My Jordan Year

Hello friends, and welcome to Progress Pulse! If you’re new to the blog, add your email below to ensure that you receive my next piece in your inbox. If you want to read more of my posts, check out my archive here.

Last week, on March 13th, 2024, I turned 23 years old. 

Colloquially known as the “Jordan” Year, my 23rd year of life has been one of significant change. 

Full-time student to full-time employee. Living in Indiana to living in California. Frat house bunkbed to an apartment with my girlfriend. 

As I reflected on the past year, I thought it would be beneficial to share those ideas that have been the most influential to me over the past 365 days. 

While I am certainly no sage as a washed-up college kid only 8 months into my first real job, I hope I can provide at least one person with a new perspective that too can change their outlook on work, relationships, or life. 

So, here are 23 ideas that have shaped me at 23:

1. Community Matters

The bubble of a college campus is both a blessing and a curse. 

Surrounded by countless peers and potential friends, it is easy to find people you like. Hundreds of clubs and social organizations funnel you into groups that quickly become your best friends for the next four years.

Unless you stay close to home after school, this tight community of people you see every day quickly fades. If you do move somewhere new, finding a group of people to spend time with when you’re not working is critical to your happiness. 

This could be through a professional org, a cohort of friends to work out with, or a new book club you heard about on a cafe flyer. 

Don’t neglect finding community. Your sense of belonging depends on it.

2. Travel Sucks Alone

Hitting locations like the historic metropolis of Rome and the Mediterranean Island of Mallorca, I thought I would be endlessly entertained. 

The shocking discovery I made was that, even in such beautiful places surrounded by so many people, I never thought I could feel so utterly alone.

Eating meals by yourself in a crowded restaurant or attending a group tour solo can feel liberating at first, but I found it often ended with crippling isolation.

Experiences are best shared with people you care about and who care about you. 

3. Where You Live Shapes How You Live
   

When I moved from Indiana to California, my lifestyle immediately changed.

Instead of spending my weekends drinking at bars or on the couch watching sports, I was going on long hikes & taking day trips along Highway 1. 

During the week, I have had the luxury & immense privilege of morning mountain bike rides or after-work surf sessions. 

Finding a place to live where you can easily spend time outside throughout the year can completely transform your health and joy. 

Find the location that best suits the lifestyle you want to lead.

4. Approach Life Proactively

Until I arrived at Purdue, I found myself constantly looking back at my educational or professional outcomes and thinking about how I could have ended up differently. 

While there is certainly a great benefit in using your past to help explain your present, you can’t let it define your future. 

Today, I find myself doing a lot more planning than I do reflecting.

Whether it be through daily journaling, setting up my post-it vision board (shoutout Marcus Lannie for the inspo), or creating weekly “to do’s”, having a concrete understanding of where I am heading, even in the short term, has given me so much more clarity day-to-day. 

5. Don’t Sacrifice Variety For Efficiency

Amidst our hustle and minimalist culture, we have thrown out many of life’s greatest pleasures from food to how we consume information in the name of “efficiency”. 

We meal-prep in the interest of saving money or time, only to spend egregious amounts every weekend on drinks and nice dinners out. 

Books have been reduced to 5-minute summaries while we use A.I. to outsource even our most creative outlets like writing or graphic design. 

Eating home-cooked meals with those you love and honing your artistic abilities through practice are just a couple examples of what make life rich. 

Not everything needs to be optimized. 

6. Give Experiential Gifts 

One of the best gifts I have ever been given was my first suitcase. Despite costing no more than $100, it empowered me to see beyond my hometown and seek out new places to explore. 

I think the best type of gift to give someone is something that enables them to do something exciting, and if you can do it together, even better. This could be a plane ticket, a cocktail-making class, or a dance lesson. 

For those close to you who have everything, the best gift to give is often your time.

Find fun experiences for you to share and they will end up being the gift that keeps on giving.

7. Grow Your Map of People, Not Places

While studying abroad for 4 months in 2022, I was determined to hit as many countries as possible. After class on Fridays, I was bouncing from The Czech Republic one weekend to Turkey the next. 

Boasting of the many countries I had visited to my friend Dilan, I realized I had gotten it all wrong.

While I had been traveling solo, he had been forging relationships and going on trips with other exchange students around him who lived all over the globe. 

Despite visiting all these different places, I did not make many friends or connections along the way. My experiences both started and ended with me, only to be relived in my camera roll. 

Reflecting on this, I realized my most memorable trips have been exploring new places with friends, especially when those friends are from wherever we visit.

Having a buddy show you the city they know best or provide their recs beforehand has made my travel experiences so much more meaningful.

By focusing on your map of people, you grow a network of friends from all over the globe with unique perspectives, outlooks, and ideas. This way, when you are somewhere new, you have somebody familiar to lean on or simply grab a beer with.

