18 Lessons from 18 Years of Life

I just turned 19.

It's 6:30am and I just finished calling my parents. Now I am sitting on the rooftop, voice journaling about what the last eighteen years has taught me. So here are my 18 lessons from living 18 years of life.

1. Don't have a plan B

I truly believe that you can do anything you put your mind to. But you have to put your mind to it. Meaning you cannot have a plan B.

Take business school, for example. Me, right now. I want to work in a robotics lab, which is hard enough that the reasonable move is let me have a plan B. I can easily think, let me just recruit for finance/consulting, because I'm in business school and it's difficult for me to first get into the engineering school, and then get into robotics, and then get into a lab.

The thing is, as soon as you start spending ANY time on Plan B, that's time lost on your goal. It's consuming my mind and my efforts. Even if it seems light work to recruit or pursue, it takes a mental capacity nevertheless. And if your goal is extremely hard (like it should be) you need to be putting all your time into it.

And I'm not arguing that you can only do one thing at a time. (I'm definitely more of a jack of all trades myself, hence being more heads down this year) What I'm saying is that if you have a crazy goal, you should not have a plan B. Because plan B is always easier to get, so you might just settle for it.

So have an unwavering self-belief in your own abilities. Set your goals high, because even if you slack off a bit you'll land somewhere you're happy and closer than you were. For me, it may not be a robotics lab, but it may just be a robotics startup, a research opportunity, or even a personal project.

2. Talk to yourself

People find it weird that I talk to myself often. But it is the sole reason why I am so clear on my goals and the reasoning behind it all.

Right now I'm talking to myself with this voice journal (I use Granola or Wispr). When you do this, it's very good for learning how to articulate your thoughts and piece together everything you're thinking about.

Sometimes my mind is a complete mess when times are stressful. But when I talk it out loud to myself and try to figure it out, I realize quickly that the pieces are not as scattered as I thought, and that the answer is right there in my mind. I just had to untangle it with words out loud.

Spending a lot of time in my own brain also means that I can train the way I think. I can train the way I approach things.

Once I really understand the reason behind why I do certain things and the way I feel about each, I'm able to approach things with such clarity.

3. Immerse fully, then decide

Last spring I was doing product at a startup that also needed GTM help, so I picked it up. And somewhere in the middle of that I thought, 'Wait, this is kinda sick. I can be the non-technical person at a highly technical company.' I was a freshman studying business & AI, so even though I wanted to work at the frontier of tech, I didn't have the skillset to break in on the engineering side yet. So, let me just break in by being the best non-technical person they can hire.

So then I learned every single GTM skill there was. GTM engineering, sales, content, product sense. I got technical to the point that I truly understood the product, meaning I could pitch it and write technical blogs about it. By April I was locking in on a GTM internship at a frontier company, ended up with 9 offers, joined a really sick cybersecurity company, and worked my ass off.

And that summer is how I found out what I actually want to build. Because I got hands-on experience doing everything I thought I wanted, for a whole summer. I would've never been able to realize that from the outside.

Which is my point here. You shouldn't be spending 4 years of college prepping for a career you have not immersed yourself in yet. Spend 4 years prepping for banking, or to be a doctor, a lawyer, a consultant, then go do the actual job and find out it's not what you want.

For me it's the same way startups iterate quickly. Set my goal, then put my all into it to see if I like it or not. You cannot tell unless you put 100% in, and you have to know what it's like working within it, instead of just observing from outside.

4. You're running a marathon, not a race

Everyone is sprinting.

I learned how to sprint in high school doing track, and then I come to college and became a product manager and learn how to sprint again (lol).

Everyone around me is sprinting as fast as they can, especially with how fast the frontier of AI is moving.

But with that comes the extreme cost of health. I went through this myself. Last school year I made a lot of amazing accomplishments, working at two startups, hosting founder dinners, and winning hackathons. As a result, my sleep schedule was terrible, my skin was breaking out worse than ever, and I stopped going to the gym consistently.

And so I learned that if I want to make it in the long run, I have to run the marathon and not a race. That means a routine that's healthy for you but also helps you achieve your goals. It might mean slowing down a little, but it also means you last longer than everyone around you.

So this year, I started waking up early and going to the gym before all else. I have so many work and school worries I want to get to first thing, but going to the gym first is what lets me relax my mind.

That was part of my TEDx talk a few years back, on how athletics fuel academic success: while you're training your body, you're resting your brain, and vice versa. That is how doing both isn't tiring.

