37 things I’ve learned in 37 years
For my daughter, who will inherit whichever world I build around her.
I turn 37 this week. Here are 37 things, one for each year that earned them.
I’ve been writing in public for five of those years, mostly to figure out what I think. The following is what I’ve actually landed on, now that I’ve stopped hiding behind the people I used to quote.
My daughter is going to grow up in a world that tells her, in a hundred soft ways every day, that she belongs only to herself. That family is optional. That community is inefficient. That vulnerability is weakness. That faith is embarrassing. That the measure of a life is what she produces and what she’s called. I want her to know, because I’ll have shown her, that every one of those is a lie.
Most of what follows runs against the current. That’s the point.
1. Everybody wants the village but nobody wants to be the villager. Community isn’t a feeling you have. It’s a tax you pay. The village is built out of shared inconveniences. The friend helping you move. The lift from the airport. The walk with no destination. When you pay to solve every problem privately, you solve the problem and eliminate relationships in the same move. Loneliness thrives in convenience.
2. Updates are not overlap. There’s a difference between hearing what happened to a friend and being there when it happened. Friendships that run on catch-ups feel thin even when the affection is real. What you’re looking for isn’t information about each other’s lives. It’s shared presence in them. Spend time with your friends.
3. The privatised nuclear family is one of the West’s worst exports. Two people, alone, raising children with no village, is historically weird and functionally brittle. If you feel exhausted trying to do it the Western way, you’re not failing. The arrangement is failing. Africa got this right. Ubuntu isn’t a poetic slogan. It is a survival strategy.
4. Your work is not your life. Your job will not visit you in the hospital. The people you neglected for it will, if they still know you. “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day” is a burnout trap dressed as career advice. Work intensely. Then leave it and come home.
5. Comparison belongs inside Dunbar’s circle. Outside it, it’s poison. Comparing yourself to a neighbour whose crops grow better is how villages learned to farm. Comparing yourself to a stranger on the other side of the world whose life you’ve only seen in highlights is how you lose your mind. Your brain wasn’t built to be benchmarked against the entire world.
6. Overstimulation has killed your tolerance for the important. Whatever is designed to hold your attention is designed to hold your attention. Your capacity to focus on anything slow or patient or long has been eroded deliberately, by people who profit from the erosion. Protect the boring hours. Protect the empty queue. Boredom is fuel, not failure.
7. You adapt to anything faster than you expect. Use it to your advantage. Pleasure fades. Pain dulls. The new thing loses its shine in weeks and the worst loss softens in months. The world wants you to misuse this. Keep chasing the next upgrade, keep running from the last loss. Use it the other way instead. Distribute gains slowly to stretch the happiness. Rip the bandaid on losses to shorten the pain. Practise gratitude until you step off the hedonic treadmill entirely.
8. Most important things in life are infinite games. Finite games are played to win. Infinite games are played to continue. A marriage is infinite. A career is infinite. A friendship is infinite. Parenting is infinite. Every time you win a finite move inside one of these, you damage the game you’re actually in. Know which one you’re playing before you choose a move.
9. Remember you will die. Let that decide what you do today. Tomorrow is not a promise anyone made you. Almost every fear that holds you back, expectations, embarrassment, pride, falls away in front of your actual mortality. You have nothing to lose that you weren’t going to lose anyway. If it’s important, start today.
10. The world is partly unfair and fully yours to navigate. An internal locus of control is the prerequisite to changing anything. The injustices you complain about may be real. That doesn’t matter. If your default is to assign your outcomes to external forces, you’ll be their prisoner forever. Look through the window for praise. Look in the mirror for blame.
11. Luck is a surface area, not a lottery. There are no lucky people, only people with wide sails. You widen yours by taking many small risks, by becoming unusually good at a specific thing, and by staying awake to the opportunities most people walk past.
