# 40 Lessons From 30 Years  ## About - Author: Nat Eliason - Title: 40 Lessons From 30 Years - Tags: #articles - URL: https://blog.nateliason.com/p/40-lessons-from-30-years ## Highlights **It’s never the right time**. Any time you catch yourself saying “oh it’ll be a better time later,” you’re probably just scared. Or unclear on what to do. There is never a right time for the big things in life: having kids, changing jobs, breaking up, getting engaged, married, moving in together. And no it’s never an amount of money, either. --- **Many of the best changes in life are unknown until you make them.** Feeling “fine” is a dangerous attitude. You might have no idea how much better you could feel, how much happier you could be, how much fuller your life could be. Changes like exercising regularly, cleaning up your diet, doing psychedelic therapy, it is impossible to convey the change in perspective to someone who has not experienced it. Sometimes you just need to trust the zealots. --- **You do your best work when you’re not working**. Your brain needs downtime to connect the dots like your body needs rest to strengthen itself for the next workout. If you’re always working, always trying to download information, always trying to be productive, you’re stifling your best insights from bubbling up. --- **The whiners are the loudest**. Happy people are off enjoying their lives, not complaining about them on social media. This is especially true for parenting. --- **Embrace the many things you’ll never do**. Enjoy saying, “I’ll never learn Chinese,” or “I don’t need to visit every country.” Everything you say no to creates space for the most important things to say yes to. --- **Most of the world is held together with duct tape**. The last 5-10% of everything seems to get slapped together at the last minute. It’s just hard to see in any area where you aren’t an expert. Don’t worry about living duct-tape-free. --- **Rebuild some relationship with nature**. Spend as much of your day outside as you can. Eat local food. Go for long walks. Try hunting or harvesting your own food at least once. You were not meant to sit in a wood box staring at technicolored glass all day. --- **If it looks sad, it needs water**. A good rule for houseplants and humans. --- **You don’t have to make money back where you lost it**. If something in your business or life is losing money, you don’t have to plug the hole right there. Often it’s easier to make the money back elsewhere. --- **Trust your negative gut, not your positive gut**. If you have a great feeling about something, you might just be excited or gullible or not thinking it through, so take your time. But if you have a bad feeling about something, you’re almost certainly right about it. ---