5 Lessons I Wish I Had Learned by 25

I tend to reflect quite a lot on lessons, particularly after I’ve gone through some kind of hardship or tough situation. I settle into a time of peacefulness, when the chaos has died down and my mind can think clearly again.

There is a danger in this because reflection can easily fall into rumination. Still, reflection is an important step in learning and improving.

Lately, I had a birthday. And I started thinking about all of the lessons I’ve learned since leaving home to strike out on my own. Sometimes I wish that I had learned some of those lessons much earlier in life.

You might already have learned these five. For me, they came much later. And they were hard ones to learn. Kind of like chicken pox. My friends who had chicken pox when they were small have a much different memory of the experience than me. For me, at age 12, chicken pox was painful and excruciating. So painful I was grateful that my children would never have to endure the same, thanks to modern medicine.

If you haven’t yet learned these lessons, maybe you can learn from me instead of going through them as painfully as I did.

Basic business skills

I went to journalism school. At The University of Texas at Austin, when you join the journalism program, you learn to report, write for news, and even use media in your storytelling. I also learned how to manage deadlines, problem solve when the technology failed me, and how to?think calmly in stressful situations.?

But I didn’t learn business. To be fair, learning business was available to me outside of the College of Communication. UT had a Business Foundations program, and as an overachiever, I decided to enroll. I really wish I had started with that marketing class. Instead, I started with accounting.?

I got a C. I thought, “I’m not cut out for business.” And I quit the program.?

Looking back, that was dumb. One class can’t tell you if you can or can’t do something. I needed more time. Maybe I needed a better instructor.

When I started my web design business way back in 2006/2007, I didn’t know anything about how to run a small business. An accountant friend, Mari Schwanke (who is still my accountant, BTW, and is just amazing), showed me how to use Quickbooks to manage my finances and pointed me in the direction of resources. I also took classes through the City of Austin’s Small Business Division.?

Later, when the company reformed as Standard Beagle, my current agency, I had to learn how to handle contracts, how to file sales tax reports, how to set up payroll systems, where to find benefits, and how to handle payment disputes. I was thrown into situations where I had to learn how to manage budgets, read a balance sheet, read a P&L (profit and loss) report. I learned what it meant to recognize product-market fit, how to market the company, and how to make hard business decisions.?

I made a s**-ton of mistakes. I failed, and learned, then failed and learned again.?

Business know-how might not have saved me from every single painful lesson, but I might not have started from zero either.

Do I know everything about business? Heck no! I still find myself in my peer group meetings googling terms that come up. Like EBITA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization). Thank goodness for Google.

You will make mistakes. Learn from them and move on

In 2017, Standard Beagle was in trouble. We were operating in the red because I hadn’t fully learned what I needed to know to operate the business. It was scary.

Part of the issue was my own ego. I thought I could figure everything out on my own. I had tried a business coach, but it hadn’t fixed the underlying issue. I couldn’t see what I needed to do.

A new business consultant came in and helped us both slash spending and set us on a slightly more stable course. I was beating myself up for hiring too many people and not knowing how to run the company. Things got so low that at one point we actually considered selling the company to another agency. (It turned out to be a bad deal and we walked away.)

It was at that point that I finally started reflecting on the mistakes I had made. Instead of beating myself up, I analyzed what I needed so that I could fix the situation.

Essentially, I pulled my head out of my ass and admitted I didn’t know anything, so it was time that I learned. I joined a Vistage group (a peer group). They gave me advice on the financials and recommended I focus on learning to sell. That’s when I signed up for sales training. And at the same time, I met an EOS implementer (Jeff Bain), who helped me see that the way I was running the company was not effective. We implemented EOS (Entrepreneur Operating System) and made major changes.

People make mistakes. They can be severe mistakes or they can be no big deal. No matter the size or severity, it’s better to view them as learning lessons.?

If you view them as failings in yourself, you can’t grow. It’s better to treat each mistake as an opportunity to improve.

The situation also makes you feel stuck. I couldn’t move past the problems in my company until I recognized the issue and intentionally put them behind me. Take care of yourself and leave the crap behind.

I read a ton of books and try to learn as much as I can from them. When I find something valuable, I try it out to see if it will work for me. I’ve done this with business ideas, interpersonal communication, presentation skills and more. Small experiments help me hone what I’ve learned.

The most valuable lessons come from the mistakes I’ve made. Once, when sulking over a mistake, my father-in-law asked me if I would make that same mistake again. When I told him I would absolutely never do that again, he responded, “then the lesson has been learned.”

Sales

During college, I went home for the summer, determined to find a job. I got signed up to sell Cutco. If you’re not familiar, Cutco sells knives. I went through two weeks of training then was sent off to sell as many knives as possible, 20 hours a week.

I lasted two weeks. I found the methods distasteful. I had this internal dialogue with myself that I was bothering people and that people would hate me. And I told myself that as a journalist, I wouldn’t ever need to sell.

