What advice would I give to a 17 year old me?
Yesterday, one of my younger cousins asked me for advice. He said he struggles with making friends and feels lonely. He is also about to join a job that will require him to work 100+ hours per week and asked for general advice on life and career as well as specific questions on how to succeed. I offered him a lot of general guidance and gave him tips for specific questions. But it got me thinking about a younger version of myself. And I wondered... what advice would I give to a 17 year old me? I would say: Take care of yourself first. There will always be ups and downs in life. Your emotional state is the most critical resource you have even above time. Often times during hardships, the first thing to fall off the wagon is self-care. And that just leads to a deficit in performance and our ability to deal with the hardship. One challenge is that we often think that we have to do something fancy like meditate or exercise or spend loads of time and money to take care of ourselves or that
