Advice to someone younger than me

The best advice I could give to someone younger than me is:

You have time!

There is plenty of time under the sun to live patiently and peacefully. It is very easy to get caught up in the whirl-wind of life trying to keep up with what everyone else is doing and keeping at pace with what society tells us is required for a happy life.

What I have learned over time is that it’s often when we are caught in this ‘washing-machine’ that we lose track of time. When we finally get a moment to breathe we look back at that fury of chaos we have been in, realising that we have been mechanical and passive with our life. We have succumb to following societies expectations.

What examples of others have taught us

JK Rowling

• Who she was: A struggling single mother living on welfare in Edinburgh.
• Late-stage achievement: Published Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone at age 32 after 12 rejections.
• Key to perseverance: She viewed hit-bottom failure as a liberation. Stripped of everything else, she stopped pretending to be anyone else and channeled all her remaining energy into her true passion: writing.

Samuel L. Jackson

• Who he was: A long-time theater actor struggling for years with severe addiction.
• Late-stage achievement: Landed his career-defining breakthrough role in Pulp Fiction at age 45.
• Key to perseverance: Completing drug rehabilitation in his early 40s finally cleared his mind, unlocked his full emotional depth, and allowed him to treat acting with absolute, uninterrupted discipline.

Charles Darwin

• Who he was: A quiet, reclusive naturalist plagued by chronic illness and self-doubt.
• Late-stage achievement: Published his world-changing theory On the Origin of Species at age 50.
• Key to perseverance: Decades of slow, meticulous data gathering and a vast network of global scientific friends who constantly pushed him to publish before rivals could beat him to it.

The only time when we lose track of what we are building in our life is when we try to ‘speed things up’ to the pace of the world around us, rather than slowing things down to our speed of development. Take your time, learn things properly, enjoy the learning!

I wrote an article on being patient, you might find it insightful.

Always,

Adam, 2026