know, when we retire or when the girls grow up, you know, we can go and travel the world and kind of have these dreams and ambitions and things like that. And what I found out in August, there is a small possibility now that that might not actually happen. And so now I'm grasping the bull by the horns and we are getting out and about and we're traveling, you know, more than more than I ever have. And it's it's so amazing. But I wish id found this out in my 20ies and been able to get out there and explore some of the world at a time when I probably was more adventurous. I was after more experiences and things like that. I just didn't have somebody telling me to get on that plane and go and explore the world and see some of just the amazing places that are out there. So go and travel. Like if there's a place that you want to go and explore and visit and you're in your 20s or 30s like and you have no responsibilities, now is the time, the ultimate time to be able to go and do that because when you get married and kids come along, longhaul flights are a completely different thing altogether. So travel whilst you can is what I'm saying. And we'll have opportunities and I know maybe I'm making excuses and making life difficult for myself, but and hindsight is always a wonderful thing, but um yeah, I wish I traveled a lot more in my 20ies. So number four is really simple. Don't drink alcohol. Um, it's as basic as that. I wasted goodness knows how many hours and days um with hangovers and things like that. And especially when it became to having children and and there is nothing worse than waking up on a Saturday or Sunday morning with a massive hangover and then having to look after the kids. So, I stopped drinking 2 years ago and it was one of the best decisions I ever made. In fact, actually at university, I didn't drink for 2 years whilst I was at university as well and got just more done with my businesses and my life than I ever got at any other period um in my life. So, I would 100% recommend if you can try and avoid alcohol. There are so many good choices now around um alcohol-f free beers and ciders that you can still make it look like to your friends that you're drinking alcohol when actually you can just choose one of the alcohol-free equivalents. And there's not that much difference in terms of kind of the taste and things like that and it still feels like you've got a beer in your hand. And part of the reason is as well because I I um went out with the school dads um just shortly after getting stopping drinking and they got so riotously drunk and I realized oh my goodness it was almost like on the point of embarrassment good fun but also slightly embarrassing and um it made me realize that goodness if they're kind of slightly embarrassing then when I was drunk I was probably a little bit embarrassing as well. So I wish I could take back uh in my 20ies the amount of alcohol which I did end up drinking lots of night out with the sports clubs I played with and my friends and things like that. Um that bottle of wine or you know glass of wine that turned into a bottle of wine on kind of most evenings throughout my 20s and even into my 30s and the hours I wish I could get back from that time from just feeling utterly awful and the damage that potentially it's done to my body. And yeah, it's going to take time but now I can start that road to recovery. that you have a choice in your 20ies and I know that things like peer pressure and I've got the benefit of hindsight now knowing kind of how I felt back then compared to now having stopped drinking but it definitely is one of the best decisions I ever made. Um I've realized that alcohol was masking who I really was and who I wanted to be not just for me knowing that as part of my identity but also how I was perceived by others out there as well. And um there were times when I used to go out to business events and kind of because I was a little bit nervous and anxious, I would drink a little bit more than usual and probably made a bit of a fool out of myself, which didn't look particularly professional. Um I would imagine so there you go. Um if you've got the opportunity, just it you don't have to stop drinking, but at least go for the zero alcohol options and start to cut back. And even things like at home, you know, where nobody is going to see you, having zero alcohol options in your fridge is a really wise decision. Number five goes handinhand with stopping drinking and that's making your health generally a priority. Over the years there have been times when I have put my health first. Going to the gym, going swimming regularly. Um I love my cycling. I've played plenty of sports, rugby and hockey. And I used to do it more for the social and for the fun side of things. And then recently this last year I got a diagnosis which I mentioned earlier on which has meant that my health has kind of taken a bit of a backseat. But the the reality is one of the things which I have done consistently over the last 20 years of my life 23 years of my life since I was from my in my 20ies was you know make health priority do sports not least from the keeping fit and healthy perspective but primarily also from a social perspective. I've always been a part of various other teams and clubs and things like that and got heavily involved in it and I've made some lifelong friends through it. So health doesn't have to be a grind and like beasting yourself down the gym and things like that. It can also be just fun, something to do. And not least because at the end of doing a good workout session, you feel good about yourself. So, I would prioritize my health far more than I did in my 20ies. I did put it, you know, fairly high up there, but there's still more that I could have done. Gradually, as I've shifted towards being in my 40s now, that decline has been slow and steady about the consistency that I've been able to kind of do workouts and stuff like that. I could make excuses like, you know, busy family life and various things like that. And I suppose taking the dog for a walk does consist of exercise to some extent. You know, taking the kids out on bikes and things like that definitely consists of doing some exercise, but it's a different it's a different form of looking after your