[This this a guest post by my friend Rocky Kwan, if you have any questions please leave a comment]

As a young businessman and a student, there are many life lessons to be learnt. By taking your mistakes and learning from them, a person becomes stronger and more efficient in doing things. I’ve seen many coworkers fired because they refused to learn from mistakes, so to help you avoid these mistakes altogether, I’ve compiled the top five life lessons that I’ve learnt.

1) Strive to be more successful than those the same age as you. Your peers are the ones who you can relate to, who you can compete equally with. When a friend receives more success than you, there is nobody to blame but yourself, but when someone older excels at something, we tend to make excuses like “Oh, he’s got more experience because he’s older”. By striving to be better than those your age, you may see changes in the quality of work you output. This may also be why many people may have done well in high school, and university but suffered when it came time to apply it to a career.

2) Start investing and networking at a young age. As a university student, I wish my parents had secretly taken a portion of my allowance every week, if they had, I wouldn’t have had to taken out money I desperately needed to buy my textbooks.
If they had taken five dollars out of my allowance every week starting at the age of ten, and I was to be paid twice a week, I would have had an extra $1040.
(52 weeks in a year, but I only get paid every other week,
Therefore the calculation is $5 x 26 weeks x 8 years)
That is only a very basic example of why investing at a young age would have been a good idea. As for networking, I regret not building strong networks from my very first job working for the city. Although I was only a boy watching children at a day camp, my boss was the head of human resources for all city of Calgary summer employees. If I had networked with her, I may have been able to be an intern at the city of Calgary the next summer; instead I was stuck yet again at the dead-end job, watching children.

3) Don’t fear failure and instead embrace it. You can take a look at any successful person in life and you will see that they failed multiple times before getting where they are. The reason people fail is because they haven’t learnt how to accept failure positively, and instead tend to give up once they fail.
The only way to learn how to take failure and turn it into productivity is to fail. There are no books to teach you what to do when you fail, because every situation is different. By failing and learning from it, you’ll prevent yourself from making that same mistake again.

4) Record every expenditure and set a goal to reduce spending. As a child, I remember going to the candy store twice a week and buying a can of soda for a dollar. You may think that is spare change, but if you calculate it, I spent $104 on soda alone. (52 weeks x twice a week x $1)
If I had recorded that expenditure down I may have realized what I was doing. Humans only realize something when they can see it in front of them, therefore I couldn’t realize that I was spending 1/10, or 10% of what I earned each year on soda! (Remember, I was only 9, and I made $20 a week for allowance)

A great example of why recording expenditures is important is gambling. The reason gambling is so successful, is because you are spending money at a fast pace, time after time. Many people lose thousands of dollars in casinos because they can remember the times they won, but never the times they lost.

5) Write down at ONE goal to accomplish in a given time period. As I stated in life lesson #4, Humans only realize something when they can see it in front of them. By writing down ONE and only ONE goal, you can see your task in front of you, instead of only dreaming about it in your mind. Make sure to give yourself a time period, or a deadline, to accomplish this goal, or you may look at it, but never get to work on it.

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Filed under: Articles, Personal Development