What I’d do if I were 18 again today with no existing resources

sorry no funny title this time people keep saying they can't find my posts

The world has changed so much in the five years since I was 18. As a thought experiment, here’s what I would do if I lost all existing resources (network, money, skills, back in my hometown) and had to start over.

Going to College

I probably wouldn’t go to college. I dropped out after two years, and was 50/50 on going in the first place. I just don’t think the cost:benefit ratio is there anymore. The promise used to be: go to college > get educated > get a job > happy life > american dream. That promise has become less true over time and we’re seeing it with [rising levels of new-grad unemployment](https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market).

I can’t say for sure it’s any different for people who don’t go to college. But if you’re somewhat smart and, more importantly, motivated to make something of yourself, college likely isn’t the best place for you to learn useful skills.

What it is good for is the social environment and having a sandbox to mess around in. Friendships and happy marriages are good for the soul, and you’re pretty likely to start them there compared to the rest of your life. College is also a great place to f*ck around and find out, to try things and meet people you normally wouldn’t. Most people fondly mention going on exchange, as well as certain clubs and the people they met through them. Barely anyone I know talks about what they learned.

For me, I also couldn’t justify the cost, so unless I got a scholarship or into a great school outside of my typical bubble like MIT, Harvard, Stanford, UCLA, or maybe out of province Canadian schools like UBC and McGill, I wouldn’t go. Instead, I’d use the 4 years to recreate the experience in the aggregate.

Getting a job with no skills

I’d think of work like college. Which means thinking about where I could learn the most and meet the most interesting people. If I didn’t have a strong idea of what I wanted to learn, I’d try to maximize learning overall by joining companies based on what industries I think would grow like crazy or what companies my smartest friends are working at and talking about. I’d likely work at startups over big companies, since being 1-25% of the company means you have more demanded of you, whereas it’s easy to get lost in the machine of a BigCo and do very little work.

At 18, I already had a bit of coding experience, but definitely not enough to be useful to a company at this point. The learning happens on the job. Landing a job with no skills seems like where young people get tripped up a lot, but it’s probably not as hard as you think. People love mentoring young people as long as they feel like they actually made an impact, so it’s your job to convince them the experience won’t be lost on you.

In any industry, all people are looking for is someone who can do the job. As in, someone who makes the company more money than they receive in salary. At 18, this is basically impossible. But companies make R&D investments all the time, which is what you will be if a company hires you at this stage. Handing in a resume with nothing on it will not be very convincing. The way to prove you can do the job is by _actually doing the job_ as your way of applying for it.

No matter how polished a company looks on the surface, there’s always a dumpster fire under it. To apply for a job, look for a problem and offer a solution. Make sure it’s as well thought out as possible, think about potential obstacles and how to solve them, and put together some sort of visual demo of your solution. Make it as real as possible. If you’re looking for a coding job, your solution should be an interactive demo like a website, not a Github repo. That’s fake. If you’re going for a writing position, write something they’d like to publish. If you’re looking for a design role, do an annotated critique in Figma, or a redesign of the company’s assets.

Act like you already have the job, put effort into really trying to identify a problem and figuring out a solution to it. Be really useful, or at least fully aim to, then find the email of whoever’s hiring for the job. If it’s a startup, email the CEO and cc anyone relevant directly. If you can’t find the hiring manager’s email, email the CEO. Busy people respond the fastest. Follow up 1-4 times on an exponential decay time curve. If you can’t find these emails, you don’t deserve the job.

In the email tell them, briefly, why you’re interested and show them the initiative you took to find and solve a real problem for them. The bar is so incredibly low that a little bit of motivation to do a good job and a decent cold email goes far. No more than 5 lines, clear ask, use line breaks, attach a link I can view instantly (no requesting permissions), and you’re ahead of 90% of people. When I was hiring, I would’ve instantly given an interview to anyone who did this to me, and would’ve never even considered asking for their age or resume.