Focus not so much on “where” to go next, but “who” you know that lives there.

8. Prioritize Those Activities You Would Still Do If You Won The Lottery Tomorrow

We all have things we would want to buy if we won the lottery.

Expensive cars, Gucci bags, a house for someone you love, the list could go on and on. 

The question I often think to myself is, “What would I do?”. If I could spend my days as I please without the fear of having enough money to support myself, what activities would I still engage in? 

In my life today, I try to prioritize those hobbies that, no matter how much money I had, I would still want to do regularly. 

For me, this means reading interesting books, lifting weights, and surfing on Saturday mornings.

Don’t delay the activities you enjoy the most if you can afford to do them now. 

9. Be Intentional About What You Put In Your Body

I always thought that if I worked out consistently, I could eat and drink whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. 

The more junk I have eaten, the more I have realized how much of an impact what you put in your body can have on how you feel both mentally and physically. 

Our diets can make or break our energy and our health.

Consume wisely!

10. Never Hesitate To Invest In Your Health

In the United States, only 3% of the 3.6 trillion dollars spent on healthcare each year is preventative. 

It should be no wonder that we are plagued by chronic illnesses and obesity at the highest rates in human history when we spend so little on keeping our bodies healthy in the first place. 

I believe that any investment that benefits your body or your mind is always worth making. Your future self will thank you. 

11. When You’re Young, Seek Breadth, Not Depth

As college students, we are siloed into majors that provide us with specialized skills to succeed in an entry-level job but do not prepare us for the next steps in our careers.

Higher-level positions require increasing levels of competency in an array of areas, rather than just one. 

In a rapidly evolving professional marketplace where the average half-life of technical skills is three years, we need to spend more time learning and growing our professional toolbox.

Try to find a job that exposes you to many different functions or learn skills outside of your job scope through self-study.

This will give you a big head start when switching roles or at the time of your next promotion. 

12. Reading Books Is the Most Underrated Form of Learning Today

Piggybacking off my last idea, one of the best ways to dive into other subject areas is through the lost art of reading. 

Our fast media & learning landscape has made the habit of reading books almost obsolete in favor of 20-minute LinkedIn courses or 30-second TikTok videos.

Books take years to create and can represent decades spent in a specific subject area. They are the culmination of someone’s life work all put together in one perfectly edited source.

No LinkedIn video or post can match that level of detail and knowledge. 

13. Not Everything Needs to Be Quantified

I believe we should do more activities just for the sake of doing.

We like to quantify our hobbies or skill level (i.e. how fast we ran or how much weight we lifted) to compare to others or ourselves.

While I think there is value in improvement, we should reserve some solace in doing something just because we like doing it, no matter how accomplished we are at it.

While I enjoy surfing, by no means am I feeling pressed to become a "big wave” surfer or hit 25-footers at Mavericks. 

I am perfectly content with being an average surfer and I think that is OK. We don’t need to be the best at everything we do and shouldn’t expect to be. 

14. Default To Honesty

I have never been a fan of “white lies”: those comments you make to appease others or say to not “stir the pot”. 

Even if what you say does end up hurting someone’s feelings, I think it is a far better outcome than lying. 

If we cannot be honest about what is insignificant, how can we expect to tell the truth when it really matters?

15. Every New Friendship Needs a First-Mover 

It is incredibly difficult to meet new people if you fail to take initiative. 

For some odd reason, whether it be pride or fear, we as humans have the proclivity to stand idle at a bar or party, hoping that someone will say something to us. 

I often think back to my 8th-grade dance where all the boys and all the girls were in opposite halves of the gym, locked in an unsaid battle of “You First”.

All it takes is one person to make the leap of faith.

Resist the urge to be a lifelong wallflower! 

16. Balance Your Current and Future Self

One interesting idea I’ve been grappling with is the trade-off we make between our current and future selves.

As a society, it seems like we only prioritize having fun and actually living before we enter the workforce and after we retire. 

College is known as the “best four years of our lives” while retirement is glorified as the “golden years”.

Why do our lives from 20-65 have to suck? 

Instead, we should aim to maximize our well-being throughout our lifetime, not just during the start and end of it. 

To me, this means not sacrificing all of your free time when you’re 22 for entry-level wages or not spending ample time with your children as they rapidly grow up in your 40s because you want another promotion you don’t need.

Short periods in our lives will call for imbalance (i.e. saving for a first house or supporting children during college), but I think we would be far better off aiming to retain the same quality of life throughout. 

It’d be a real shame to spend your whole adult life planning for a retirement you can’t enjoy due to unforeseen health issues you couldn’t plan for.

Similarly, it doesn’t make sense to throw caution to the wind and live every day like there is no tomorrow.

Tomorrow will most likely come and you’ll want to ensure you are healthy and wealthy enough to live it. 

