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5 Mindsets I Wish I Could Give My 22-Year-Old Self

If I could only turn back time…

M.S. Lane
5 min readDec 9, 2020
Photo by Hadley Jin on Unsplash

22 is a pivotal year for many. You graduate college, enter the “real world,” and suddenly find there’s pressure to perform. Did you land an entry-level job? Are you moving to a cool city? What kind of jobs are your peers landing? Which cities are they moving to?

The mindsets you hold — your assumptions, ideas, preconceived notions — define how you react to this pressure. And I often wonder how different my 20’s would’ve looked if I could go back in time armed with what I know now.

Assume for a second that I could. Here are five mindsets I would take with me.

1. The Truth Defends Itself — Always

I used to spend an embarrassing amount of time arguing on internet forums. Most of the time, it was over “honorable” topics, like religion, philosophy and politics. Occasionally, it was more trivial matters like sports. In the last eight years, I must’ve spent over 4,000 hours drafting and refining responses to other people’s opinions.

What do I have to show for those 4,000 hours? Aside from moderately sharpened debate skills, pretty much nothing. This year, I realized that no matter how academic or valuable the topic you’re debating seems, most internet arguments…

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M.S. Lane
M.S. Lane

Written by M.S. Lane

Editor @ Fortune 500 company by day. Used to write about personal finance. Now I just write about what I find interesting at the moment.

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