10 Truths About Life
Lessons I learned the hard way
Hey Friends,
Life is a bizarre video game.
The downside of this video game is you can’t respawn and start all over again. So some actions you choose carry a real risk to them.
For the majority of my twenties, I did some dumb and reckless things:
Smoke my breakfast and drink my dinner.
Take enough “extra-curricular's” to wake a dead horse.
Walk into a sketchy cardroom in Vietnam alone to play a private high-stakes poker game.
I was playing Russian Roulette with my life. Looking back, I realise how lucky I was that nothing bad happened.
All mistakes and failures have one thing in common - They are life’s way of teaching us its rules. In particular, the ones we do not want to learn.
For the last few years, I have been re-correcting and re-conditioning all my mistakes. Because the thing I desire most in this life is to live a fulfilling one. One of which I’m proud of.
I write this to start collecting what I’ve learned and share it with you so you don’t make my mistakes.
But also as a reminder to myself to be a little less reckless, a little less impulsive and a little less irrational.
1. What feels urgent is mostly important for someone else.
The most common regret of those on their deathbed is chasing the urgent and neglecting to do what was actually important.
Spending time with family and friends, learning, and taking care of our health are all important activities. And yet, we often skip them to attend meetings and other urgent tasks.
The ironic part is that the very important never feels urgent. We have the impression there will always be time, and we can delay it for the next day, month or year. Instead, what we think is urgent is mostly important for someone else.
Why do people acknowledge the important only on their deathbed? Because facing death, the important now has a deadline. Death has come knocking.
You don’t have to wait til the end of your life. Make the important a priority in your life. Everything else is subordinate to it.
What is so urgent that it takes you away from what is important?
2. You can be whoever you wish to be.
In 2021, I spent it scared out of my mind. I didn’t want to be a poker player anymore. But I was still clinging to who I was, what I was doing, what I knew how to do, and to what made me feel safe.
It’s been almost a year since I let go, and my old self has become a distant memory.
But here’s the thing: you don’t have to be your past. You can be someone else and have what you want without anyone giving you permission.
All you have to do is wake up every day and make one decision that takes you a step closer to who you wish to be.
Who could you be if I gave you permission?
3. Is this making my life better?
In American History X, Derek Vinyard (played by Edward Norton) a neo-Nazi, lived a life of violence, crime and racism. After killing two black youths, Derek goes to prison. Derek begins to reconsider his life when his former history teacher asks him, “Did any of those things make your life better?”
Many of the activities I engaged in my twenties did not improve my life. Drinking, smoking, hanging out with the wrong people, playing video games for 8 hours straight, complaining, waking up and doom-scrolling on social media.
I couldn’t admit it then, but I was addicted to the wrong things.
I've managed to overcome many bad habits and behaviours, there are still some vices, but today my life is better.
Is the activity you regularly engage in making your life better?
4. Problems grow to the size they need to be for you to acknowledge them.
In There’s No Such Thing As A Dragon, Jack Kent tells a story of a little boy named Billy. One day Billy finds a dragon the size of a cat in his bedroom. He runs and tells his mother, but she ignores his claims — after all, there is no such thing as a dragon. Day after day, the dragon keeps growing, remaining ignored. Until one day, it grows so big that it destroys Billy’s house with its size.
Now with a destroyed home, Billy’s mother acknowledges the dragon. With the acknowledgement it wanted, the dragon starts to shrink. Billy’s mother asks, “Why did the dragon grow so big?”
Billy answered, “I’m not sure, but I think it just wanted to be noticed.”
The moral of this story is that problems grow to the size they need for us to acknowledge them.
There are many reasons why problems appear. However, there’s a single reason why problems grow — we ignore them.
What problems in your life are you currently facing that need acknowledging?
5. What got you here won’t get you there.
When the going got tough in poker, I would grit my teeth, dig my heels in and claw my way through. I didn’t want to have losing months, so my solution was to grind harder. Every time this happened, I would burn myself out, take a few days off and jump right back in. Rinse and repeat.
