In the past, I wrote a letter to my 18 year old self. Here’s a letter to a slightly older self.

1. Up until now, you’ve been following your parents’ plan. Do well in school, go to college, get a job. Now, as you quit your job and go to build a startup, you won’t be able to rely on a plan. The progression will no longer be linear. This will be harder than you imagined. The easy success you had in your career thus far will not carry forward. It will test your resilience, confidence, and self-esteem. You won’t want to hear this but you have to: for now, focus on the journey rather than the outcome. You will ultimately fail in your first venture because you were not ready. But you will learn a lot.

2. You are at your physical peak. You can survive on little sleep and no routine. You can eat junk food, not exercise, go out late, and show up to work functional. Use this time to be physically active and prolific with your work. Hit the gym and lift hard. Continue to master software engineering and push your boundaries. Throw yourself into work late into the night and into the weekends. Ship side projects. At this stage in your life, it’s about the amount of time you practice.

3. Your music tastes will stop evolving. You were raised on rap, specifically gangster rap, and you will find that genre of music slowly become out of vogue. It will be replaced with a feelings oriented “emo-rap” that you will have a hard time relating to. The artists you grew up with like Jay-Z and Eminem will fade in influence and be replaced with artists like Future and Drake. This will be a strange feeling and for the first time, you will understand why older people cling on to their era’s music.

4. It is going to be harder to make lifelong friends. Your friends will start to settle down into long term relationships. You will become busier with your career. You’ll get tired quicker when you go out. There will be less instances where you are around strangers for prolonged periods of time. Your core group of friends that you’ve known since college will still be there for you and you should remember to be there for them.