Experience Required

I've been keeping a journal ever since I was eleven years old. I was an only child for nine years, so my little sister offered very little in the way of companionship when she popped out. By the time she'd learned to talk and be remotely interesting, I'd learned to keep myself occupied. Writing advice to my future grown-up self in the form of a journal was one such way. It's a practice that I keep to this very day. In the present time, I feel like an idiot. Looking back at stuff I've written...I'm not too bad.

One entry is from a few years ago. I wrote:

There are 25,000 days in your life. Your death will only happen on one of them. Don't waste the other 24,999 worrying about how you'll feel, what you'll regret and what you'll wish you'd done differently. Live your life now so that when you die, you can look back and see that the majority of those 25,000 days were good days.

Experience is a resource without which you can't expect to really do an efficient job of living. Either you start off by borrowing from the experiences of others, namely your parents and older relatives, or you go out and acquire your own. The latter is more time consuming and the opportunity costs associated with it are huge, but sometimes you have to do what you have to do.
(In simpler terms... If you start out with a strong support network of parents and family who've been there and done that and are good at sharing their life experience without being overbearing or alienating you then you won't have to make so many mistakes on your own. You won't have so many setbacks. Maybe you'll go far in life because you had a good start. But...if your parents aren't around, or they didn't do much themselves or they are horrible at explaining life without being dicks about it then you'll have to make your own mistakes to grow into the person you are destined to become. It'll take more time. You'll find it much more difficult, but you can't beat yourself up over it because life requires you to learn and grow. How you do it is sometimes out of your control.)

Random thoughts and journal entries. Just thought I'd share. It is my website after all.