Doing what you really want to do

People often say youth is wasted on the young. I think they say this because old people are haters. They’ll say it’s because time and experience comes with age and by the time you know how to use your vitality, you’ve lost it.

Which is fair, but another reason is that young people are poor. A lot of what I want to do costs money, and so the great part of starting work early is having money saved up to do what you want. Of course your early career should mainly be about the learning, but money is a nice byproduct.

Money buys time and freedom, which is what youth implies anyway, but more so. It’s important to live as cheaply as possible for as long as possible, so I wouldn’t recommend buying luxury goods even if it’s what you think you really want. That money’s really best spent on stuff that’ll make you see the world a different way. Think plane tickets, camera gear or a guitar if you’re into that, a nice laptop, anything that contains a world inside it. You want the things you buy to have the potential for infinite use. I definitely recommend moving out of your parents’ house ASAP, your growth is capped there.

You have to keep doing stuff you like. It’s not about what you own but what you do with it, getting gear just helps with that. Maybe the best thing right now to buy for a motivated young person is a $200/month ChatGPT subscription. The entire internet is locked away in there, ready to teach you anything without getting tired of answering your questions. So is a billion dollars if you press the right keys in the right order.

Try to do everything you want to do in a public way somehow. I’m not saying don’t keep moments to yourself, but a little bit of public documentation or externalizing your thoughts goes a long way.

A lot of good things can happen when you’re known but not necessarily famous. It’s just a tool for opening more doors and making more friends, especially if you skip out on college. I made all my friends on the internet so when I moved to San Francisco, it was a no-brainer because I already had a huge community there from spending so much time on Twitter.

Having friends with the same interests rather than just who you randomly spawned in with in your hometown can completely change how you think about yourself and the world.

Beyond that, you’ll likely make better stuff if it’s public. Being forced to fully bake your creations for the world will push you further than you could’ve taken yourself. Creating in obscurity is nice because no one can tell you your work isn’t a masterpiece, but having haters builds character. Having your work impact people touches you in a way just making it can’t. Opportunities might come your way that you didn’t even know existed. I got my last job because the company’s CTO found me on Twitter.

Today everyone’s an influencer and everything’s content, which can become draining on our actual lived experiences. Yet I still think it’s quite positive as long as we:

1) remember to create more than we consume

2) create as a byproduct of our experiences rather than experience things to show them to someone else

The benefits far outweigh the costs, and the costs are mitigable. We can’t be too afraid of what’s three miles down the road that we don’t even take the first step. No great artist is obscure, because if they were really that great, they’d be known. Worst case, you have a log of memories to look back on when you’re old.

Beyond that, try to do new things often. Happiness is pretty easy once you make it beyond your bedroom door and off your phone. Travel a lot. Stay up late talking to people. Try things even if they’re not halal. Say yes more than you say no, and really scrutinize why you’re saying no, since you’re probably overestimating the downside. Be nice to everyone, you have no idea what people are going through. Get your heart broken. Host stuff. Everyone loves the host, no one likes organizing. Play a team sport. Practice an art form. Experience what it’s like to eat clean, get really strong, and sleep perfectly. Then throw it all away and have fun. Ideally both, but I’d rather have life in my years over years in my life. Make dad (or mom) lore.

Spending time with people

Ideally you spend time with people you like, and away from people you don’t like. This will likely not come to you instantly, but worth looking for. Don’t trust anyone that tells you to network. Find and replace “networking and building connections” with “making friends”. Everything good in my life career-wise has come from my friends. Make your own nepotism.

Finding my people felt like meeting people who congratulated me when I said I got laid off rather than asking if I was okay. People who start brainstorming when presented with a crazy idea rather than claiming it won’t work. People who cared if I didn’t show up to a group hang. I have friends like this in Canada as well, but so many more in San Francisco. Having these people in your life, who make you insntantly feel cool and comfortable, can do wonders to build up your confidence. Knowing what a good friendship feels like helps you ignore anyone who makes you feel less than. They’re not worth the energy.

