I turned 30-years-old today. Admittedly, it is little weirder than I’d expected. I can no longer use being “in my 20s” as an excuse, or a bragging point for that matter. It’s over.
A little self-reflection got me thinking, what have I learned over the past 30 years? I certainly don’t think I’ve got very much figured out, and I could go on and on about mistakes I’ve made that I’ll be trying not to repeat. But since we don’t have time for all that, here are just 7 quick things I’ve learned over the last 30 years that I’ll be trying to take with me for the next 30. I don’t consider them to be particularly profound, but maybe some of them will hit home. I write them to myself as much as I write them to you.
1. Live in the moment
When I traveled to Israel a couple of years ago, everyone in the small group I was with realized it was probably a once-in-a-lifetime experience. With that in mind, we did our best to take as many pictures as we could. At one point we were in a bus flying down the highway trying to reach our scheduled destination on time. That meant we were passing sites quickly, and we would only have one chance to see them. We were jumping from one side of the bus to the other trying not to miss anything and snapping pictures when time allowed. But one girl wanted desperately to take a picture of herself with the sites in the background, so she sat with her back to the bus window snapping selfies of herself with whatever we were passing in the background. For the rest of her life she’ll be showing people pictures of things she’s never even seen with her own eyes.
Almost as bad, and on a far more regular basis, I find myself reaching for my phone to look at Twitter or check my email any time there’s a lull in the conversation.
Put the phone away and have an experience. The memory you’ll make will be way cooler than the Instagram picture you posted that got 34 likes.
By the way, there is science to back this up.
2. Prioritize the important over the urgent
The picture at the top of this article was taken at sunrise in Cape Canaveral, Fla. the morning of one of the last ever space shuttle launches. My band was on tour in Florida and we drove through the night to get there. But you know what? I didn’t see that shuttle launch. One of the other guys in the band was desperately trying to get back home to see some new girl. I’m sure she seemed like a big deal at the time, and she was telling him he needed to get home right away. But I bet he can’t even remember her name now. I know I can’t.
Similarly, I sometimes find myself getting so distracted by URGENT emails and URGENT phone calls from people needing URGENT attention to be paid to their URGENT issues that the IMPORTANT things in my life suffer — my company, my goals, my relationships, my marriage, my faith.
3. Things are never as bad as they seem
Alabama’s own Harper Lee coined this phrase in To Kill a Mockingbird, and boy was she right. So many of the stupid things I’ve said and done in my life could have probably been avoided by not getting caught up in the moment, and instead just simply getting a good night’s rest. Everything feels like a big deal at the time — embarrassment, anger, sadness, pain. But it never lasts.
4. The people in charge aren’t any smarter than us
I’m typing this article on a MacBook Pro, an iPad and an iPhone are siting within arms reach, and I’m listening to music on iTunes. But the product from the mind of Steve Jobs that has had the greatest impact on my life is not a piece of technology, it’s this quote:
Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you.
I’ve had some neat opportunities to spend time with a variety of successful, powerful, influential and famous people over the past few years. And almost every single time I’ve walked away with the same thought — they’re really no different than me or any of my friends.
That’s a simultaneously frightening and liberating revelation. On one hand, “People no smarter than us are running the world?!” On the other hand, “Hey, we can run the world, too.”
5. Work to live, don’t live to work
One of the greatest regrets of people who are lying on their death bed, according to one study, is that they wish they hadn’t worked so hard.
“They missed their children’s youth and their partner’s companionship,” one nurse said. “All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence.”
God created work. It’s a huge part of His plan for our lives and He can be glorified in it and through it. But don’t let your life turn into a reenactment of Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s In The Cradle.”
6. Quit caring what other people think
Oh, the anecdotes all of us could use for this one. Concerns over what other people think about us can become all-consuming. But they may be most prominently displayed in the way we spend our money. Dave Ramsey sums it up better than I ever could:
We buy things we don’t need with money we don’t have to impress people we don’t like.
How silly are so many of the things we buy when they’re looked at from that perspective?
7. There’s a huge difference between dreams and goals
All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible. – T. E. Lawrence
If you’re daydreaming without a pen and a pad, you’re just wasting time. Dreams become goals once a roadmap from where you are now to where you want to go is laid out. Keep dreaming, but start mapping.
(Update: re-posted on my 31st birthday and it still feels relevant!)
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— Cliff Sims (@Cliff_Sims) December 3, 2014
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