If I could sit down with myself at thirty, twenty years before this one, I wouldn’t give general encouragement. I’d give him a short list of things I actually needed to hear, not the kind that sounds good for five minutes and changes nothing. This is the closest thing I have to a real letter to my younger self.

Never Stop Learning

Never stop learning, even when the job pays enough that you don’t have to. In my late thirties, working from home became normal and my workload dropped hard. I had to be online during working hours, but there was often very little to actually do. Looking back, it was probably the best learning opportunity I ever had. A nice amount of money arrived in my account every month, I had time, and I couldn’t find a reason to bother. Earlier in the same job I’d been different. I was motivated enough as an amateur cyclist to become a certified cycling trainer, because there was something I wanted to know and no reason not to learn it. Later, I didn’t even keep up properly with changes in my own field. Nothing was forcing me to, so I stopped. By the time I left corporate work at forty-five, I had dusty knowledge and dusty learning muscles to match. Going back to school was partly about learning something new and partly about finding out whether I could still make myself learn when nobody was paying me to do it.

The Small Thing That Becomes the Big Thing

The small thing you’re doing for no obvious reason might be the thing that matters ten years from now. After I left the corporate world, I trained as a fitness coach and rehabilitation therapist, and started writing about health and longevity almost as an afterthought. There wasn’t really a plan. I wrote about whatever I was learning, experiencing, or thinking about at the time. Somewhere past a hundred articles, I started seeing the same things coming back — sleep, recovery, training, how people keep pushing without knowing how to stop. I realized the scattered notes might actually contain something worth putting together. The early feedback pointed in roughly the same direction: people already know how to push. The other half — sleeping, recovering, building enough structure and freedom that the pushing can continue — is much less obvious. So I decided to try building that part properly and see what happened.

Check the Signal

When your body tells you something is wrong, check it. I spent four years explaining away a signal because stopping long enough to find out what it meant wasn’t something I was willing to do. I still don’t have a neat diagnosis for everything that was happening then. I just know the signal was real, it kept coming back, and ignoring it didn’t make it go away. I wish I’d understood that sooner.

Pay attention to the people in front of you. I used to think being present was mostly a personality thing, something some people were naturally better at. Now I think it’s much more basic than that. If I’m tired enough, I check my phone during a conversation, get distracted at dinner, or become irritated by something that normally wouldn’t bother me. When I’m rested, none of that takes much effort to avoid. It took me an embarrassingly long time to connect those two things.

Consistency Beats Intensity

Consistency beats intensity over a long enough stretch. This one is almost boring, which is probably why it took me so long to appreciate it. Money worked that way for me. I never made one spectacular investment or took some enormous risk. I just saved, invested, avoided doing anything particularly stupid and repeated it for years. Training is much the same. I watch people do the heroic sessions — the fifty-kilometre run, the enormous weekend, the workout that makes a good story — and I understand why it’s attractive. I’ve done plenty of them myself. But the thing that actually made me a decent athlete wasn’t any single session — it’s that I’ve trained almost every day for a decade, and most of those sessions were completely ordinary. That’s the part that adds up.

Don’t Wait for Perfect

And don’t wait for the perfect version of your life before you start living it. I know someone who always wanted to play things safe. Smart, motivated, careful with money, the sort of person who believed things should happen in the right order: house first, then a child. There was always another career opportunity, another problem that needed solving, another reason why now wasn’t quite the right time. By the time they felt ready, his wife got sick, and that was that. Other friends of mine did almost the opposite. In 2008, with the financial crisis starting and job prospects looking terrible, they decided that was exactly when they should have their child. Their thinking was simple: by the time she was ready to return to work, surely the economy would have recovered. They were right.

I don’t think the lesson is to ignore risk or to have children at some particular age. It’s that waiting for conditions to become safe can become its own kind of risk. Nothing ever lines up perfectly first.

The status game, the responsibility, the boundaries — I wrote about that a few days ago, so I’m not going to tell the same story again. I just wish I’d believed it sooner.

That’s probably enough of a list for now. There are other things I know at fifty that I didn’t know at thirty, but some of them are still too close to me to pretend they’re lessons for somebody else. Maybe that’s another thing I’d tell the thirty-year-old version of myself: you don’t have to have everything figured out before you start saying what you’ve learned.

September is coming. That’s really what this list is for. Not to look backward and make the past seem smarter than it was, but to decide what is actually worth carrying forward.

Frequently asked questions

What’s a good format for writing a letter to your younger self?
Specific, concrete lessons tend to land better than general encouragement — naming an actual decision, mistake, or turning point rather than abstract advice like “believe in yourself.” The more precise the memory behind each point, the more useful it is to actually read back later.

Is it common to regret waiting for the “right time” for major life decisions?
Yes — this is a frequently reported regret, particularly around having children, changing careers, or starting something new, since conditions rarely align perfectly and the cost of waiting is often invisible until much later. It’s a well-documented pattern in retrospective life-satisfaction research, not just an individual experience.

Why does consistency often matter more than intensity for long-term results?
Sustained, moderate effort compounds over years in a way that occasional intense bursts don’t, largely because consistency is what actually continues during the inevitable periods of low motivation. Intensity gets attention in the short term, but adherence over time tends to predict outcomes better.

How do you know if a small hobby or side project could become something bigger?
Usually you don’t know in advance — the pattern tends to be recognized only in retrospect, once enough material or practice has accumulated to reveal it. The more useful approach is continuing something because it’s genuinely interesting, not because you expect a particular outcome from it.