My Advice for Each Stage of Life

There's a life cycle: right, your teens, your 20s, your 30s, and so on. Every phase is a little bit different, or quite a bit different. People have asked me, uh, in their 20s, what is good advice for their 20s? You are about to go independent; you were dependent on others, and now others are going to become dependent on you. You're going to work, and you're going to learn, and you're going to try to be successful.

This is a whole different phase in your life. The best thing I can say is: make your work and your passion the same thing, and don't forget about the money part. Okay, now you're in a different phase of your life. You're in the phase of your life that, um, your job is getting more serious. Your responsibilities are going to get more serious; perhaps your, uh, relationships are going to get more serious.

This is a stage of your life where you might be choosing a partner, and you may be having children. As you're choosing a partner and having children, you're going to deal with the work-life balance issue. So the bit of advice that I want to convey is that you can look at that, um, as: oh, I have to choose between giving up my work hours, and I have to choose to—so, to have a quality of life, you have to choose less.

If you know how to get more out of an hour, you can have more life in life. There are things that you can do. In my book "Principles," I wrote some of those things down that you can be more efficient, more effective, and you can get more out of life. So the trade-off is less.

Okay, what would I recommend? First of all, I recommend for every phase of your life meditation. If you can meditate and you have the calmness and the equanimity to look at that, I think that that's an important thing. Then I think also that if you think about the relationships that you're in, that then may be more strained, um, to differentiate those relationships.

Who are the people that you want to be around, and how do you work with them to get you through those issues?