Growth

I do not wish you an easy path. Instead, I wish you a path filled with impediment and ambiguity and struggle and joy.

You are about to experience the first taste of freedom in your life and that won't be freedom from your parents. You are about to be free from yourself, your old self, the self of your youth. You are, in many ways, about to be born.

Whether or not you think you can, you are right.

Don't let yourself get comfortable. Avoid the comfort zone. Being uncomfortable will motivate you and cause you to grow faster.

This is your time and it feels normal to you, but really there is no normal. There's only change, and resistance to it, and then more change.

You don't need to change yourself. Ever. You need to come home to yourself. And that changes everything.

If you have 50 years left, or 50 days left, or even 50 minutes left, it's never too late to become what you might have been.

A career is not something that you put on like a coat. It is something that grows organically around you, step by step, choice by choice, and experience by experience.

When there are better players around you, you get better.

Find allies rather than adorers. Adorers will point out everything you do well. Allies will also be honest with you when they feel you are making mistakes or not living up to your potential.

Do something you're not ready to do. In pushing through that discomfort you'll learn a lot more about yourself. You'll learn to do something you didn't think you could do, or you'll learn where your limits are. Either is valuable.

Growth has been the great alleviator of poverty. Growth has been the engine of social mobility. Growth is the key ingredient in the glue that holds our society together.