Life questions that people keep asking me.

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What advice would you give your younger self?

Apologies in advance, but this is going to be a very underwhelming response. Ready?… The advice I’d give my younger self is… drum roll—nothing. Genuinely, if I could go back in time and tell Wyatt what to do better, I wouldn’t tell him a damn thing.

Life is defined by our mistakes, or rather, our ability to learn from them. Unfortunately, humans do not learn very well by being told what to do and how to do it. We simply learn the hard way—by failing and realizing how bad we messed up.

According to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), neurological data shows the brain processes mistakes via "prediction errors." When a person makes an incorrect guess or mistake and is corrected, the brain updates its neural pathways nearly 10 times faster than when it passively absorbs a pre-packaged fact like being told what to do.

If I didn’t experience every emotion, failure, hardship, or whatever low point in my life, I wouldn’t have learned some of those deeply valuable lessons that are crucial for life. I wouldn’t go back and “save” myself from those experiences.

We only learn the hard way; that’s what makes information so valuable.

How do you stay so consistent?

I’ve been asked this question by a few different people. Each one of those individuals required a slightly different answer. I’ll combine them into one general response.

Firstly, I just so deeply love what I do. I love writing. I love spreading value out into the world. I’ve received countless DMs and comments about how something I wrote or said helped someone. That is an incredible feeling—knowing that my work is reaching people. Why would I ever stop?

That leads me into my second point. My work gives me purpose. In my view, purpose is largely driven by service. Service is when we go out of our way to help others, or at least our work provides value to others unselfishly. When you have a sense of purpose, getting out of bed becomes a whole lot easier.

What does genuine confidence actually look like?

There are many different ways confidence can be exemplified. That said, there’s one in particular that has stuck out to me over the past year, I’d say. That being how often someone gives compliments.

A genuinely confident person has no problem lifting others up. In fact, they do it freely and often. Why? Because they're not threatened by someone else's success or attractiveness or intelligence. They don't see complimenting someone as diminishing their own value.

The insecure person, on the other hand, hoards compliments like they're rationing oxygen. They're afraid that if they say something nice about someone else, it somehow reduces their own worth. So they stay silent. They nitpick. They wait for someone to mess up so they can feel better about themselves.

Watch closely for this. You will quickly notice what kind of person someone is.

Until next week,

—Wyatt