4 Decades, 4 Lessons

I turned 40 today.

Here are the top 4 lessons (that I still live by today) from these 4 decades of my life. Text is audio transcript.

4 Lessons on Turning 40

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Lesson 1 (Ages 1-10): The Best Games Are the Ones You Make Up Yourself

I am 40 years old today, and this is a recording I've been thinking about doing for a while. I think it's because it's just so common on social media. I've seen it for the past several years that I've been on for creators to do a list of top things they've learned, you know, 40 lessons for 40. And I've thought about that for a while. But I'm not going to do 40 lessons. One, I don't have the time and they get kind of silly after a while. Like, don't forget to wash your underwear or, you know, just bullshit common sense stuff that I'm like, okay, that's kind of dumb, you know. So I boiled this one down, mine down, to top four lessons I've learned in my life from each decade of my life so far. And these are lessons that I continue to live by to this day that have been informed by mostly my experience in each of the decades I've been around. And yeah, that's what I'm going to go through in this in this quick, hopefully quick recording. Okay, so let's jump right into it. The first lesson from the first 10 years of my life is I wrote down games are fun, but the most fun ones are the ones you make up yourself. When I was a kid, I of course played a lot of video games. I loved playing outside. I loved playing It and Freeze Tag and just running around. I just liked being outside when I was a kid. But I also liked being inside. I remember spending countless hours in front of the TV playing Nintendo or Super Nintendo or just playing with action figures with my brothers, building Legos. I remember doing a lot of this stuff and the stuff that was more fun that I remember to this day was whenever we made up our own rules and our own games, not the games that were established, not the ones that, you know, Oh, this is how you play this. Even video games or board games or whatever. Those were fun too. I played those and played my fair share of monopoly and, and sorry, and all these other ones. But, The ones that I remember, like Daniel in the Dens is what we called basically the floor is lava, that type of thing. We had one called Don't Pop the Rocks where the goal was to jump onto my parents' waterbed without busting the pillows. You had to jump over the pillows. My parents hated this game, by the way. We had a bunch of other ones too that I just remember having a lot of fun just kind of making up our own rules and those are the ones that I remember to this day like over 30 years later I still look back on them fondly. This is one that I still very much live by today, especially in my creative work and writing and creating just whatever I'm creating. I think, you know, especially now with technology like AI, it's really easy to write your own rules in a sense and shape your own destiny when it comes to what you can create. But it's not just AI. It's just having really that flexibility to, it's about thinking outside of the box to me. I think that's the biggest lesson for this one that I got when I was younger. It's seeing something that's not there. And then slowly bringing it to life through play, through fun iteration and failing upwards and all these types of buzzwords that I hear and see written often. But it is true. It's a lot more fun to play by your own rules than it is to play by the rules that someone else gives you. That's the lesson here.

Lesson 2 (Ages 11-20): Cherish What You Have While You Have It

The second rule that I've learned, or not ruled, the second biggest lesson that I've learned in my life from ages roughly to 11 to 20 is, it's a simple one and it's pretty common, gratitude. Cherishing what you have while you have it. And I learned this early on when my dad passed away when I was 16. And I learned very quickly that Even the most important things in your life, they can be taken away from you very quickly and with no notice. And there's no, once it happens, it's gone. And it's like that with people. It's like that with objects, with things, with tools, with opportunities, jobs. It's just poof, up in smoke. And this was a big lesson that I covered in my military biography. But it was a profound one to learn at such a young age. And since then, I made it a point to, if you're important in my life, especially for people, I want to tell you. I want to let you know. I want to spend time with you, if I can, as much as I can. and I still try and do that today. I have a smaller pool of people that are around me these days or that I make time for. It's much smaller than when I was younger, but they're much more important than ever because they are that precious. This applies to things too, by the way. I've always treated things that I have I always think to, I forget what video game it was in that put this, but put it this way, but Oh, I think maybe it was an early Legend of Zelda game. It was like a Legend of Zelda Link to the Past or something. You like borrow a sword or something. It's like, oh, you can borrow your uncle's sword or something like that. Maybe it wasn't Link to the Past. Maybe I'm misremembering. But it was one of these games where they go out of your way to tell you that you're borrowing this thing that you're basically going to be using for the entire game. And that always stuck out to me because I was like... I remember thinking when I was younger, well, you're not really borrowing it. You're basically taking it. You own it because the uncle's dead and he's not coming back for it. But... That word, putting borrowing there, borrowing there, not you get this or you acquire this or you pick up this and it becomes yours. It's like it's a temporary situation, even with something that feels so permanent. Why am I talking about this? Mainly because that's really my viewpoint that I maintain to this day. Everything in my life is borrowed. From my car to my house to my wife, it doesn't belong to me. And at some point in the future, I'm going to have to let it go. And I've always lived my life that way. Even the things that seem the most permanent, like they'll never change, it can and it will. And that's why you have to appreciate it as much as possible while you have it, because you never know when it's not going to be there anymore.