12. Effortlessness is a myth. The geniuses you admire worked like lunatics for a decade before you noticed them. “Talent“ is mostly survival bias applied to obsession. Preparation beats performance, every single time.
13. Consistency beats correctness. You vote for the person you’re becoming every time you do the thing. Identity follows behaviour. Do it every day, badly, before you worry about doing it well. I became a writer by writing 52 weeks in a row, badly at first and then less badly, and the principle doesn’t care whether the thing is writing, prayer, the gym, or showing up for a friend. You can’t steer a parked car, and you can’t find your voice in your head.
14. Combine, don’t specialise. Being the best at one thing is for freak talents. Being solidly above average at two or three unusual things is available to everyone, and the combinations are rarer than the skills themselves. Civil engineer plus software engineer plus preacher plus Ndebele speaker plus writer plus artist plus father is a combination nobody else on earth has, and yours will be different in ways only you can build. Hunt the intersection of things that shouldn’t go together but do, in you.
15. Creating more is the only way to develop taste. You can consume passively. You cannot create passively. The moment you try to make something, you have to choose, commit, and evaluate, which is where taste is forged. Reading a hundred essays teaches you less about writing than writing ten bad ones yourself. When competent becomes cheap, taste stays scarce.
16. Own the work, including the parts the tools did. Every generation has had this argument. The calculator. The compiler. The camera. Whatever your generation’s version is, the answer is the same. What matters is not whether you used the tool but whether you’re willing to stand behind what you shipped. Treat your tools like coworkers whose contribution you’re proud of, not a contamination you need to disclaim. Judgment stays with you.
17. You have blind spots. Find people honest enough to tell you about them. If one person says you have a green tail, they’re crazy. If seven do, turn around and look. The fastest way to grow is to ask people who love you what you’re like when you’re not performing. Then stay in the room when they answer.
18. Writing is thinking. If you can’t write it, you probably don’t know it well enough. You don’t write what you already think. You find out what you think by writing. Writing isn’t communication first. It’s meaning-making. Clarity, voice, structure, all of that is downstream of that single move.
19. Honour your rhythm. Your body has a clock older than any schedule you’ve been handed, and it cares nothing for anyone else’s preferred hours. If you’re built for late nights, build a life that respects it. If you’re built for mornings, don’t let anyone shame you out of them. You were given a rhythm. Build your routine inside it.
20. Move toward the conflict, not away from it. Conflict avoided is conflict compounded. The hard conversation, badly handled, is almost always better than the hard conversation deferred. When the crowd is wrong, speak up. You might be the buddy someone else has been waiting for.
21. Many stories matter. Beware the single story. Your experience of the world is one data point. People who only know one version of religion, of a place, of a people, or an idea are easy to manipulate. Collect other stories actively, especially about the people who rarely get to tell their own.
22. “Love yourself” is not useful advice. We are not drowning in self-neglect. We are drowning in self-interest. The antidote to self-obsession is not more self-focus. It’s service. “Love your neighbour as yourself” already assumes the self-love is in the bag. Look up from the mirror.
23. Adult friendship needs an initiator. Be one. Everyone wants to be invited, so nobody sends invitations, so nothing happens. Send the invitation. Send the next one after it’s ignored. Say yes, enthusiastically, when someone sends one to you. Community runs on this fuel.
24. Communities have seasons. Honour them, don’t cling to them. Some communities are meant to last a chapter, not a lifetime. Grieve the dissolution. Don’t resent it. What endures is a few threads you carry into the next place. That’s enough.
25. Travel gives you a crown and a quiet exile. Ukuhamba kuzal’ inkosi. Travelling gives birth to kings. The proverb leaves out that it also makes you slightly too different for the place that made you. Home becomes a constellation, not an address. That’s a freedom and a loss at the same time. Learn to hold both.
26. Optimise for vibes. Vibes are the compressed version of a thousand small signals your conscious mind can’t enumerate. Most arguments about films, frameworks, cities, churches, and people come down to one side not liking the vibes. That’s not shallow. Build a life that feels good, not just one that looks right on paper. Life before death. Strength before weakness. Journey before destination.
