40 Lessons I Know at 40 I Wish I Knew at 20 | Part 1

Alright, so last week, I crossed one of life’s biggest milestones, the 40th birthday. And I collected some of my thoughts, some of the lessons that I’ve learned over the years, and I compiled them into a list of 40 things that I would like to share with you here today about the 40 years I’ve spent on this earth, the things that I’ve learned or the things that I’m still trying to figure out. The very first thing I’d say is that 40 feels nothing like I thought it would. To be honest, when I was young, I assumed 40 was ancient. It was decrepit. It’s really interesting. My dad is about 20 years older than me, and so when I was 20, he would have been about 40. And at that point, he just seemed so old and so wise and like he knew everything.

And now that I’m here, I’m realizing, oh, my God, I know next to nothing. He must have known next to nothing. And yet the perception that you have as somebody younger, you know, like, at 40, you’ve lived twice as long as somebody at their 20, in their twenties, so you have so much more wisdom and experience and perspective. But I’m just blown away by the fact that 40 feels entirely different than I thought it would. It feels amazing. I feel great, feel physically fit, feel mentally like I’m just beginning the game right now in a, in a very real way. And I, and I hope that’s what 50 feels like. I hope that’s what 60 feels like.

I imagine, like, right now, I think those are old, but I’m hoping that when I get there, I realize, oh, my, this is nothing like I thought it would be. So here’s, here’s some other lessons that I’ve learned along the way, is that, number two, it never gets easier. You just get better. It never gets easier. You just get better. And the thing with better is that better has no finish line. For a long time, I pursued the idea of being the best, the greatest. I want to be the greatest version of myself, the best.

And I wanted to compare myself to others. I wanted to win the game. And that set me up for failure in a lot of ways, because you can’t be the best. You can’t be number one on top of the mountain. It’s just, it’s not possible. Given the complexities of life and the fact that you’re not actually competing against other people, you’re only competing against yourself, and you can’t best yourself. All you can do is be better than you were. And that was a big mindset shift.

That helped me a lot because I struggled with this competitiveness that I had against other people. And it wasn’t until I started approaching this game of life through the lens of how do I get better for my sake, how do I get just become a better version of myself today than I was yesterday. And that really transformed how I played this game, and it’s made a massive difference. But the thing to remember is that just like going to the gym, this game that we play, it never gets easier. You just get better, right? You don’t go to the gym expecting it to get easier and that one day you’re going to lift 1000 pounds and it’s going to feel easy. Your capacity continually expands. We go to the gym to push the against the boundaries of our potential and to hopefully expand it through that pursuit, but we never expect it to get easy. In the same way, I don’t think life ever does get easy or business or, you know, any of the games that truly matter in life, like the games of relationships, right? It never gets easier.

You just get better. All right, number three, the secret to unlocking gratitude for me, I spent so much of my life looking forward. I consider myself a high achiever, and. And part of that is always having a goal on the horizon that I’m pursuing. And if you’re listening to this, I’m guessing you’re like that as well. The problem is we spend so much of our time looking at that horizon, looking at the goal. And as we get closer to it, we have this propensity to continue moving the goalposts further back, and so we never actually catch it. And that can mean that we accomplish great things because we move so far and we’re just constantly in pursuit of this thing.