Lesson 3 (Ages 21-30): Identity Is Built Through Willful, Risky Experiences

The third lesson was I wrote the difference between who you think you should be and who you are is willful, risky experience. And this might be one that's like, okay, you know, this is mainly my 20s, right? So this is 21 to 30. And this also comprises the majority of my military career. So when I was writing this one, because there were so many lessons that I could have pulled on this one, but I think this, you know, most people, like most people in their 20s, this was a struggle for identity. I remember it started when I was, I remember being 21 in college and thinking like, you know, I hadn't really dated anybody seriously up to that point. So I thought I was weird because of that. And I had friends, but it was kind of this fracturing going on between all the kids that I used to hang out with when I was younger. They had already started kind of drifting away, and I had already seen that, even though I really didn't want that to happen. Same thing with family. They were drifting away. And I remember it was a very lonely decade in general, my 20s. And especially the first half of my 20s, I remember really struggling with, Like what it means to be black and what it means to be in the military and who I wanted to be as a man. And none of those answers came easy. But, you know, I have a much clearer idea of who I am now, mainly because of the risks that I took. And that's why I said, willful, risky experience. Because I took my shots. You know, I took my chances. And I wouldn't be in the circumstances I am today had I... been more passive like and that's one thing i'll always admire myself for was that i was willing to put my ass out there i was really willing to go there to to try it out to follow rule number uh lesson number two of of gratitude as much as i could of okay this is a temporary experience from my time at the academy in college to my entire military career because I knew I knew I was this was a temporary time and I was really a part of something that I really enjoyed especially when I transitioned to be a federal agent in in the military that was that was one of those things that it was like Yeah, this is cool. It was very difficult. I look back, I got extremely lucky that I was able to get into that job and do that job for a number of years. And once again, willful, risky experience. And I wrote risky because I feel like today I've met younger people and they're less willing to take the risk because they're The downsides. There's an argument for it. I like to say there's an argument for everything online these days. And they're all convincing arguments. Why you should go to church. Why you shouldn't go to church. Why you should travel abroad. Why you shouldn't travel abroad. I mean, there's convincing arguments for either side. So I feel like younger people have a disadvantage these days because... They have so many opinions that are readily available to convince them what's worth their time instead of them going out and just figuring it out like I did or like older generations did. to just, you know, go out there, be willing to make mistakes, get into the wrong relationships. You probably will. I did a lot of that in my 20s. I also had some good relationships that just, you know, it's timing, it's things like that. But I traveled a lot, I experienced a lot, and I wasn't afraid to screw up and get it wrong. And I definitely got it wrong more times than I can count. But I also got it right, I think, overall. I look at the overall span of my 20s and even in the lowest of lows. it was still me trying. It was still me being out there and taking hold of my life. And through all of those experiences, I found out who I was and who I wanted to become and all of those old insecurities and shedding. I think that's another big part of this lesson is shedding the pre-programmed scripts that you were handed when you were a kid. I know I got a lot of them being a young black kid. A lot of black guys do. You just get told that you're a certain way. And, you know, I tried that shoe on. I tried those shoes on for a number of years in my 20s and they just didn't fit for me. I'm black. I always will be. I'm proud to be. But a lot of the stereotypes that come along with that and a lot of the things that are prevalent and normal in black culture, I don't embrace. They're not important to me. And it's not who I want it to be. It's not that they're bad, but it's just not for me. And the only way I figured that out was through this I keep saying willful, risky experience. I think that's a good way to put it without making it... Because I didn't want to just have as many experiences as possible. That's what everybody tells everybody in their 20s. But it's willful. No, it's me raising my hand. It's not somebody raising it for me. It's risky because... It might not turn out. And a lot of times it didn't turn out great for me. But sometimes it did.

