Welcome to the first day of the rest of your life.

Coincidentally, it’s also the first day of Lateral Thinking’s rebirth.

It would be a shame not to start things off with a lateral thinking brain teaser:

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Also, what are your thoughts on this as a potential Lateral Thinking logo?

While your wheels are turning, let’s jump into a light hearted topic that will definitely not cause anyone dread or anxiety.

Life misalignment

I’ve done a lot of things over the years while trying to figure out myself and what my next move is. If you’re even remotely like me, you’ve always been hungry for information and have always tried to be one of the first people to learn about new things.

For the longest time, I thought that learning is the most important thing in the universe no matter what stage of your life you’re in. My dad even used to sign off his emails with “write less, read more”, which I’m sure is part of the reason why I thought this.

Even my Instagram bio says “Constantly curious”. I promise I’m less basic than I sound.

I came across an interview with Denzel Washington the other day. It’s just an interview to promote the new Gladiator movie, but there’s a gem hidden at the end of that video (jump to min 3:00 if you’re curious).

Denzel talks about the 3 stages of life:

1. Learn

2. Earn

3. Return

If you know anything about me, you’ll know I don’t really take things at face value - so I went rabbit holing until I found what seems the source of this train of thought: Mr. Bert W. M. Twaalfhoven (this is one of the times I’m thankful I’m not a podcast guy and I don’t have to pronounce his last name).

Bert (never typing that last name unless I’m being waterboarded) is one of the OG Dutch entrepreneurs. He started 54 companies in 13 countries, with most being successful (16 of them failed).

So what’s the whole Learn/Earn/Return shtick about?

The 3 stages

Let’s see what the stages look like on an 81 year timeline, just so it’s divisible by 3.

In the first 27 years of your life, you learn. That means 90% input and 10% output.

Looking back on my own journey, that makes sense - I left Romania to grow Blindspot in South Korea when I was 28. I would honestly say learning was my top priority for the first 30 years and I’ve been slowly switching focus for the past 3 years.

That means that from 27 until you’re about 54, you should focus on earning. Now, one caveat here - do not mistake earning with simply monetizing your skills.

Earning means making sure the years you spent learning start paying dividends. It means honing your skills. If

Spend 80% of your time on output and 20% on input.

From 54 to 81, I imagine you focus on return, which I translate as giving back and helping others on their learn/earn/return journey.

I’m not going to cover this part too much since I don’t feel I have enough knowledge about it yet.

However, I am going to cover this topic again and invite 3 people that are in 3 different stages to share their thoughts and life hacks on how to maximize each step.

Stay tuned.

Exercise answer:

If more people told the truth, more STD treatments would be sold. Or more birthday candles (since more people would be honest about their age).

Shoutout again to Lateral with Tom Scott for creating one of the most entertaining shows around lateral thinking (and helping me source some of these puzzles, which was becoming a problem after 100+ editions).

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