We make it so much further than if we did not have those goals. But because we never catch the horizon, it can often make us feel like we’re just hamsters on a wheel going through the motions. And the thing that’s really helped me, the paradigm that’s really changed my life, is to spend time reflecting, not on the gap between where I am and where I’m trying to go, because that gap will only ever maintain its distance. As I continue to move the goalpost to myself, instead of focusing on that gap, I focus on the gap between where I am and where I began. Look back at how far you’ve come. And in that gap, that gap also is perpetually increasing. But in that gap, there’s a lifetime of gratitude to be found. And that, for me, has been very, very powerful.
Number four, the people ahead of you in life, the ones that you look up to, they are only there because they’re standing atop a larger pile of failures than you are. Most of the massively successful people that I look up to, not just financially, not just in business, but in relationships, within their health, it’s because they’re. They’re too stupid to quit in a lot of cases. They’re not afraid of looking stupid. They’re not afraid of going for the thing and recognizing that a lot of their efforts are going to be wasted. They’re not afraid to fail forward. And I find that so empowering to know that the people I look up to, they’re only there because they’re standing on more failures than I am. And so I need to increase my rate of failure if I ever want to catch them.
Number five, the fear of judgment, not failure, stops most people from even trying. I don’t think most people are actually afraid of failing. I don’t think that’s the case. I think we’re afraid of what other people are going to think of our failures. We’re afraid if we leave our w two, we go to start that business. We’re not afraid that the business might fail and that, like, whoa, what am I going to do? Because you could always go and find another job. You probably have that confidence, that belief in yourself that you could do that. The thing that holds people back is the fear of what your dad, what your mom, what your son, sisters, with your friends are going to say.
Your coworkers, the people that you went to school with, like to take that step back on the ladder and restart the game. We’re afraid of what people will say about us if we fail. And so we let that stop us from ever taking the actions that would maybe potentially lead us to success in the first place. This reminds me of something that Marcus Aurelius said. He said, every man loves himself more than any others, but we put more value on the opinions of others than we put on our own. So we love ourselves more, but we value our opinion of ourselves less. And so we sacrifice that opinion of ourselves, which is, hey, I feel I have this greatness, this thing I could go for, but I’m afraid of failing in front of people and what their opinions of me will say about me. I’m afraid of that judgment.
And so we let that stop us. I get it. But it’s not the failure. It’s the judgment, and the judgment we have no control over. And tying into this is the idea that if we knew just how quickly people forget or how little they actually think of us, we would let our fears of their opinions dictate our life a whole lot less. Because people. Truth is, they’re not really spending that much time thinking about us. Not as much time as we think we are.
At least, right. Number six, our beliefs limit us more than reality. Your beliefs are the chisel. Your actions are the hammer. Reality is the stone. The question is, what are you going to make? My friend, you have to be very careful about what you choose to believe in this life, because in a very real way, you will make it real. Number seven, your capacity is practically unknowable. There’s levels to the game.

And while something might be impossible for you, given your current skills and abilities, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. I personally find this very motivating. I find this so motivating because there’s so much in my life that I want to do that is currently beyond my capacity. For now. For now. Number eight. The risk of mediocrity is greater than the risk of failure. Michelangelo said, the greatest danger is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.

I think one of the most important decisions we can make in life is about which goals we choose to pursue. If you pursue goals that even in failure, make you better, you can’t help but succeed in life. So choose big goals. Go after those audacious goals that even in failure, they make you better. Shoot for the moon. Because even if you miss, you land amongst the stars. Cliche. There’s a lot to that.

Number nine. The universe doesn’t care how you feel. It doesn’t care what you plan, it doesn’t care what you intend. It only cares what you do. So stop thinking, stop worrying. Stop letting your feelings dictate your actions, and understand that you can act despite how you feel. You don’t have to love it. Just do it anyway.

Number ten. Showing up with consistency matters more than intensity. Edmund Burke said, nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing. For he could do only a little. How often have we had 510 minutes between meetings or sitting in the car? And we knew we could make progress on a tiny little goal. We could move the ball forward, but we chose not to because we said, that’s not. It’s just not enough time. I only have ten minutes.

And so we sit and we do nothing. We sit on our hands. But life is nothing more than the compounding interest of small decisions. Stacked upon one another over the span of decades. Small decisions, small actions become big things. Number eleven, you have to learn to be alone and to love it. Blaise Pascal, he said, all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone. Learn to be with yourself.

Learn to love yourself. Learn to be bored. Learn to find quiet. I think it’s one of the most valuable things any of us can do. All right, now, I don’t want this episode to run 40 minutes. We’re already at the ten minute mark here, and I try to keep these episodes, you know, small and bite sized so that you can consume them on a quick car ride or when you’re out for a walk or on the treadmill or something. So what we’re gonna do here is we’re gonna turn this into a multi part episode. If you want part two of these 40 takeaways, these 40 lessons learned from 40 years on this planet, then tune into the next episode, which should be coming out tomorrow.

Depending on when you’re listening to this, it might already be out, so go subscribe on Spotify on iTunes. If you wanna be notified when the next episode comes out, go to YouTube. Find amplified impact with Anthony Vacino. If you want to subscribe to the channel, it means the world to me. It helps us continue to grow, to reach more entrepreneurs so we can help them maximize their return on life. And that’s gonna do it for me. My beautiful people. I will see you in the next episode.

Until then, stay hyper focused, my friend.