What are your twenties for if not for failing? Not the lazy kind of failing, the kind where you never really tried and so defeat is easy and obvious. No, your twenties are for the kind of failing where you challenge yourself to something just at the edge of your ability, and maybe past it, and you put everything you have into it, and yet you failed anyway. Your twenties are for heroism, in other words.
I read a lot of books in my 20s, but I think I read more in my teens. By 19, I had read many of the classics, including Tale of Two Cities and Les Miserables, and also some of my all-time favorite books, like All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy. During my 20s, I caught up a little on the books being published today that I missed while I was reading the classics as a teenager. Here are my fifteen favorites…
I accomplished a lot in my 20s. I don't know if I'll ever top marrying Talia, becoming a father, writing my first book, and starting my first business. It was a breakthrough decade.
The last accomplishment in my list of top 5 accomplishments is that I bought a house. Honestly, though, this only made it to the list because I needed five. What I'm much more proud of is taking care of my house. Because a house isn't just a place you live. It's also a never ending list of projects that will take up all your time, energy, and money.
In my early 20s, I was at the pinnacle of my musical taste and acumen.
See Accomplishment #1, #2, and #3. When I was four, I overhear a word my parents said that would change my life: entrepreneur “What’s an entrepreneur?” I said (remember I was four). “It’s someone who starts a business.” “That’s what I want to do. I want to be an entrepreneur,” I said. Really. I’m not making that…
Talia is telling me these posts need to be shorter or I'm never going to finish, so I'll just say this: When I was 27, I became a father. Being a father is messy, stress-inducing, sleep-depriving, and often frustrating. And yet it's made me a better man. I am more responsible, more trustworthy, more productive, and an altogether better person after becoming a father.
I first thought about becoming a writer when I was sixteen or seventeen. I was lying in bed too late in the morning reading A Tale of Two Cities. For some reason, that question popped into my head. You know the one: "What are you going to be when you grow up?"
When I was 13 years old, I couldn’t imagine waiting until I was in my twenties to get married. This was both because I was a romantic and because I was raised to believe that you shouldn’t have sex until you got married. At 13, I couldn’t imagine waiting seven or more years to have sex (twenty,…
Today is the last day of my 20s. And so I'm doing a café crawl, going to all the coffee shops I can and writing blog posts… basically what I've been doing for the last six years of my life (I can't tell if that sounds more braggy or embarrassing, but it is true). My 20s were filled with cafés. At 20 years old, never having spent much time in a coffee shop before, I discovered I loved the atmosphere of coffee shops. And so this is a list of the top 10 cafés and coffee shops of my 20s.