Looking back I think, “Well, that was dumb.”

To sell is human, as author Daniel Pink says. Selling is in everything. We not only sell products and services, but many other things. Candidates have to sell themselves to hiring managers. Teachers need to sell ideas to students. Selling is infused in our lives whether we believe it or not.

I believe that sales is the most valuable skill not taught in school. At least it wasn’t when I was last in undergraduate school.

People have this revulsion to the idea of salespeople, like they’re smarmy and are trying to take advantage of you. And that if we sell, we have to be like them.

We don’t. There are many sales methods. I only learned that after trying and failing often to sell my company’s services, then finally signing up for sales training. I figured out that sales takes practice. You have to make it your own. And there is no magic bullet.

Maybe if I had stuck out my Cutco experience I would have figured out sales much sooner. That might have helped me avoid a host of issues later in life.

Your path isn’t set in stone

Would you believe that at age 18, I thought I had to decide my life’s trajectory and then stick with that forever? Imagine what happened when, at age 26, I realized that I had chosen poorly.

Lost. That's what I felt.

I had been working as a TV news producer since graduating from UT. I was in my third market, working at the ABC affiliate and producing the morning newscast. Every Sunday, I dreaded going into work that night (I worked from 10pm to 7am). As time wore on, I found myself more and more miserable. I’m sure I felt a little like Frodo carrying the ring to Mordor (Tolkien reference) -- my work became more and more of a burden I struggled to carry.

Then, one day, the assistant news director told me that the news director thought I was doing a sh***y job and wanted to fire me. The ratings had gone down and I was responsible for the show. I just thought, “I’m done.”

I quit. Which is not what they expected. They begged me to stay until a replacement could be found (because they had fired my co-producer weeks before). I stayed for a little bit, but I was operating without that burden. My anchor told me I should just keep quitting because the show was going awesome. The ratings even went up.

But eventually I had enough. I left after several weeks to go off into the world without a plan.

And that was the scary thing. I didn’t know my path. I went to work for my friend, Steve, who owned a skate shop. He taught me how to sell skates. I got a job at Williams Sonoma, and I learned to sell there, too. I even sold the Southeast Archaeological Center (part of the National Park Service) on the idea of a documentary.

When we moved back to Austin, I finished my documentary but ran out of money. The only place that would hire a washed up TV news producer was, well, a TV station. But this time, I became a web producer. And a whole world opened up to me. (Thank you, Frank, for hiring me.)

I started learning about design and coding and the web. Suddenly I realized that I was no longer lost. Instead, I had a lot of opportunities ahead of me. It was up to me to forge my own path. And it could change that path if I wanted to.

The paths I chose didn’t lead in a straight line. Some ended in dead ends. I felt like a guide carving a path through the jungle with a machete. My road wasn’t clear, but it led me to where I am today.

I wonder if that would have been any comfort to that younger me who felt so stupid for choosing television news and then ultimately hating the experience.

Change is inevitable

When I turned 9, this woman at my church made a comment that it was the last single-digit birthday for me. I suddenly started thinking about how my childhood was rapidly coming to a close and wanted to cling to it. (Spoiler alert -- I couldn’t stop from growing up.)

Earth is constantly changing, and so are we. What’s important to you changes. Technology changes. It was easier for me to see that change once I had kids. They grow up extraordinarily fast. I find myself reminiscing about how my son -- now 16 -- used to jump into my arms and talk to me endlessly about his day when he was small. Now, I’m not the center of his world. If he does talk, it’s likely to his friends. He says little to me these days.

But that’s part of growing up. We all change.

Holding onto the past is an exercise in futility. Of course, understanding that we change can be terrifying. Humans inherently prefer certainty. Change brings uncertainty, which makes us uncomfortable.

But change is inevitable. My interests have evolved. What’s fun for me has evolved. My friend groups shift and adjust. Clinging to the past and wishing it wasn’t so doesn’t help anyone?grow.

Right now the world seems tumultuous. Advancements in AI and the new companies with tools to help us are both exciting and scary. There’s resistance to learning the new tools. There is fear it will take jobs.

As someone who saw the rise of the personal computer, the rise of robotics in manufacturing, growth in mobile phones, digital classrooms… change is not new. We can either resist it or we can learn to grow with it.?

Conclusion

I often wish I had learned these and other lessons much earlier in life. Would things have been easier or different??

Different, yes. Easier, who knows??

The optimist in me wants to believe that I needed to take all of this time to learn these lessons. Or that it’s some grand scheme laid out for me as I find purpose in life.

But the more likely conclusion is that I learned these lessons by chance. And now that I find value in the lessons, I wish they had been much earlier.?

I can’t go back in time, though. And neither can you. We can only move forward and make decisions based on what we know at the time. To quote Gandalf in J.R.R.Tolkein’s Fellowship of the Ring, “all we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”