Dear Kian, as a Covid-era baby, you were born into interesting times. Before you entered our lives, your mother and I worried about the world you would grow up in. Indeed, in recent years, it has been far easier to feel pessimistic, rather than optimistic, when thinking about the future. Since you came along, however, we still worry, but not nearly as much.

Our renewed sense of optimism comes, unsurprisingly, from you. We have come to accept that every generation will have its own challenges and opportunities. And since we don’t know what the world will look like by the time you grow up, we will try to focus on what we can control. Our role as parents is to support you in the journey of becoming yourself, rather than to impose our biases, fears and views upon you. It is a responsibility we take seriously, but since there is no manual for parenthood, we are quite likely to get some things wrong along the way.

As you start your life, I thought I might offer you some thoughts on the journey ahead. You may or may not find these concepts and ideas useful, but they incorporate some of the lessons I have learnt thus far in my life. None of what is written below is particularly new or groundbreaking, but as you will perhaps discover yourself, we often tend to complicate life far more than we should.

10. Life is not a straight line up and to the right.

I wish schools and universities would add a “biographies” component to their curricula to illustrate that our lives do not follow straight line paths. We tend to focus disproportionately on the outcomes, but there are a number of setbacks and crossroads that we all encounter over the course of our lives.

As you get older, you also realize the margins separating success and failure, to the extent these can even be defined, are very fine. So it can be helpful to have a healthy appreciation for the role of luck and randomness in life. As Sartre noted, “once you know the details of a victory, it’s hard to distinguish it from a defeat.”

My advice is to have a directional sense for what you want to do in your life, but be open to new and different opportunities along the way. Try not to engineer things too much. Learn to enjoy the process, be patient, and do not focus only on the outcomes because these are often moving targets.

9. Strive to be a lifelong learner.

As Ken Robinson said, part of the challenge for the traditional education system is that it is meant to be preparing young people for a future that we can’t grasp. We don’t know what the world will look like by the 2040s, which I use as a marker only because it is the decade you are likely to graduate from college and enter the workforce. So how best to prepare you for an uncertain future?

Well, one thing we can hopefully instill in you are the right values, which will never become obsolete. In terms of skills, I suspect part of the answer involves relying less on the formal institutions such as schools and universities than we have in the past, because they can sometimes be slow to reflect the changes taking place in the world. There is still value in traditional education, of course, but it increasingly needs to be supplemented with other forms of learning throughout your life and career. 

The key, however, is to have a love of learning. Not for a better grade, a certificate or a higher salary. But because you are truly curious about how the world works. I think that all children have that innate curiosity and creativity, but they are often stifled by an education system that doesn’t encourage or reward it. We hope we can provide that environment for you at home if it doesn’t exist at school.

8. Don’t be afraid to make commitments.

I can speak from personal experience here. My 20s and early 30s were characterized by a reluctance to commit to my most valued relationships, a location or career. I desired the freedom that came from living an “unlevered” life and keeping my options open. As Mihir Desai points out, this is perhaps an intuitively appealing approach to life, but it can also backfire in unexpected ways.

What I have found over time is that meaning in my life comes from making commitments, whether to family, friends, work and community (all of them in fact). You often have to go deep to get to the good stuff. The stability from having some anchors in your life can give you a stronger sense of identity and force you to prioritize what is important. Far from tying you down, making the right commitments can set you free and give you the leverage to do more than you could by yourself. 

7. Focus on your energy levels, rather than more abstract concepts such as passion.

This one comes from Scott Adams. I have increasingly come to believe that energy is one of the most undervalued traits in life. People often mistake it for other things, such as passion. But you cannot have a sustainable passion for anything without energy. If you don’t believe me, just ask first-time parents who aren’t getting enough sleep!

Your energy levels are of course closely correlated with your health, which is the single most important factor enabling everything you want to do in life, but also the one you are most likely to take for granted (often until you have some sort of setback). It does not have to be that way though.

You will figure out what your baseline is over time. Some people are blessed with good health, and as a result, seem to have very high energy levels regardless of their lifestyle. If that is not you, that is ok, but work on building up your energy levels. Sleep, exercise and nutrition are key. Minimize intake of addictive substances. Pay attention to your mental health. Try to spend as much time in nature as possible. You get one body and mind per life, so try to take as good care of them as you can.