Life is filled with pain and suffering but friends make life worth it. It’s not about the journey or the destination, but about the company. To find them takes a fairly simple but slow optimization process of meeting people and paying attention to how you feel around them. Are you contracting or opening up your chest around them? Do you feel light or heavy? Do the hours pass like minutes? Do you like looking at their face or do they look kind of slappable?

I’ve had a couple friendship breakups. I truly believe you can be friends with anyone, but sometimes you’ve gotta move towards ease rather than tension. You only have a finite amount of time and most of the time you know who you like and who you don’t if you’re honest with yourself.

You could probably make a list right now of who you care about then spend all your time with them. They’ll likely also lead you to their other friends who you’re more likely to get along with than the average stranger. I’ve only ever made a handful of friends randomly, the rest were mutual friends I befriended. You should spend more time with people you’re close to, not less. Yet young people especially try to make as many friends as possible and spread their time and energy so thin they don’t have any left for the people that matter. The older I get, the less friends I have, and the happier I am.

It also helps to be yourself when you meet someone, so the people that are looking for you can find you. Forget trying to be a camouflaged version of yourself tailor made to fit into a social situation. Be unapologetic about your personality while being receptive to feedback from those close to you. Often they can see things you’re blind to and help you in ways you can’t. Repay the favour by trying to do the same for them, without forcing your opinion onto them too much.

Maybe not for everyone but also, call your mom. Ideally every day, but definitely on some cadence. 10 minutes doomscrolling will mean nothing to you but a 10 minute call will make her day. She should know when she’s going to talk to or see you next, even if it’s in a long time. Tell her, “I’ll visit in six months” or “I’ll call you in two weeks” and keep your word. Or update her if you can’t. Just make sure she has something to look forward to. Do this for yourself, not her, because it’ll make you feel good in the soul.

Keep showing up

A successful entrepreneur I know mentioned he had a group of friends that all started doing startup stuff in their early 20s. Some people quit a few years in, but everyone who stuck at it for 8-12 years had some outsized outcome.

You can do anything you want but it’ll always take longer than you expect. Take breaks as needed, that’s totally fine, but also you can recover much faster than you think. Every time I think I need half a year off, I’m usually bored after 2 weeks. Just make sure you keep coming back. If you aren’t excited about what you’re working on, switch! Chances are, you can always go back to whatever you were doing before, so the downside is really low.

Show up on the days even when you don’t feel like doing anything. A lot can happen in three months if you show up every day. 12 weeks. 84 days. I’ve seen [people turn their entire lives around](https://buildspace.so/sf1) in that time. Get a friend to help you out. Call them when you’re stuck in bed feeling lazy. Send out weekly updates with whatever you’re thinking to some close friends. Find a WeWork that’s empty on the weekends and [get your friends together to work on projects](https://luma.com/wosp-to) you’ve been procrastinating together.

Every day, there’s one thing you can do to make it a win. On your lowest of days, even getting a 10 minute walk in is progress, or writing one paragraph, or one line of code. Momentum is everything, and every little bit of work you put in now will pay dividends as you take on bigger more ambitious and harder projects later in life.

Work really hard now and learn to love it, because another one of life’s great joys is having work that feels like play. Bonus points for getting to work with your friends on stuff. Again, you can probably make a list of stuff that feels like play to you. Do it as much as you can every day, even if it doesn’t make money, and do it in public so opportunities and friends can find you.

Some more (mainly career focused) guides I think are good

• What I would do if I was 18 now - Levels.io

• Guide to Career Planning - Marc Andreessen

• Career Decisions - Elad Gil

Hope this helps someone!

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If you’re seeing this twice, forgive me. I originally posted on my site aadillpickle.com but x-posted here because the content is more life-y so thought folks here might like it. Also it follows an unofficial series I seem to have started of giving advice to my younger self. Earlier posts here and here.