I’m turning 30 in a week. When I was 20, I thought I’d be living in an apartment or house, working a job I liked, and in a solid relationship at this point in my life. But I have none of the three. Not for lack of trying.

Guys, who accomplished the goal I never did….how did you do it? Did one thing come first and the others fell into place? Was it luck? Am I perhaps just not working hard enough? Any tips or advice?

21 comments

  1. I set goals and worked toward them. I wanted a relationship so I devoted time and resources to get into one. I wanted a house so I went into the workforce with that goal in mind and worked until I achieved it.

    That’s really all there is too it. There is something about being in the right place and the right time, but luck favors the prepared.

  2. Joined the military, Got out and went into IT. Got married and had two kids in the meantime

  3. I spent most of my early 30s trying to get my head straight. I’m 40, and have all those things.

    Happiness is a choice, It’s not easy to get to that mental space, but it’s doable.

  4. I grew up fairly poor. not completely destitute, but we felt it. Single mother house hold, moving a lot as land lords sold the places we rented, a car that we couldn’t afford to fix so we just bought a new quart of oil every other gas fill up as it burned away ([Very Boots Theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory)). Stuff like that.

    I now have my own home, wife, kids, solid salary at a job I mostly enjoy.

    There was no trick to it, I worked my ass off and made some good choices. The work part was on me, the choices was luck. Making the right choices when you’re 17 is really a luck thing. Got a scholarship, worked my ass off in school towards a lucrative degree, and kept that churning professionally. My first job offered to pay for my masters as long as I got an A or a B and didn’t lose productivity so I did that too.

    This isn’t a “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps” story though. There’s a thousand ways this goes wrong and I avoided them mostly due to luck. So many people look back on their choices and say “I did that right! I’m a winner” but that’s not it. You have to make SO many choices with incomplete information that you do the best you can and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. That’s luck folks. Now… you have to put yourself in a position where luck can find you. THAT part is on you. But there is no recipe.

  5. Totally luck for me man. Got a college degree that I never used, fell into a job that I knew virtually nothing about and met an amazing woman by pure chance. Unfortunately, I can’t really give a good playbook to get there since I’m like Forrest Fucking Gump – I’m just lucky.

  6. I am also still working on a couple of those requirements but I’d like to throw in my two cents.

    Each of those things has a lot of factors that go into being successful. For relationships, it’s honestly just luck. Yes, being more attractive or fit and being funny or other positive aspects helps lot but it still takes a lot of work and luck to find the right person. Having positive features just makes the pool of potential candidates bigger and faster to access but anyone has a shot at a good relationship.

    Owning your own place and having a job you like might be at odds with each other as what you like doing might not pay enough to be able to afford your own place. This has a lot to do with where you are geographically. There are many places that have lower cost of living than other places. Moving to areas with low cost of living will help you get a place you can afford but nothing is guaranteed in this market especially if you do not have solid financials which is why so many millennials have essentially given up on owning their own place.

    The job you like depends on a lot of factors too. Many jobs that have high satisfaction rates are simply being phased out. I believe fork lift drivers are some of the most content with their careers but are being driven out by automation. There are plenty of people in the medical field like nurses who find their profession generally fulfilling but can dislike the day to day of their jobs. I know plenty of people who are happy being a librarian, auto mechanic, or personal trainer despite being paid relatively low wages. I also know plenty of tech workers who make 6 or 7 figures but absolutely hate their jobs and their very existence at times and are just grinding away so they can retire as fast as possible.

    The point of all that is to say, figure out what you like to do and try to make it your job. Maybe you can start a business. Maybe it’ll fail but many people end up with small businesses that can sustain a pretty good lifestyle for one person and will never grow to a business that requires many workers.

    But as someone who is also just trying to figure it out, you can disregard all of that.

  8. How much of this did you have mapped out? I think the answer for me is, along with a bit of luck, is that I was intentional about all of those areas.

    I started saving in a Roth IRA and in a separate account when I turned 18 for a retirement fund and for a house fund. When I got out of the military that house fund was pretty healthy and allowed us to put a good chunk down on a house.

    I knew I didn’t have the cash for college and that is part of why I chose to join the military so I could go to school debt free. I learned that there were college benefits for active duty and used that to pay for my undergrad degree and then still had my Post 9-11 GI Bill for grad school. Again, I had mapped out my career plans, I figured out the steps to get there and did them. Another important point to bring up is I didn’t go with my first choice. I had wanted to be an art teacher, but that would have made hitting some of my financial goals more difficult, so I went the law route. I still fulfil that original goal to be a teacher by doing volunteer work doing art projects with kids in a type of after school/summer club.

    As for the relationship, I think luck has a lot to do with this one. I was incredibly lucky to meet my wife. But I was also intentional with dating. I didn’t waste time in relationships that I couldn’t see lasting. I knew I wanted to get married and have kids so I was looking for someone who wanted the same. In addition to someone I loved I was looking for someone I was compatible with in the core areas like money, debt, kids, sex, etc.. Also intentional in the relationship. It is easy to get complacent and just start existing together so you have to make a point to continue to chase one another.

    So I guess intentionality is my best advice. It might not be that you aren’t working hard enough, but maybe you’re working hard on the wrong thing. What do you want to do for a career, what are the steps to get there, and how can you tackle them?

