How To Setup Your Life's Work In Your 20s, 30s, 40s and Beyond

I recently saw this little quote which she posted in our community group amongst some young entrepreneurs and felt that it resonated greatly.

So I thought why not re-share it here with our wider audience!

Your Life Is A Marathon, so run it with clear intent.

The Asaro tribe has a saying: “Knowledge is only a rumor until it lives in the muscle.” Each major personal or professional change takes about 10-15 years to go from head-level awareness to settling deep enough into your being. Change happens in an instant but it also takes time to be an embodied, practiced part of you.

You cannot control what changes and uncertainties life will bring. But you can plan to respond to these changes intentionally rather than incidentally.

So I Tend To Think In What I Want For Each Decade.

In your 20s, most of us are fresh into “adulting”. We usually start making some first major independent choices about where we want to go in life. You are forced to consider seriously what could be your areas of talent and interest. And as you make your choices, many of which will be mistaken and painful, one of the insights that should emerge in your late 20s is more (but not complete) clarity around what you stand for and what you will not stand for. This is your “Why”.

Your 30s is best thought of as the Age of Doing More of What Worked in my 20s and Less of What Did NOT Work in my 20s. You want to use your 30s to more intentionally practice the precious “adulting” lessons learnt. You stop dating certain people. You start eating more nutrients, less junk. You stop spending money to impress people who will never be impressed with you.

Ideally, you should spend your 30s noticing areas of clear growth and strength to invest in. This could be personal or professional. Your 30s is a great time to intentionally invest whatever resources of time, energy and money that you can spare on turning your areas of interests/potential growth into strengths. Everyone’s resources will be limited - so we have to choose which high value investments will yield the highest upside.

Remember nobody is born strong in something. We are born with interests and talents. But you can be interested and talented at something - and still not be strong at it. At least not in your 20s or even early 30s. You want to get stronger and better - you need to invest in it early. Your innate interests/talents are the first and most important investment to take care of.

Talents x Time + Investment = Strength

That way, by the time you hit your late 30s, you should be starting to experience yourself in a more powerful and confident way. That’s because you’ve been intentionally leveraging from your 20something mistakes and creating and owning what you are good at, interested in. You’ll still stumble but less unintentionally vs. your 20s. You should be able to pick yourself up with less self-destruction and more more dignity.

By your 40s, ideally, you get to a place where you can begin a consolidation of power that can set you up for your 50s well. Power is not a bad word - power simply means the capacity to move things. 40s should be the age where you position yourself to move things. In the system, many organisations will be looking for 40-somethings who can lead various people groups, issues, groups. They are looking for many things but one general thing they are looking for is leadership - and leadership looks like someone who has learnt to be intentional in the way they look at change and work with change. You will be surprised at how rare a find an intentional person, making intentional choices is. If that is you, you are Gold.

By your 40s, hopefully you have come to understand your "Why" and "Who" much more. This self-awareness of your core purposes and core identities builds a more or less unchanging, internal base of deep confidence within you. Think of it as a psychological anchor that can withstand any storms. A solid base of “Why” and “Who” allows you to deal with the ever-shifting “Whats” and “Hows” of technological change, pandemics, industry disruption, personal health issues etc. that life will keep throwing at you.

The 40s should be the time where you draw upon that inner well of confidence to lead yourself - as well as others - to leave behind the “finite games” that most people are caught up in and learn to play the “Infinite Game”.

The finite vs Infinite Game is a concept argued by philosopher James Carse that is now popularised by leadership expert Simon Sinek.

If you treat life as a Finite game, you assume it has known players, fixed rules and an agreed-upon objective where only one person - or a small group of persons - can win. You try to “win” at life. But life is not something that can be won or needs to be won. Life is already yours to make of it what you will. It is to be lived - and enjoyed. If you made your life all about “winning” over others by the age of 35 or 40, chances are you have lost much that is significant along the way.

If you live life as an infinite game, you accept that there are many known and unknown players, the rules are changeable and the objective is to find the infinite game worth playing, and to stay in the game for as long as possible. Forging Strong Friendships is an infinite game, Creating Value For Others is an infinite game, A Good Marriage is an infinite game, Leading Well is an infinite game. You cannot win at any of them - you can only learn to keep playing it better and better, together with everyone else who is in that same game with you.

I am almost at the halfway point before 50. And because the 50s-80s comes with a natural slowing down of the body first followed by a later slowing down of the mind, I consider them the decades where you very intentionally start building legacy.

The questions of “What do I want to leave behind? Who do I want to leave it behind for? What kind of world do I want to see?” will become very real as mortality becomes more and more real.

If you’ve done all that pre-work from 20s-40s, you’ll be set for a very interesting and deeply meaningful last few decades of life. You’ll be much braver than you’ve ever been to do what matters most to you.

You’ll be surprised - I bet - by how much new appetite for risk-taking you might actually end up having in your golden years. It can be glorious.

Who is Kuik Shaio Yin?

Shiao-Yin started work as a creative director before co-founding The Thought Collective in 2002 with Tong Yee and Elizabeth Kon.

Today, she works as a cultural change strategist, systems thinker, process facilitator, dialogue designer, executive coach, public speaker and trainer. She loves helping organisations and their stakeholders work together with compassion and respect through complex issues.