By Brianna Wiest

1. Be friends with different types of people. Don’t insulate your worldview by only socializing with those who are fundamentally the same as you.

2. Read. Do you know how few people are reading anything other than a few lines of an article here and there? Few. Do you know why it matters? Because a book you read in a few days this week can change the way you think about something for decades to come.

3. Question yourself, and honor your doubt. People who aren’t secure enough to do this stagnate.

4. Be willing to live the way other people won’t, so you can live the way other people can’t.

5. Learn how to cook things you enjoy more than you enjoy ordering out.

6. Learn how to budget your money in a way that makes you feel responsible and liberated, not restricted.

7. Put away a bit of money each month, however much you can afford (and don’t worry if there are setbacks along the way). Compounded interest is no joke.

8. Take on a side gig exclusively for the sake of that savings account. It will be exhausting for a while, but you’ll come out with new skills and the peace of mind that comes from having a fiscal cushion.

9. Get addicted to healthy pain. The kind that comes from clocking in hours of practice or maneuvering through the discomfort of training your mind to focus on one task until it’s complete. The more you channel your pain into something productive, the less you’ll be tempted to ruminate.

10. Get comfortable admitting when you’re wrong. There is no failure in making mistakes. There is failure in making mistakes and having too much pride to fix them.

11. Clean out your space, then work on adopting an attitude of “enough.” Do you really want to spend the next 10 years accumulating things? No, you don’t. Imagine what else all of that money and time and worry could have gone toward.

12. Only put things on your credit card that you will be able to remember in 3 months from now. If you look at how much is due and can’t remember what you spent it on, it was nothing worthwhile.

13. Do your soul-searching. Make lists of what you like and what you dislike; what you value and what you don’t; what you’re skilled at and what you’re not. Start cohering an idea of who you fundamentally are, but allow yourself to be open to that idea changing over time.

14. Reflect on your life, and ask yourself what your single most compelling motive is. Construct your narrative about it carefully — the way you justify your past actions will become your philosophy for future ones.

15. If you commit to nothing else, commit to a daily routine that consists of actions that, over time, will lead you to where you want to be.

16. Do things intentionally. Date intentionally. Work intentionally. Don’t let your life be a series of mindless, random actions that just seemed nice at the time, but are ultimately meaningless.

17. Take yourself as seriously as you want the world to. Behave accordingly.

18. Scrap it all and start over as many times as you need to. There’s no shame in not getting it right, there is, however, a lot of self-loathing that comes from knowing better, but not having the courage to do better.