So don't obsess over adding all the zeros, because it won't matter if you don't have the 1 in front of it. You can be 10, 100, 1,000 times what you are. None of it matters without the 1, which is your healthy physical self. Otherwise it's just zeros.

5. Your birthday is your parents' day

My birthday is more my parents' day than mine.

Today, I took my time to call them first thing at 6am, because it is genuinely more their day than it is mine. They always tell me the story of my birth, and I just know how much work and care and love went into giving birth to me and raising me to who I am today.

I'm so thankful to my mom for everything she's poured into me, into planning my life, giving me the best life I could ever have. And my dad for accompanying me at all my extracurriculars, no matter how many times I changed my mind about what sport I wanted to play, what instrument, what arts. My parents would always let me try.

The other half of this is giving my parents complete transparency into my life. A few years back I started telling them absolutely everything. Every single friend I have, all my experiences and my choices, all the ups and downs and the things I don't want to share.

Because as a parent, the most heart-wrenching part is nurturing your child so much, and watching them leave home.

When I went back home over summer break, they said to me, 'Even though we only see you twice a year now, we still feel very close to you. We feel like we know everything that's going on in your life. And because of that, we're so grateful that we don't feel empty-nested.'

That's all they want. Even though they've poured so much money and time into you, they don't want you to give any of it back. They just want to feel like their baby has left the nest but a parents, they are still able to keep up with everything.

So maybe this is your sign to call your parents more, or send them more photos. I'm always FaceTiming them, sending voice messages, asking for their advice.

6. Befriend people outside your discipline

I think you have something to learn from every single person. I don't care if they're younger than you, less accomplished than you, or in a completely different industry.

I was talking to my friend who's in political science and does campaigning, and he told me why politics people hate tech people. We're all innovating, using AI to its max, thinking each one of us is doing something better for the world. But in reality, while some people might be truly innovating for the better good, the rest of us may just be spamming AI tokens and making GPT-wrapper startups. The argument was that not everyone needs to be using AI this much because of the water waste and climate impacts.

Then the ethics. When a driver hits another driver, they go to jail, they get punished for what they did. But when a Waymo hits a person, the company just settles. The victim doesn't get to see the person who hit them go to jail. They just get a settlement, and they don't even get their wrongs righted.

These are very valid perspectives, and things that I could easily brush off if I was not open to listening. I spent the whole summer around people who genuinely believe they're innovating tech for good, and I believe so too.

I think there's a reasonable response to his argument: AI is becoming the new Google, widespread usage of it will become inevitable, so we have to innovate to improve the climate impact and the ethics. So hearing his opinion helps me shape my product better. So you just always have to listen.

Once you talk to people outside your discipline, people who disagree with you, people who might not even understand what you're doing, you learn things you can't get from taking classes and talking to people in your own industry.

7. Explain it to a five-year-old

Building on my previous idea, but applied to someone who may not understand what you're doing at all. Their unfamiliarity with your realm shows you exactly what questions a normal person is going to have about your product. As a product person, you should be able to articulate your product as if to a 5-year-old, broken into very simple, understandable pieces. If you aren't able to do that, that's when you have to go converse with people outside your expertise.

We often think, 'I want to get smart enough to talk to this PhD in Physics.' Yes, it's great to bond with people over shared knowledge. But you also have to be able to hold a conversation with anyone in a bar. You might think a music class is BS, until you can name historical artists to a random stranger. Because we don't always have to be talking about our niche :)

8. Don't drop the hobbies you love for work

I have a friend who loves hiking and the outdoors. Even though there's commuting, he got into a routine of surfing every morning and hiking every few days. That might seem very out of the way, like busy people just don't have time for it. But once you start getting it into your routine, you won't need to drop it when things get busy, because it's part of your routine already. You already know how to work around it.

So it's really important not to give up the hobbies you love for work. And I'm very guilty of this. Or I was, and I'm only recently starting to have that balance.

One of my close friends gave me a pretty brutally honest talk in May. He said, 'Dara, it seems like all you do is work. When do you have fun? I know you find your work fun but you genuinely have to find something that is non work related to enjoy.'

I didn't really understand what he meant at the time.

But I began making an effort to prioritize work-life balance, and by life I mean nothing to do with work.

Saying yes to sidequests and trips that I used to think take up my time. Spending time with people who are not in my industry at all, where we don't talk about any of that. Trips for the sake of going on trips, not for anything else.