6. Opportunity cost is (sometimes) what you don’t see.

Morgan Housel observes, correctly, that “wealth is what you don’t see.” I like that turn of phrase and think it applies to many other aspects of life. We make choices, but don’t always think rigorously enough about what we are giving up in the process. Sometimes it is not even that obvious. Clayton Christensen discussed how it is often easier to allocate the marginal hour of your time to activities with a tangible rather than intangible (or long gestation) outcome. So, for example, you focus on working hard for the next promotion versus spending time with your young child, where maybe the parenting and relationship payoff is 20-30 years out.

Remember there are always trade-offs in life and you have to live with the choices you make, whether immediately or eventually. If nothing else, try at least to be deliberate in your choices, based on the information you have at the time. Of course, your preferences and constraints will change over time. You can’t perfectly optimize for all aspects of your life but you can try to connect with all of them. As Sam Reeves said, he wanted to live his life as a marble cake, not a layered cake. You often just don’t have the time to do it all separately.

5. On matters of money, keep it simple and don’t go back to the start.

For better or worse, managing your finances is a big part of life. But remember that money is only a means to an end and you can’t take it with you. It is just a tool to exploit, nothing more. I only have two pieces of advice related to money and both are relatively simple.

First, remember it is your money and that you cannot outsource the ultimate responsibility for it. No one else cares. So make sure you are the one making the decisions, based on your own research. If you don’t know something, it is your job to educate yourself about it. And if something sounds too good to be true, it almost always is.

Second, your primary goal should be to avoid the resets that can undo years of hard work. Remember the board game snakes and ladders? Well, the ladders certainly help, but the truth is you can still do fine without them. You have to avoid the snakes though. There’s that particularly pesky long one right near the end of the board that takes you back to the beginning, just when you think you’ve won. We all make plenty of mistakes with money, but just make sure no single decision can ruin you.

4. Will you pass the “funeral test” when you die?

When I was a senior in college, we had a distinguished alum come in as a guest speaker for one of the last economics classes. Unfortunately, I no longer recall who he was or what his talk was about, but he did say one thing that stuck with me. He asked us to imagine our own funeral many years from now – who would bother to show up in person, celebrate your life and speak about you? Quality beats quantity obviously, but an empty funeral hall would surely not be a sign of a life well lived.

MLK once said life’s most persistent and urgent question is “what are you doing for others?” The trick here is that it doesn’t require grand actions on your part to make a difference in the lives of others. Small things count too; they often compound and matter more than you think. Overall, you can’t go too wrong in life if you have an honest, helpful and kind attitude towards others.

3. “The ice cream will melt, so have the ice cream now.”

As Peter Barton wrote in his memoir, we are largely conditioned to live in the future, not the present. In the fields of business and investing, for example, he talks about how the whole idea is to figure out what will happen and then prepare for it before anyone else does. The present hardly exists, except as a launchpad to the future.

Planning for the future is a sensible thing to do, but don’t forget to enjoy the here and now. You have to find the right balance. I like the quote above because it is a simple illustration of this idea. It comes from Howard Stevenson via Peter Ueberroth. Stevenson was at Ueberroth’s office to interview him when an ice cream gift from a client arrived. Ueberroth said “you’ll probably stay and talk to me, but the ice cream will melt, so let’s have the ice cream now.” So he stopped the interview and invited in the whole office to share the ice cream, before getting back to the scheduled interview.

2. Your job in life is simply to make the most of the cards you are dealt.

Lee Kuan Yew said something to this effect in an interview. We are each born into the world under a unique set of circumstances and equipped with very different attributes. I have observed that much of the frustration and unhappiness one experiences in life will come from two sources: not comparing apples to apples when it comes to our vastly different circumstances, and not fully embracing the attributes (or accepting the limitations) we are equipped with.

The sooner you accept the cards you have been dealt and focus on playing them the best that you can, the easier life becomes. Not necessarily better in terms of outcomes, but easier because at least you are being your authentic self and not getting in your own way. And this is also how you will end up making your own unique contribution to the world, because no one can be you like you.

1. Don’t concern yourself too much with legacy; remember Ozymandias.

We spend a great deal of our lives huffing and puffing for our respective causes. And because we are the center of our own universe, it is natural to assign great importance to the impact we have on others and the legacy we will leave behind. It is wonderful to have a sense of purpose, however you define it. But the pressure to feel you are doing something “meaningful” with your life can be overwhelming (perhaps even more so for the privileged of this world).

If you need to take some pressure off, just revisit Percy Shelley’s words on the transience of power and accomplishment. Nothing matters very much in the end – and that should be liberating, not depressing! Our very existence is a miracle, so don’t take things too seriously.

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.