Lesson 4 (Ages 31-40): To Be an Endless Learner, challenge your self-assumptions

And that's a good transition to the final lesson. Which is, you know, 31 to 40. This is my latest decade. And be an endless learner. Willingness to challenge assumptions about yourself and the world allows you to gain understanding faster. This last decade has been, it's been rewriting a lot of the things that I thought I understood about the world, especially when I was in the military. Not that I didn't understand anything, but I had to learn not just how to be a civilian and to operate outside of the military, but how to really take those first three lessons that I learned and And evolve them, rely on myself and bust down all of the limiting beliefs that I'd built up over time in the past to land it somewhere completely different. And that's in all aspects of my life too. That's my relationships, my now going on six years, being married. That's business. I remember 10 years ago when I got out of the military, the concept of launching a business not only was it foreign but it looked completely different i remember getting the they offer a class when we get out in the military it's called boots to business and i remember taking that class back in 2015 2016 and i knew nothing about really online business i knew nothing about social media of course ai wasn't a thing it's not around and and the way business looks today then and compared to what it looked like back then to me it's it's night and day it is it's all leaps of faith that's all learning not just new technology and new techniques uh for producing things or writing or anything like that it's learning about myself every step of the way. It's challenging that assumption that I wasn't a technology person, that I had that in my head most of my life. And then I did 100 Days of Code. And after that, I'm making apps. And then, of course, now AI is here. And so it's a lot easier for me to interact and understand how to manipulate code to create amazing things. It was writing all those years I journaled and taking that step to say, let me try and write a book. And then writing one book and then 10, a dozen books later, I'm not only writing, I'm publishing my own books. It's the same with videos and podcasts and all these. Every step of the way, it's less about the technical skills. Like the technical skills are great. And it's cool that I'm able to have these capabilities. But when I zoom out from those, what's more important is that I've taught myself that I can do these things. That I can... Learn new things. Learn them well. But it all starts with saying that previous thing that you thought you never could do, turns out you can do it. And nobody can stop you from doing it. The only person stopping you in most cases, you know, it's cliche to say, but it's you. You're the one saying I can't sing. You're the one saying that I don't know how to code. You're the one saying that my writing's not ready to write a book. You're telling yourself those things. And the only way to get over those things is to do it. And I've carried that mentality with me to this day to where my most recent thing was creating a hardcover version of my latest novel, Gates of Okinawa. I'd never made a hardcover book. I formatted it in a very untraditional style. I had to make a hardcover... cover which I'd never done before until last week and it turned out great it turned out great and that's just the most recent example and it's top of mind because I just got the books yesterday but in the end the important thing is is willing to have that humility to be like, okay, I don't know this. Let me go back and learn it. And then having the boldness to build on lesson three, to take willful, to have a willful risky experience and dare to create something from it and then have another willful risky experience of daring to show it to somebody else. Then having another willful risky experience of daring to Slap a price tag on it and say, no, this is not free. I will not just give it to social media. I will not just give it out and post it somewhere. I'm going to sell this. I'm going to say it is worth X amount of dollars, X amount of money, and somebody's going to pay me for my work. Every time you do that, every time I've done that, and I've done it dozens upon dozens of times now with various books and projects, it's a risk. You risk the rejection. You risk the failure. And trust me, there's a lot of failure. I post stuff all the time and nobody looks at it. Surely nobody buys it. But that's okay because every time, not only do you refine the technical skill, but I've taken that willful risk experience. And there's rarely bad things that, permanent bad things that come from it, from doing that.

Conclusions

I think that's going to do it. It's just those four lessons. 40 years, I never imagined being 40. I mean, I've just been one of those people throughout my life that I'm like, okay, one step at a time, you know, next thing, next age, next milestone, but... I'm happy to be here, that I'm healthy, I'm relatively healthy. I have an amazing, loving relationship with my wife. I have a growing business. And things are just looking up. It's a good day to turn 40. And I have no idea what the next decade is going to bring. Like I said, I don't think that way. It's one day at a time, literally. But I know... Judging by, I think, of where I was 10 years ago and how different just the entire world looked, not just the reality of the circumstances of the world, but the way I looked at the world, especially just coming out of the military, it was completely different than I do now. And I know, you know, it... I think about this often how it can always be hard times, you know, that people can default to that. And there's a lot of reasons to think now, especially as I'm recording this in March of 2025, that it's hard times around the world. And yeah, I feel like, yeah, there's an argument to be made for that. But You have to look harder, but there are also a lot of amazing opportunities that are there and that have always been there, but they're just way more accessible now than surely 10 years ago when I got started. It's just a lot easier to do things, to make things, to get what you want. I mean, you can literally get anything delivered to your house within hours, depending on where you live. I mean, the fact that that's a reality is just insane to me. But there's a lot of opportunities as well. You just have to kind of look harder to focus on those instead of everything that's negative that's happening. And trust me, I struggle with this every day, but I know that's been a big contributor to my success, and that's kept me going and out of the depressive muck that it's easy to get sucked into in our world of algorithms and economic downturns and political climate. All of these things just want to suck you in and drain the life out of you.

But what did you think of my lessons? I hope you enjoyed listening to this. Yeah, I look forward to sharing more wisdom and sharing more writing and just sharing my creative spirit with you and the rest of the world for another decade.

Here's to 40.