I would work Monday to Friday, but spent almost all my weekends this summer out of town. And other than a few work trips, I would take a weekend and literally just go somewhere with friends, and then come back and go straight to work Monday morning.

This means it's in parallel, I don't wait until after I 'make it' to enjoy life and rest.

After I started making space in my head for something other than work, I spoke to that same friend again and he brought it up before I even said anything, that he could noticeably see the difference and that I seem lighter and happier.

9. Always be skeptical

Always question things. Always be skeptical.

That applies to the decisions you make about your future, and honestly to everything else in life too. So train your curiosity. Think of contrarian takes, contrasting arguments, or simply just question everything.

The best place to practice that is with other people, and people love someone who's curious. Curious to learn about them, curious to ask without being afraid. My past bosses have told me this is one of my biggest skillsets: even though they were of higher authority than me, I had no problem pushing back on their opinions, or telling them I thought they were wrong and that the company should do something else.

One note though: always bring data to back it up instead of just arguing with your boss. (I don't want to get you guys fired lol)

Even when you're coffee chatting with someone more senior than you, whether that's in career or in age, don't be afraid to ask the why behind what they're saying. How do they know that? How did they learn it?

10. Don't put your future in someone else's hands

I believe that you truly have the ability to carve out a wonderful, utopian future for yourself. You just have to have the will for it. You can shape your dream life the same way you can shape how your mind thinks. You can shape how you make your decisions, therefore you can shape how things turn out. More people need to know this.

If you want to be a software engineer, don't let whether or not you can be a software engineer be put in the hands of big tech companies who say yes or no to you interning there. You're gonna be one regardless. Whether that's working for a startup, or working for your parents, or working for yourself and coding your own projects. It doesn't matter if other people say yes or no.

Remember that the greatest of the greats were rejected several times. They just didn't take no for an answer.

11. Set medium-term goals

When people ask me what I want to do after I graduate, I no longer have an answer. And I tell everyone this.

Storytime. The summer before freshman year, I planned out my entire 4 years. I had a spreadsheet. I planned out my accelerated master's too: business analytics, graduating in 4 years with my bachelor's and master's. And then MBB, corporate consulting, McKinsey. Courses set for all 4 years.

And then a few months in, I'm working in startups, in tech, in AI as a product manager, and I faded consulting.

Is that a failure? Is it a failure because I didn't go according to plan?

No. What I think is that you right now have no idea, absolutely no idea, how capable you will be a year from now. It is possible for you to grow so exponentially, that your current self cannot even predict what your future self in one year is capable of.

So why are you planning four years ahead then?

What I mean by medium-term goals is that right now it's September, and all I know is what I want to do this school year. I know what I want to focus on this semester. I have a rough idea of the classes I need next semester to stay on track. I'm thinking about next summer's work too, but not too much.

12. Find your why

Once you find your why, the reason you do things, that's when you know you're on the right path.

At my birthday get-together, my friend asked me: 'Dara, if money wasn't a factor, what would you want to do for the rest of your life? What would you want to be?'

I thought about it long and hard. I thought about all the fun options, all the free options. But the answer I came to is exactly what I'm doing right now, which is working at the frontier of tech. Because I realized it's literally coming from intrinsic motivation.

So try asking yourself that question too, and see if your answer is the same or different.

When I was younger I was super 贪玩, a kid who just wanted to play. I only did my homework for the sake of my parents. I got straight A's just because they wanted straight A's, so I would BS it and then go do everything else I actually wanted to do. It was around sophomore year of high school that I found my intrinsic motivation and went out and did startups and nonprofit work out of my own will.

The lesson may be generic, but it's to do things for yourself, not for the sake of other people.

13. It's never too late to start from zero

A lot of people fall into the sunk cost fallacy. They've spent years working toward something, and when they realize this might not be what they want, they're afraid to turn back and start from zero. And yes, that is scary.

But you can go back and start from zero. I just did it.

I feel like the stupidest person in the room right now in my engineering classes. But I strongly believe that once I feel like I'm becoming the smartest person in the room, I have to go into another room and be the stupidest person there. It's good to continuously put yourself in a place where you're the dumbest person in the room, because then you have the most to learn.

So don't be afraid to start over. It really never is too late. Most of the time you're much, much younger than you think.