health. And health isn't just about exercise either. It's all about healthy eating and and making just sensible choices with your body. You only get one body and one life at the end of the day. So, you want to look after it. So, I've done a lot of work with um watching my weight, keeping, you know, making sure that I'm eating relatively healthily, watching the calorie intake and things like that. I've done a couple of diets over the years in terms of like the keto diet and things like that. And generally, I would say that keeping my body leanish, probably possibly got a few extra pounds these days, but keeping my body lean has actually kept it kept it in relatively sort of healthy order. And most of that comes down to diet and healthy eating, just living as healthy a lifestyle as you possibly can do. you can get away with a heck of a lot more in your 20s, but let's not make that an excuse. I think it's just about forming good habits in your 20s around health and exercise and various things like that. And um it stands you up well it gives you the best possible opportunities when you get into your 30s and 40s and your body starts to slow down a little bit. Just give yourself that head start. So thing number six um essentially is that I wished in my 20ies that I had read more books. I don't know why, but when I finished my university degree, I thought that was a license to stop learning and I didn't have to pick up any more books and learn anything else or read ever again. And it wasn't until about six or seven years into my agency when I realized that I wasn't the smartest person in the room. And there were people there who had all of this immense business knowledge and I was wondering where they were getting it from. And essentially, they were just picking up books from other experts, learning the principles within those books, and then practicing and implementing them within their business. So it was a sign for me that I needed to go back to the um the drawing board and start learning all over again. Um because whilst I did a business management degree, it's very theoretical. It wasn't necessarily practical tactical business skills that I was learning when I was doing that degree. So what I did is I downloaded audible and I aggressively started listening to audiobooks and made a a pact with myself that from that point onwards I would listen to an audio book at least one a month from that point forwards. I think my library is now up to something like 260 books that I've downloaded and listened to and it was the best thing that I ever did. One of the first books which I downloaded into my Audible library was a book called Built to Sell by John Wallow which was all about how an agency owner who was full service essentially a jackof alltrades master at none went to sellers agency and it was worthless and so I was going through a similar journey myself with my agency. So it was really easy for me to get into and I applied the principles in that that book and they were very simple. Essentially, it was the principle of subtraction. Remove as many of the complexities from your business as you possibly could do, which we did. We productized. Um, next thing you know, the following year, our revenue doubles. So, there's the value in picking up books or downloading a audio books and uh getting back to reading and learning and things like that and then applying those principles, it will make a massive difference to your business. And I know if id done that sooner when I was 20 and read practical tactical business books instead of whatever it was that I was doing at the time. Um I know that oh well I don't know that for sure. But I think I'd be a heck of a lot further along than I am now. You could argue that actually going to university set me back by 4 years because I wasn't running my business at that time. But equally I had a couple of side hustles and things like that going on. But that's something for maybe a whole other video. So the next thing I've got for you is to believe in yourself. When I went back to my early 20s and I started my first business, I felt incredibly awkward going to things like networking meetings and whatnot. And I used to dress in a way that uh I thought I should be dressing to go to these really important local business networking meetings. And I wore the button-down shirts. I wore the smart chinos. I put those pointy shiny shoes on because I thought that that's how business people showed up. And I'll be very honest, I felt very anxious. I felt incredibly uncomfortable wearing those clothes. And as you can see, I'm traditionally the t-shirt and jeans guy. I've got my fearless t-shirts on, you know, I'm not a suit and booted guy. I'm the guy who goes out surfing pretty badly, but I go surfing. I go downhill at 52 and a half miles on my push bike. I've never been the uh button-down shirt kind of guy. And I think what happens is when you step into an environment which is a bit out of the ordinary anyway and then you're dressed in a way that you think you should be sort of dressing yourself and showing up in a way that you think you should be showing up. Is it any wonder that I think in my early 20s when I started my businesses that we really struggled to kind of get them off the ground because what people saw was it I mean there was nothing that was um particularly sort of I don't know how to describe it weird about that but it was just I felt uncomfortable and therefore you know if you feel uncomfortable generally speaking you then project that uh to other people. So, what I um decided to do eventually was start to just be myself. And sort of my mid to late 20s and wear what I wanted to wear and not really think about what other people thought of me. And lo and behold, that's where some of my successes started to take off. My invitation to you is um first of all, be authentic. Be true to yourself. Hey, Twigs, come and say hello to the camera. This is Twiggy, everybody. I don't know if you can see her or not. Be authentic. Like, be genuinely you. Don't show up in a way that you know you feel you should be showing up for other people. But the really real in-depth thing to remember is that like you do deserve a seat in the room. And I think a lot of people don't realize this that they always think that