  9. Worked fucking hard and never had a holiday.

    I’m the first in the office and the last to leave

    No college education but hard work has made me the 2IC for a major firm

    Life’s hard, you can either take the easy road and try to enjoy life on the cheap or work hard to set up your kids

  12. In my 20s I had a very very strong drive to succeed. My focus was on being a great dad as my kids were 2 and 4. I was a single dad, and being the best dad possible to them was my driving force. In order to get there I needed financial security for them.

    I had gotten out of the Marines at 23, divorced their mom at 26, and was living with my oldest sister while I kept my nose to the grindstone hustling. I had my kids every other weekend, and no one else existed when I had my kids. No other women, no TV, no video games. My focus was 100% on them. That kind of determination is what I needed because I know that luck is one thing, but hard work will pay off over time. And it did.

    At 27 I interviewed for my dream job as a software dev. But it was way better than I could ever imagine. It was with a government agency, with a union, great benefits, good pay, and only 5 miles from my sister’s house.

    Fast forward 1 year and a woman at my work took notice of me. Single mom, with her head on straight, and she was gorgeous. BUT, you don’t shit where you eat. I was not going to go there…. but she wore me down and I eventually went there. We got married 2 years later, without anyone at work knowing. Bought a house, we were happy, the kids were happy and life was perfect.

    Fast forward again to today, we’re both 48 and the kids are moved out. We both still work at the same place, and TBH, life is still perfect. Yeah, we had ups and downs, but that happens in every marriage and family. But we were able to get through it.

    My tip to you, is to stay focused on what you want. If you want a house, you gotta hustle and bust your ass to get there. The cards are stacked against your generation as much as, if not more than what they were for my generation. But I came from a background with nothing. Literally no help or guidance from my family. I had to figure it all out on my own, without the internet or whatever.

    So for you OP, lets tackle the problem. What is it you want? What do you need to get there? How do you get what you need so you can get there? Like, lets get to the root cause here and work up from there.

  15. Like numerous other posters, humble beginnings here—single parent, rural depressed area, no role models. But I did notice wherever there was money there was math (arithmetic, actually). Early on I turned up as good at math.

    Not wanting to be poor, as a kid my primary focus was to study how people made money and how they saved it. One thing that was clear already as a kid was “no money, no honey.”

    Being a stage musicians provided plenty of opportunity to meet lovely warm-forms. One became a delightful girlfriend for years.

    My bands gave a regular income while in high school and I studied all the math I could. I began studying the stock market when I was about 15. “Gambling!” as all the impoverished piety around me continually said. That I wanted to become a scientist was already weird enough for them. But try to escape poverty? *Ingrate!*

    At 18 I started investing in dividend producing stocks. Then went to college with a focus on math which over time morphed eventually software engineering. That turned out to be an incredibly lucrative career path.

    Then, a few years or so down the road, I bought a house. It was an investment property for a small company I’d set up. I lived in part of it (and yes, paid rent … to myself) and rented out part of the space to others as “study space.”

    Continued investing and reinvesting through graduate school. Met my to-be wife there.

    The only thing I really focused on when young (aside from musicianship) was establishing my ability to make money, legally and without 8-5 shift work and backbreaking labor.

    It’s been somewhat surreal, but having money makes most of life go much easier. Focusing on that young was incredibly beneficial for the long run

    Wishing you good fortune in your own pursuits.

  17. Biggest move I attribute to my success was realizing that I had to leave my small town and follow where the work was in my 20s. I always volunteered for projects even when I had to figure it out (stacked my “skills”), worked many late nights, and definitely got underpaid for a while, but then I moved again to follow a better job in another city.

    Now I’m in my 30s, living back in the countryside near my hometown, working 100% remote, with my family and pets. I won’t say I haven’t been lucky, but I feel like I was smart enough to catch my lucky breaks.

  18. Wife makes 3x what I do a year, house was bought before I met her but she wanted to be secure incase of divorse so paid in the same amount I already did so we had a 50/50 split of the house which basically paid it off. We both work from home 5 feet away from each other and that made work so much more enjoyable and fulfilling because we work in the same field so we help each other out. So short answer for me was find someone you can spend 18 hours a day with still love. Only problem we really have is she really wants me to be a house husband and just cook, clean and fix up the house more.

  19. Relationship kinda fell in place. Luckily I’m pretty good looking. Though I do work hard on it – I work out, I make an effort to buy nice clothes and luckily the genetics thing is pretty good too

    Job was a struggle at the start. I was intellectually gifted early on and excelled in public school. I absolute sucked in college and didn’t have the work ethic to show up to class. I overestimated how gifted I was and thought I could cram an entire semester the night before the final exam. By that I mean probably 30 hours of lectures or just skimming an entire semester of slides without really knowing what they meant.

    I figured out the work ethic part much later on, somehow eked out a graduation, and landed a starter job as a software engineer. I was bad in school, but that doesn’t mean I’m not intuitively good at programming. Got a new job, now I’m making 200k. I was always interested in programming… Not really interested in computers the way some people talk about it (i.e. building your own computer, hardware specs, etc). Honestly, I find things like hardware to be kinda dull… Since it doesn’t really scratch my puzzles itch.

    I just found programming super interesting because you could write some code and the machine would do what you wanted to do. I was super fascinated by that and found myself drawn to programming books and taking all the programming classes I could in high school.

  21. 28yo here. I worked at a job that paid decent while putting in my RRSP. I ended up going to school while I was working and when I was out of school I quit my job to get my better job. BUT HERES THE KICKER: I opted to be paid out my RRSPs after I quit (took a big tax hit) but it was still enough for a down payment on a house. Now I’m engaged and happily ever blah blah blah

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