Seek balance.

17. Don’t Miss the Macro for the Micro When Spending Money

Parkinson’s Law of Triviality states that “the amount of time spent discussing an issue in an organization is inversely proportional to its actual importance in the grand scheme of things".

I think we do this all the time with our money. We debate & worry over the purchase of a $5 coffee while not blinking an eye on big-ticket items like our rent, car payments, or student loans. 

When it comes to expenses, you should be focusing so much more of your time trying to mitigate these large, Pareto-like costs that drive 80% of your total spending. 

If you can get these right, the Starbucks coffee every day does not matter.

18. Call Your Friends

One con of graduating college is the physical community you have built up over the past four years vanishes. 

Not only are your friends all over the place, but they are much busier with full-time jobs, grad school, and other time-consuming obligations unknown to university life.

The only way to consistently nurture those relationships is to a) call first, and b) keep calling.

Everybody is busy. The best thing you can do is to consistently and persistently check in on those you love. 

19. Aim for Novelty

After college, you have all of these unknown dreams, ambitions, and desires that can take a long time to manifest into reality.

It’s unrealistic to assume that the first role you find after graduation or the city you move to will be the best for you for the rest of your life. 

When it comes to your early career (and life for that matter), put yourself in a situation that allows you to experience a high degree of novelty. 

This could be somewhere far away from home that is completely foreign to you or in a job that doesn’t match what you studied in school.

In doing so, you build a knowledge base of experiences that gives you the optionality and foresight to find a better fit in the future. 

20. Be A Weekday Warrior

I hate the idea of the “Weekend Warrior” where one only does physical or strenuous pursuits on Saturdays/Sundays.

This creates an internal narrative throughout the week that “I just need to make it to Friday” as if there is no fun to be had apart from the weekends.

If you are like most people, you work 9-5 pm M-F. With a daily average of 12 hours of sunlight globally, this leaves 4 hours to go on a morning run, golf with friends, or bike after work.

We all have more time to do the sh*t that matters than we like to admit. 

Get after it!

21. Asymmetric Risks Run the World

Every decision is made with incomplete information. 

We can’t possibly know with 100% certainty whether Tesla’s stock will outperform the market, or if attending business school will set you up best for a career on Wall Street. 

The less information we have, the more risky the decision we make is.

As Nobel Prize-winning economists Daniel Kahneman & Amos Tversky laid out in their Prospect Theory, people default to loss-aversion when faced with risky decisions, opting for small, guaranteed outcomes over larger, less likely gains.

We can’t expect above-average returns without above-average risk. You must take asymmetric risks to achieve above-average results, where the potential upside far outweighs the potential cost of being wrong. 

Venture Capital is probably the clearest example of doubling down on asymmetric risks. The average VC firm invests millions in dozens of promising businesses each year, despite around 75% of venture-backed startups failing.

However, all it takes is one Apple or Microsoft and the gains outweigh all previous losses. 

If you desire an above-average portfolio or life, the first place to consider thinking about is your risk tolerance. 

22. Embrace Slow Progress

When I started taking Spanish lessons this past June, I was sure I would skyrocket to fluency in the next ~six months. I had taken Spanish in high school and college. It can’t be that hard, right?

What I forgot was the 16 different tenses and countless irregular verbs that make the language a bit more complicated than I remembered. 

Instead of setting my expectations so wildly high, I have decided to take a more long-term approach.

Sure, I could double the amount of lessons I take each week, but I would be sacrificing time in other important areas of my life. 

What I’ve realized is the most important element is being consistent.

While I am far from fluent today, I am much closer than where I was six or even three months ago. All good things take time.

Don’t rush greatness!

23. Book The Trip

There are a lot of experiences when you are young that are time-sensitive. Think college sponto’s in Chicago, Spring Break in Miami, or a spontaneous trip to see a good friend over summer break. 

When you graduate, these sorts of experiences become even more scarce. 

While everyone might express the desire to make it happen, plans often never come to fruition. So many potential memories die as text messages and unbooked flights.

Don’t leave the trip in the group chat. 

The More I Learn, The Less I Know

I feel like I have learned so much more in the past five years through attending college and entering the professional landscape than I did in my previous 18 years of life.

While I certainly have much more to learn about what makes a human “good”, how to impact the world positively and be a better friend, partner, and citizen, I feel like I am closer today than I was even a year ago.

In 2024, I plan to continue seeking new ideas, perspectives, and people different than myself to better grasp what’s happening around me.

I hope this article gave you the chance to think about your own life at 23, or any age, and those ideas that shape who you are. 

I’ll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from a man much wiser than myself, who said something that rings as true today as it did 2400 years ago.

See y’all next week.

-John Henry

If you enjoyed this piece, make sure to subscribe to get the next one in your inbox.