27. Money can buy happiness, but only when spent right. Not on cars. Not on status objects you’ll adapt to in weeks. Spend it on health. On sleep. On food worth eating. On time with people you love. On experiences that compound into memory. Every dollar spent on something relational is worth ten on something transactional. The modern economy wants you to forget this.
28. Many marriage arguments are perpetual. Learn to live alongside them. Even if you find your soulmate, many of the things you’ll fight about, you’ll fight about forever. Around 69% of marital conflicts are perpetual. You won’t solve them. You’ll learn to hold them with enough humour and respect that they don’t become the whole story. The mature move isn’t resolution. It’s coexistence.
29. Contempt is the one thing you cannot let in. Not fights. Not money. Not long silences. Contempt. The antidote is a culture of appreciation. Be irrationally biased towards the positive about your spouse. When they do wrong, assume it’s fleeting. When they do right, treat it as evidence of who they are.
30. Technique is not a substitute for actually seeing someone. You can learn every framework, gentle startups, active listening, repair attempts, and still be absent. Technique without presence is choreography. Put the phone down. Look up. Be there.
31. You learn love in stages. Each one prepares you for the next. Childhood teaches you you’re loved before you earn it. Siblings teach you to love who you didn’t choose. Friendship teaches you to choose love freely. Romance teaches you to love vulnerably. Parenthood teaches you to love sacrificially, without reciprocity. Skip a stage and the later ones distort.
32. If you perform for love, you’ll pass the performance down. Every parent who never received “you are loved for just being” struggles to give it. So they love their children for their achievements, their behaviour, how they reflect on them. Without meaning to, they’ve trained the next generation into the same exhausted dance. The work is to notice the cycle and break it. Not to hope it ends on its own. It won’t.
33. Real love accepts and transforms at the same time. You are enough right now, and I see who you could be, and I’m here for both. The false choice is “love them as they are” or “love them into who they could be.” Actual love does both, without contradiction. Conditional love masquerades as unconditional. Real unconditional love never stops calling you forward.
34. Every form of love is a window into the same house. Childhood, siblings, friendship, romance, parenthood. Each one shows you a room you couldn’t see from the others. Together they’re teaching you what love actually is, and if you’re paying attention, what love actually is, is who God is. Life itself is the curriculum.
35. Whatever you love, love it through people. A passion driven by love for people cannot be stopped. A passion driven by love for itself will eventually stop you. My father loved sports, or so it looked from the outside. What he actually loved was giving young people who had nothing a shot at something, and sport was the vehicle that let him do it for four decades without burning out. Choose your fuel carefully. It decides how long you last.
36. Build the village on purpose. Nobody will build it for you. The inefficiency is the relationship. If the world that raised you won’t raise your children, you have to raise the world that will. That means choosing where you live with community in mind, not just commute times. It means the inconvenient invitations, the shared meals, the long obligations, the small group that sees your marriage up close. It means refusing to optimise everything that makes relationships slow, because sometimes slow is the point.
37. Success is two things: great relationships and meaningful work. There is no timetable. Everything else, titles, milestones, the age by which you should have done X, is a cage with the door painted on. The real definition has no deadline attached. If you’re still showing up, you’re not behind. You never were.
My daughter is not even two. She won’t read this for years, if ever. But she’s already teaching me more than any of the books I’ve quoted in my writing did.
The things above are what I’d want her to know if something happened to me tomorrow. They’re also the bet I’m making with the life I have left. That these are the right things to build around, and that the quiet countercultural work of building them is worth more than anything else I could do with my time.
This is the best of what I believe today, it might change tomorrow, that’s fine. I have learnt to be okay with updating my beliefs when I get new and better information.
A life where you stop updating your principles is a life where you stopped paying attention.