The 5 Things Successful People Do In Their 20’s

What's up you guys? It's Graham here. So your 20s are really such an important time. I honestly believe that it's these early years that best form the foundation for everything else you do later in life. Much like it's the easiest to learn a second language at the age of 10, financially speaking, a lot of these business and money habits are best developed in your 20s. This is a time where most of us begin working, begin investing, and really growing and making our mark. But we haven't been investing or growing and working long enough to really form bad habits that might derail us later in life or be difficult to break.

That's why I felt it's worth addressing these five things that you should be doing in your 20s that will make a massive difference going forward and will set you up on a very bright future. So number one, the first and most important thing on this entire list is just click the like button. No, I'm just kidding. But in all seriousness, number one is learning how to invest in yourself. And I know this sounds cheesy, but you are the best investment with the highest ROI. There is literally nothing else—maybe besides BitConnect—that has as much potential as you do.

Think of it almost like having a dull knife. Well, it still probably works; it doesn't work as good as it could be. So imagine investing in yourself is really like just sharpening the blade to make it more effective at its purpose. But investing in yourself doesn't need to be crazy expensive. I don't mean going and spending thirty thousand dollars on a weekend how-to-flip real estate course; I'm talking about just learning a new skill, reading a book, or investing your time firsthand in learning something new.

At this time in your life, your skills are pretty much limitless. Whatever you want to learn right now is at your fingertips. For instance, when I was 14 years old, I wanted to learn how to trade stocks. So I went to Barnes & Noble when that was still a thing and I got a book about how to trade stocks. I then bought a book about how to read candlestick charts. I then went online and found a forum of people who talked about day trading stocks. I then learned firsthand when I took $2,000 that I had saved up over weekends and summers and put that in a Scottrade account—in my dad's name.

By doing this, I was able to learn firsthand exactly what it was like to trade stocks: all of the emotions of feeling excited when it's worth more or just totally depressed when it goes down in price, and the panic when you see it dropping and you questioning yourself if you should sell. That was really the best $2,000 I have ever spent on anything in terms of the learning experience involved with that. And that $2,000 was really the best investment in myself.

Even here with YouTube, I wanted to invest in myself and make YouTube videos, so I went on YouTube to learn how to make YouTube videos. I learned everything I needed to know about camera equipment, different lenses, lighting, audio, and just how to use iMovie. Within about a month, I got it down. So if you have an interest in something, now is the time to pursue it, learn it, and go for it. Now is the time to invest in yourself because it just gets harder as you get older.

Now the second thing you should be doing is just never getting complacent and seeking to constantly improve. You're always gonna be able to do better and enhance your skills. There is always something more you can do, and honestly, complacency is probably one of the worst things to fall into because it just kills all the momentum that you've been building up. As you start doing something, you'll always find that there's a more effective way to do the same thing, and there's always gonna be something new to try.

Even though the saying is very true—don't fix what's broken—the reality is that things do change over time and you will need to adapt to those changes. What ends up working right now is probably not going to be as effective 10 to 15 years from now. There's always gonna be adjustments that need to be made over time, and by constantly pushing yourself and seeking to do better and improve, it's gonna be much easier to stay at the top of the curve.

The reality is if you don't innovate or progress, there's going to be someone else out there who will, and that person will eventually outpace you. Because as you stay still, the world keeps moving forward without you, and eventually, you realize that you're much further behind than everyone else. So just aim to constantly be learning and improving, no matter what you're doing. A really great example of this is the book called "The Compound Effect." It basically summarizes that you should take very small, reasonable changes that just add up to something greater over time.

When you stick with them, doing just 1% better every single day doesn't seem like a lot right now, but when you add that up over the course of a year, you're gonna be 367% further ahead than where you are right now. The third thing you should be doing is taking risks. Your 20s are probably one of the best times for you to take the riskier business moves or take chances you wouldn't ordinarily take. This is because in your 20s, chances are you still have quite a few fallbacks in the event that you fail.

It's still socially acceptable for you to move back in with your parents. It's totally okay to sleep on a futon and eat ramen noodles because that's what a lot of people do in their 20s. Chances are, you don't have the financial obligations that someone decades older would have: maybe a wife, kids, a mortgage, payments, responsibilities, and all that stuff that could really end up holding you back from taking the riskier choices. Being able to take these riskier decisions could really end up propelling you much further in business or your career.

If you think about almost any super successful person you look up to or want to emulate, almost all of them took substantial risks to get to where they are today. For instance, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg both dropped out of college, and Elon Musk took huge risks with both SpaceX and Tesla. Larry Ellison would even pitch products that weren't yet feasible to make and then would go to his developers and demand they made them work. It's these really strategic risks that ended up putting them much further ahead.

Being able to do this and take these risks early on give you the best chance to bounce back in the event you need to without wasting 40 or 50 years of a potential career or having a lot to lose in any event you fail. So with that said, now is really the best time to go for it. The fourth thing that you should be doing in your 20s is really focusing on the projects that you enjoy the most. Much like the third example of taking risks, your 20s are really the best time to pursue the things that you really want to pursue.

By doing something that you really like and enjoy, it makes it that much easier to excel and do well in it. There's really nothing more disheartening than being forced to do something you really don't want to do, and that alone could crush all of your enthusiasm and potential. Especially when you're young and brand new to something, you have the advantage of what I like to call the beginner's excitement that has the potential to really push you above everybody else.

Now, when you combine that with doing something you enjoy, it's gonna be much easier just to break past any obstacles or anything that might be holding you back. Plus, just when you do something you're excited about, other people just naturally tend to get excited about it too, and it’s much easier to get them on board with what you want to do. It's so true that people will feel how you feel, so if you're excited about something, so will they. Conversely, if you feel lackluster about something, well guess what? They're gonna feel lackluster about it too.

So if you do something that you're excited about, that you enjoy, and that you're passionate about, other people will feel the same way. So use that to your advantage as much as you can. Do things that you really enjoy, that you really want to be doing, and that's just gonna make everything that much easier. And finally, number five is just learn from your failures. This is actually probably one of the most important ones of this entire video—besides clicking that like button, of course.

Number five is probably one of the most important things on this entire list because this will really set the foundation for everything else you do going forward. If you can't learn from your mistakes, nothing else is really going to matter. But seriously though, it's important for me to say that you will fail along the way, and those mistakes really don't make that big of a difference. It's really how you handle it that really matters the most.

For instance, if you fail, do you just give up, or do you learn from those mistakes just to do better the next time? In fact, I really believe that if you go without failure and everything you do is successful along the way, it's gonna give you a false confidence that everything you do will be successful, and this is just simply not the case. When you have that false sense of confidence, it could really put you in a position of being vulnerable and not thinking things through as much as you should.

So be okay with making mistakes, learn from them, and move on. Do better the next time. Honestly, just see every mistake as a lesson and a learning experience—as something for you to improve from. Our mistakes really don't end up defining us, but it's how we handle those mistakes that do. One of the biggest mistakes you can do right now is not implementing these five things immediately going forward in your life, especially if you're in your 20s. Now is really the best time to be doing these.

So with that said, you guys, thank you so much for watching! I really appreciate it. Now, if you've watched it all the way through, you guys enjoyed this; you're not already subscribed, you don't need to smash that subscribe button. We just need to gently tap it, and then also feel free to gently tap the notification bell so YouTube can notify you any time I upload a video. This also means that you might possibly be able to beat Belle for the number one comment; we'll see.

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So make sure to do all of that. Thank you again for watching, and until next time!