there are people out there who are smarter than themselves that are more successful than themselves that are what are more charismatic than than they are. And so they don't put themselves in those situations which are going to create success for themselves. And I think even if you're not the smartest person in the room, it doesn't matter. You deserve a seat at the table. It's one of the reasons why now in my 40s I'm able to have, you know, conversations with really influential people like Ali Abdull and Simon Squib and Chris Doe and the guys at Atomic, Andrew and Pete and Daniel Priestley and all of these amazing like influential uh entrepreneurs and business people. But it's because finally I realized that actually they started somewhere and they've had people who've helped them uh on with their careers and they maybe felt that they didn't deserve that seat at the table. They felt a bit of that imposter syndrome at some point in the past and so they had to get over it and so I've got to get over it now. I'm obviously a late bloomer. It's taken me until I'm in my 40s to realize this, but gosh, I wish I could go back to my 20ies now and tell my 20-year-old version of myself like you do deserve to be in the room. Be yourself. Make sure you're adding value and being helpful. Like, don't just get go in there and take, you know, without giving. In fact, don't take at all. Give without take, as Simon Squib puts it. And you will create remarkable opportunities for yourself. And I think if you're watching this in your 20ies like and and you feel like you're showing up inauthentically, maybe now is the time to change that. And well, welcome back uh to the studio. Um I'm going to carry on with thing number eight, which is to charge your worth. I think this is something which a lot of business owners forget about. And in fact, somebody just tagged me onto something in LinkedIn where uh one of the people on there was having issues around cash flow. What I always say is um most businesses don't have a cash flow problem because the money freely flows in and it flows straight back out again. What they have is actually two other problems. So problem number one is making more money problem and problem number two is keeping that cash problem. So if you can learn to make more money and then learn how to keep that money. I wish I'd known that way back when when I first registered my business in my 20ies. And really what it comes down to is having the ability rather than creating these challenges for ourselves, charging what we think other people think we should be charging or maybe not charging enough. Back then we kind of fell into that trap of just charging what we thought other people could afford to pay. And unfortunately what that did mean was we were competing. It's like a race to the bottom essentially when you're competing based on price. I think in my first year in business I think me and my business partner made a grand sum of £8,000 each. So we turned over like 20k or £16,000 or something. And back then I thought, "Wow, it was amazing." But with hindsight, what it meant when we weren't charging enough is it kind of sets you back. There's this compound negative compounding effect which has then happened through my late 20s, 30s and now growing my businesses now. Good news is in my coaching practice now, I don't have that issue because I knew about all of this when I started that business 9 years ago or this business 9 years ago. But way back when, I'd have told myself to make sure that you know you're charging in the top 10% of what everybody in your industry is charging at least. If not, try and be the most expensive in the market because that is how you build firstly positive cash flow cycles in your business. And second of all, it also means that those big chunks of money, if you don't need that money, if you can learn to live within your means, i.e. a keeping thing. You can start to build up a a rainy day fund, a pot of cash, so that then you're not quite so desperate to bring in more clients each and every day, week, month that you're running your business. You can be a bit more selective about the types of clients you were bringing in. And again, back in my 20ies, I'll be very honest, because we needed every client that we could get back then cuz we were a bit desperate for cash, it actually meant that we were bringing in clients who weren't the perfect clients for our business. Lo and behold, a few weeks or months down the line, those clients were coming to us with problems and quite frankly being a bit of a pain in the ass some of them. And we were regretting our life choices of a starting up a business and bringing those clients on in the first place. But it wasn't the starting up the business that was the problem. It was the fact that we just weren't charging enough, which meant we had to take on every client. So, we weren't being selective enough with the clients we were bringing in. So, when you niche and you're selective and you qualify your clients, you get better quality clients. And it creates this virtuous cycle as well because those good quality clients who pay more upfront generally then you get better quality results and outcomes for those clients and then they spend more money on the back end. So again it creates this really positive cash flow cycle within your business which then leads me on to thing number nine which is around building recurring passive forms of income. Now they always say that the most successful entrepreneurs wealthwise have multiple streams of income in. So you can start to build multiple streams of income within your business. Now, when we first started out, we were just selling website packages and the odd logo design. So, these were very much like one-off projects that we would deliver and then we would get no recurring revenue from. So, we were constantly having to like filter and bring in more and more and more clients all of the time. And I know I'm talking a lot about business. There are some life lessons within this as well, which I learned a bit later on around passive income on my personal financial side of things. So then I'm even less dependent on my business bringing in money regularly, you know, um, as much as we used to back in my 20ies. So eventually we did learn that