Because we see young people succeeding so early, we feel like we should theoretically be more successful than them. But just because they discovered their passion earlier, or started earlier than you, doesn't mean you're not going to catch up.

14. Being good at something isn't the same as wanting it

A lot of people do sports or instruments or extracurriculars because they're good at it, and it's great to win awards and succeed.

But the thing about that is, often after you get into college, a lot of people quit right away, because they realize, 'This is not what I wanted to do. I only did it because I was good at it.'

So looking back, you spent years doing a sport that you no longer even touch anymore. When you could have spent just a little more time on something that you were a little bit worse at, but you would continue doing forever.

And it's very easy to confuse the two. Your parents might want you to do something, and you're just doing it because you're good at it, and then you no longer know what you even want to do anymore.

The test I use is this. Would I wake up excited to do this every single day? When people ask me what I do, would I be excited to tell them about it? Would I be able to yap about it for hours on end even when I'm off work? Because being good at something will get you the awards. It won't get you any of that.

15. Do things alone

Growing up, I've been a very independent person. Or I think I've grown to be.

I do love having a gym buddy sometimes, or a study buddy. But I also really, really enjoy doing those things alone. It allows me to have a clear mind. It allows me to do things in the time that I set, which may be very short.

For example, I have successfully hit an entire upper body workout in 45 minutes. Whereas when you go with somebody, it is very easy to spend 2 hours in there and do a few exercises.

I found the beauty of doing things alone.

And because I'm an extrovert, a lot of people ask me, 'Hey Dara, how are you always so energetic?' But I think it's because I do a lot of things alone. That's how I'm able to save my energy, so that when I am with people, my social battery is fully charged.

16. Learn for the sake of learning, not grades

Go to school and learn not for the sake of grades, but for the sake of learning. And this is something that I learned by doing the opposite.

I had perfect grades all throughout elementary to high school. I was a nerd, in the library all the time. I was great at absorbing material for a test, and not great at applying it to the real world.

I think it's fine that I focused a lot on grades in high school, because that's what allowed me to get to a really good college where I'm then able to do everything else.

But now in college, take the time to put in that extra effort to ask, how does this apply in my life? How do I apply this physics equation to the thing I'm actually working on right now? How can I take my advanced finance class and help out the company I'm interning with, even though I'm not in the finance department? How can I take this formula econ gave me, or this random history story from class, and apply it to current stuff?

This is something I'm actively working on right now.

Grades just don't matter as much anymore. Real-world experience matters so much more. You might be able to ace a finance test because you memorized all the formulas, but if I put you in a room of CFOs, can you hold your ground?

This also means not dissing my classes that aren't related to what I'm interested in. I'm always super interested in my innovation classes and my AI classes, and then some general education requirement comes along, philosophy for example, and I'm like, 'Wow, this is not related to what I want to do at all, so I'm just not going to pay attention to it.' But the reality is that having a drastically different perspective can teach you so much.

17. Protect your peace

To be honest, I'm only beginning to learn to protect my peace.

Because I'm a very extraverted and talkative person, I meet a lot of people and end up having many relationships to maintain. I am blessed to say this, but I learned that it is important to not get overwhelmed with meeting more people, and instead focus on making deeper friendships.

Because keeping up with your friends should never feel like it's draining you, it should be the opposite.

So this year especially, I'm focusing closely on those relationships that fuel me. It's just like putting energy into the things that fuel you.

18. Take that break now

My friend passed recently.

He was the hardest working person I knew, and what I took from him is the mindset to push your body as hard as you push your brain.

But because life is so precious, and incidents happen, and there are some things you can never control.

So when you're working hard, don't think to take your break in a year from now, a few months from now, or even a few weeks. Take it now. You deserve it.

It may be as simple as taking a step back to enjoy life and do the bucket list items that you always wanted to do.

To end off

While writing this, I never once had to go looking for the next lesson. One just led into another.

That's because none of these stand alone. They are intertwined.

You can't iterate fast on your career without being willing to start from zero. You can't start from zero without the self-belief to walk into a room where you're the stupidest person in it. You can't sustain any of it if you're sprinting, and you can't sprint forever, which is why you have to take your break now. Doing things alone is what makes me good with people. Talking to people outside my field is what makes me better at the thing I do inside it.

So to those who have read to this point, these are the lessons and values that I genuinely preach to my friends everyday. Many of which I learned by doing the wrong thing first.

So cheers to 19, and I hope you guys enjoyed reading the 18 lessons I learned :)