Until one day, the flame for poker was snuffed out for good. I was mentally checked out. I could no longer bring myself back to poker.
Working harder works until it doesn’t. What got me here won’t get me where I want to go.
I’ve come to see life in stages or seasons. This next stage of my life is about longevity. Longevity requires being consistently good than occasionally great.
I try to avoid situations where I have to dig deep. Instead, I go 80% and conserve my energy so I can turn up again for tomorrow.
What habit or behaviour that proved beneficial in the past but is near useless for future growth?
6. Other’s people expectations aren’t your problem.
My mom wanted me to do Maths at university and get a nice fancy job in corporate finance. Instead, I did Psychology and ended up as a poker player.
Too often do we pursue what we do not want because of others’ expectations.
But going against her wishes, I learned that people’s expectations of me aren’t my problem. It’s theirs.
I know my mother is disappointed that I didn’t make the choice she wished for.
I know why she’s adamant about dictating my and my brother’s lives. Because she doesn’t want to see us suffer the way she did, I can’t imagine what it’s like to flee Vietnam and start life again in a foreign country. To her, a good education and a good job can alleviate many life struggles. She’s justified in wanting the best for me. But she’s not justified in how I should live my life.
Going against her wishes and not caring about other people's expectations taught me to take ownership of my choices and responsibility for my problems.
What expectations of others do you currently hold on to?
7. Are you willing to pay the price for what you want?
Every decision, good or bad, has a price.
Say yes to something means you pay the price of not knowing the other options you could have taken.
Taken to a higher level, each goal you set in life has a set of costs that must be paid. They don’t have to be financial. They can be the cost of actions: doing the work, deliberate practice and spending time on it. If you pay these costs, you will achieve your goal.
But not everyone is willing to spend the effort to pay these costs.
Success in anything, whether that is health, wealth or relationships, follows having paid all the right costs.
Are you willing to pay the cost to achieve what you want?
8. Always start small.
Every time I failed to achieve a goal, it had one thing in common: I was trying to do too much.
But something I learned from behavioural science, copywriting, and successful people is to start small and start easy.
Notice how I opened with 6 words? I’m making it easy for you guys to read this post.
Last year I completed my first half-marathon and triathlon. How did I do it? I started walking. From there, I went from a light jog to running every other day, to swimming, biking and running the London Triathlon.
When setting out new goals, it’s tempting to go full speed because of motivation. But motivation is a fleeting feeling.
It’s better to start small and easy. This generates momentum to carry you through to the end of your goals. Consistently good beats occasionally great.
What small step can you take today to move one step closer to your goals?
9. Intentions don’t matter. Actions do.
Talk is cheap.
As the old saying goes, “don’t trust people’s words but their actions.”
This is sound advice, and we know to apply it to others. But we often forget to apply it to ourselves.
Our brains tell us:
We will take out the garbage
We will do the workout
We will write a book
But we end up not doing what our brain says.
It’s not that our brains are trying to deceive us. It’s just that our brain is complicated and made up of multiple regions. The region responsible for conscious thinking is not the same for moving our muscles to take action.
You can’t say you’re a kind person just because you thought you are. You have to do acts of kindness.
As Naval Ravikant once said, “Intentions don’t matter. Actions do. That’s why being ethical is hard.”
What actions do you fail to keep doing?
10. Discipline equals freedom.
Growing up, my tiger mom taught me, inadvertently, that discipline is coercive.
So when I moved out for university, I went a bit wild. I thought not being told what to do and doing what I wanted was freedom.
But what I’ve learned is coercive discipline is needed when someone’s interests are not aligned with yours. When discipline originates from the goals you want to achieve in life, it leads to freedom.
Having the discipline to exercise and stay healthy frees me from the coercion of poor health and diseases.
Having the discipline to wake up and work on my business and writing will free me from the coercion of having an employer.
Having the discipline to mediate and journal frees me from the coercion of my impulsive mind and emotions.
What do you need to become disciplined in to find the freedom you want?
— Jason Vu Nguyen