1. Worry less about what's trendy or what will get you a job, in terms of the specific details. Just learn skills and learn how to learn. 2. Finish your degree

1. Worry less about what's trendy or what will get you a job, in terms of the specific details. Just learn skills and learn how to learn. 2. Finish your degree as quickly as possible and don't obsess over which electives you should take. It seems like a big deal at the time, but a decade later, you'll barely remember most of them – and you can always pick up a book on the topic later in life. 3. Forget traveling and study abroad programs and instead try to live abroad. By live, I mean actually get a job there, make local friends, learn to speak the language, go grocery shopping. Traveling and study abroad programs are too structured and separated from real life. 4. You can skip job applications entirely if you focus on building a good network. Every good job I've ever gotten has come from knowing someone at the company, whereas open application jobs I've had have been (mostly) terrible. 5. Pick something small that you can do every day, and consistently do it for a long, long time. Learning 3 phrases a day in Spanish gets you to 10,000 words (which is borderline fluency) in a decade. The hard part is consistency. 6. As an extension of #5: understand that life is long. When you're 22, spending 5 years on something seems like an eternity. But it really isn't and even then, you're only 27. It's very possible to get really good at basically anything in a decade and still only be in your early thirties – but only if you be consistent and patient. 7. Worry more about work environments than about the actual content of the work. By this I mean: you may prefer thinking about programming to thinking about forestry, but if you don't enjoy sitting at a desk in an office, you're not going to enjoy the actual day-to-day existence of being a technology worker – and might instead prefer being outside all day as a forester, even if the subject matter is less interesting to you. 8. Think about startups in longer terms, not as a genius idea you need to find. Most successful founders have a unique angle and specialized knowledge that comes from working in an industry for years.