what we needed was not just this front-end product with like selling a pack a website or a logo. We needed some kind of support or care plan that then they would subscribe to on a regular basis. And actually, one of the reasons why I was able to sell my agency 12 years into running that business was because eventually we built up a a list of 150 clients that were paying a minimum of 50, anything up to £500 a month for their support and care plan. So, we had this regular sustainable recurring revenue coming into our business. And quite often as well, because we were good at what we did in terms of the websites we built, they leaned very little support. So many of those clients we wouldn't hear from from one year to the next but they still felt they were getting um value for money because they could get in touch with us any time and so to a certain extent I mean the vast majority of those care plans that we sold were kind of very passive they didn't require a huge amount of upkeep and work on our part latally then coming into my um coaching practice I've then been able to build up a rainy day fund and then I get interest on those savings and I've got other streams of income so I have you know not just um I got money from my books I've got money from speaking. I've got money from events which I run. I've got money from my group clients, my one-to-one clients. I've got some associate coaching roles. And there's also a spin-off business which we've got now around content partnerships and sponsorships. So, I've got, you know, close to 8 to 10 different sources of revenue coming into my business. So, if one dips a little bit, you've always got the others to fall back on and generally they lift the business back up. So, it's more likely you're going to be able to have regular consistent months if you've got this some form of passive recurring revenue coming in. And it was probably a good like seven or eight years before we realized the power of this within my businesses. And I wish I'd known this when I was 20. If somebody had told me to focus on recurring revenue again, things might be quite different now. Who knows? There might have been other challenges which pulled the rug from under us or you know 12 years down the line when I come came to sell that agency. But build recur build multiple streams of income. Make sure some of them are upfront cash. Make sure some of them are recurring. Make sure some of them are passive. and then you're not scrabbling and scratching around every single day trying to find more clients and earn more money and things like that. The very final thing I've got for you is that life and business will throw dips at you. You will just have natural dips whether it be through energy levels, through your health, through your motivation, through success, through the volume of work which you're able to do for any number of different reasons both your life and business will hit dips. And um speaking more so around and I didn't know this so way back when in my 20s I thought oh yay entrepreneurship business it's going to be super exciting. I have the explosive growth and make tons of money and there won't be any problems. And then lo and behold when the first dip arrived it was catastrophic. It felt like the worst thing that ever happened to me. You know we ran out of money having a few problems with clients fell out with my business partner. One of our team you know messes around. You got all of these things going wrong in your business and in your life and you're thinking is it me? What am I doing wrong here? How why did I why me? Why did I did I deserve this? And so and then there's this horrible like undulating pathway to then recover and get back again. And one of the things which I've come to realize is that these dips are actually cyclical. They are almost designed into your life, designed into your business that they I can guarantee that you're going to go through a dip at some point and probably more likely in in as little as the next two to three years max. Cuz I know that over the last 20 years in business, I've been through five dips. I've been through five stages of that the business life cycle and dipped five times. First time catastrophic. It felt awful. Second time, oh, here we go again, but it still didn't feel very comfortable. By the time you get round to your fifth dip and you're a pro like I am, well, first and foremost, when you know that you're heading towards a dip, I break my business. I force myself to go into that dip because I know that what going into a dip means is that it encourages you to creatively solve problems to get yourself out of that dip. And in doing so, you have massive breakthroughs. Some of my biggest growths in myself and in my business have happened coming out the other side of one of those dips. So now when I can see and predict that it's starting to slide off down that cliff edge, I purposefully break my business. I purposely switch off and focus on different areas of my life. And my challenge then is essentially I force myself to go into the dip. And then my goal is simple. get through the dip as quickly as humanly possible and as painlessly as possible and then you have a breakthrough. You pop out the other side. Inevitably when you pop out the other side actually you consolidate at a much higher place than where you were previously. So in I did three dips in my agency. I've done had two dips in my coaching business and each time I've increased my revenue dramatically as I've gone in and come out the dips on the other side because you have to innovate, you have to be creative and you have to solve problems. So there you go. So, there's my 10 things that I would go back and tell my 20-year-old self. I'm curious if you had to go back and tell yourself something when you were in your 20s or 30s. What piece of advice would you give to yourself? Maybe think about dropping it in the comments below. I'd love to read some of those and maybe we can create a compendium of all of the things that our 20-year-old selves should know, and maybe we write a book about it and then gift it to our our kids when they become, you know, turn 18. Here's our uh diaspora of everything that you should know right now. um heading into your 20s and setting yourself up for success.