30 Lessons I Wish I Knew Before My 30s

I turned 31 this week, and for the first time in my life, my birthday felt refreshing.

For most of my twenties, I operated like turning 30 was the deadline - and I know that many of you reading this can related. There is so much pressure to be married, have kids, button up your career… and if you don’t reach these milestones at 30, your life is somehow a failure. I don’t think that was ever really my own belief - it was something I absorbed without even knowing it. And then, sometime over the last year, I realized I’ve been making decisions based on a clock that isn’t even real.

So this year, rather than sulking over all the things I don’t have, I actually let myself celebrate. I am generally a very reflective person around my birthday, so I sat down and wrote out the 30 lessons I wish I’d known on the day I turned 30. Many of them I really learned over the last year, which has been one of my most transformative.

Here they all are, in no particular order:

1. De-center your age. Turning 30 isn’t a deadline, it’s the beginning of the beginning. Aging is a privilege, and rushing major life decisions to beat an arbitrary clock only leads to regret. It’s also dumb.

2. Normalize changing your mind. You’re allowed to change your mind at any age, about anything, as many times as you need to. Letting new information shift your opinion isn’t inconsistency, it’s growth. I’ve changed my mind a TON - most notably, this year with my move back to LA. Normalize learning new things and changing what you do as a result.

3. Hating yourself is exhausting. If you hate yourself, you’ll hate everyone around you too, and it makes life so much harder than it needs to be. Building confidence and liking who you are is the foundation everything else sits on.

4. Stop taking everything so personally. 99% of the time, someone’s feedback or behavior has nothing to do with you and everything to do with them. Learning to let things bounce off you is one of the most freeing skills you can build.

5. If you think you should be on an SSRI, you probably should be. Sometimes there’s a chemical imbalance that no amount of self-help is going to fix, and medical intervention is nothing to be ashamed of. I wish I hadn’t waited as long as I did!

6. Go to therapy. Even if you think you’re already self-aware, therapy gives you an unbiased space to think out loud and a perspective from someone with zero emotional attachment to your life. It’s not just for when things are falling apart. I thought I knew too much about myself to learn anything from therapy, only to realize I was living in my own echo-chamber. Go!!

7. Create your own boundaries or don’t complain about the lack of them. You teach people how to treat you based on what you tolerate. Having a boundary doesn’t make you cold, it means you respect yourself enough to hold a line.

8. Never leave a mess for yourself for later. Pick up your stuff, wipe your counters down, don’t let things pile up. A messy space is a direct reflection of your mental load, and cleaning it up will make you feel more capable than you’d expect. I have a (surprisingly controversial) podcast episode about this if you want to learn how to implement cleaning systems!

9. If you take offense to everything, it says more about you than the person saying it. Separating what someone says from how you personally feel about it is a life skill, not a character flaw to overcome.

10. Learn how to do things alone. Going to lunch alone, taking a class alone, sitting with yourself, it builds a kind of confidence that isn’t dependent on anyone else’s company. It’s the difference between being alone and being lonely, and it’s honestly just a life skill you need to take time to develop.

11. Less is always more. This applies to your belongings, your relationships, your commitments, all of it. Less, but better.

12. Quality over quantity. Focus on having better things and better relationships, not more of either. Three friends you can actually depend on beat ten you feel awkward texting. One pair of jeans you wear all the time is better than ten you wear occasionally. Learn to edit and refine everywhere.

13. Your nervous system is data. Anxiety about a decision usually means something’s off, and excitement without doubt usually means you’re on the right path. Learn to trust your gut the first time, before you talk yourself out of it. I am still working on this.

14. There is no finish line of having it all together, and you probably never will. You’ll never be an A+ in every area of your life at once, and that doesn’t mean you don’t have your act together. You just build each pillar incrementally, at different times, and eventually it will feel like you’ve pieced everything together.

15. You can have it all, just not all at once. It takes time to build a life, and most people who feel like they truly have it all are closer to 70 than 30. Acting like it should all happen before you turn 30 is not only the fastest way to make yourself miserable, but it’s plain unrealistic.

16. Get the basics right with your money. Set a budget, invest in your 401(k), track your expenses, build your emergency fund. Long-term financial success is about doing the boring stuff over and over again.

17. Separate your identity from your job. Your work is one pillar of your life, and it only becomes your entire identity if you let it by not building anything else alongside it. Make time for hobbies and friendships that don’t revolve around what everyone does for work.

18. Calculate your Coast FI number. Once your retirement savings can compound on their own, you have the freedom to change careers, start a business, or take a sabbatical without starting from zero. It’s one of the most important numbers you’ll ever calculate.

19. Create strong defaults. A default meal, a default outfit, a default morning routine, these reduce the mental load so you’re not making a decision from scratch every single time. The busier you get, the more you need them.

20. Discipline is a form of self-respect. You build confidence by keeping the promises you make to yourself. Discipline isn’t something you’re born with, it’s a skill you train like a muscle.

21. Systems make life feel easier and the hard stuff feel manageable. A system reduces the brain energy required to get through your day and frees up mental space for the things that actually matter. If you feel overwhelmed all the time, you need more systems, not more willpower. My favorite system I have implemented has been my Sunday System where I plan out my week on Sunday nights. It’s easy, and it makes a HUGE difference.

22. How you feel physically shapes how you feel about everything else. Steps, strength training, sleep, eating enough, these aren’t vanity metrics, they’re life infrastructure. When you don’t feel good in your body, it erodes everything else.

23. The majority of your everyday life exists within a 15-minute radius of your house. Where you choose to live, down to the neighborhood, shapes your day-to-day happiness more than almost anything else. The things that make you happiest and are most important to your quality of life need to be within a short 15 minute walk or drive from where you live.

24. Don’t make your life small because you’re afraid of trying something new. Fear keeps you stuck in the same place and keeps your world small. New cities, new jobs, new hobbies, they force discomfort that teaches you more about yourself than staying safe ever will.

25. Some decisions are doors, and other decisions are walls. A door decision is reversible, you can walk through it and walk back out. A wall decision, like having a child, is permanent, and most of what feels like a huge decision in your 20s and 30s is actually just a door.

26. Give people grace. You have no idea what’s happening in someone’s life behind closed doors, and if you take a bad interaction personally, that says more about you than them. Occasional bad moods aren’t a character flaw, they’re just what it looks like to be a person.

27. Healthy debate is a good thing. Surround yourself with people who have different perspectives and lived experiences, because disagreeing with someone doesn’t mean you can’t be friends. Normalize changing your mind because you learned something new, not because you were pressured into it.

28. Move to a new city, even if just for a while. You don’t have to make it permanent, but living somewhere else teaches you how many different ways there are to live and forces you to grow through discomfort.

29. Being busy isn’t a sign of success. A full calendar isn’t a trophy. I always used to think that at my most successful, I would have back-to-back calls and meetings and obligations on my calendar. LOL. Success (to me) is having autonomy and genuine choice over how you spend your time.

30. Your life can look and be however you want it to be. The only people who will have a strong opinion about how you’re choosing to live are the ones who feel insecure about their own life. That’s not a reason for you to change course.

If there’s one thread underneath all 30 of these, it’s that your life can look and feel however you want it to. Not however society, your family, your industry, or your own 20s-era anxiety told you it had to. I don’t feel like I’m racing toward anything anymore. I feel like I’m finally building something, on purpose, at my own pace.

xx

Michela