Ten Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me When I Was a Teenager

1) Life speeds up from here, and the stakes just keep getting higher.

I know that you think your life is busy now. Maybe it is, with school, sports, a part-time job, family, social life. But after high school, responsibilities will get bigger and come at you faster, like cars and trucks approaching on the highway. And just like standing in the highway, life is lethal—some of your responsibilities will be life or death matters.  Your perception of time speeds up as your brain processes all these new experiences, and one day you’ll wake up and be twenty, thirty, forty...until you’re old like me. Don’t be afraid of life, but enjoy these years because they are a gift, the pre-season games that let you learn and prepare for what’s ahead. 

2) Your emotions are not calibrated to reality.

Right now, you can’t trust your feelings, especially their volume, or intensity. It’s like driving a car with untrustworthy gauges: the speedometer may say 60 mph, but it could be 45 or even 72. See, it’s not just that your gauges are off, but they’re off by unpredictable amounts, sometimes too high, sometimes too low, sometimes just right. I want to say that the problem fixes itself over time, but the sad truth is that some people never get around to calibrating their emotions to reality. Some drama queens never grow up. It takes experience and effort to adjust your feelings to the real world, and to figure out when and how to trust them. For now, really do rely on the advice and counsel of those who are older and have gone through all of this, whether it’s parents, relatives, pastors, teachers, relatives, whomever. Do not ask a friend whose emotional gauges are no more reliable than yours. When you’re emotionally worked up, slow down, take some deep breaths, and let one of them talk some sense into you.

3) High school is not the high point of your life.

If it turns out that it was, you will have missed the best parts of life. Despite all the heart-wrenching emotions poured out when you sign your friends’ yearbooks, most of them will not be your best friends for life. Your boyfriend or girlfriend is almost certainly not your soulmate, so do not trust them with your soul! You will probably never go back and visit your high school (why?), and if you are still proudly displaying your high school memorabilia or talking about your high school accomplishments twenty years from now, then you lost twenty years somewhere along the way. I’m not saying that high school is bad, or that you should hate it or not treasure it. But it’s a brief passage along the way to things that are bigger and far more meaningful than you can understand right now.

4) At this point in your life you can’t achieve great success, but you can fail spectacularly.

As a teenager, you can’t achieve too much, unless you become a teenage movie star or get drafted directly into the NBA. But while even those rare kids might get famous and make a lot of money, too many learn about just how badly you can fail at this age. And when I say fail, I mean the belly flop into a pit of acid and have your remains mauled by a cougar type of failure. In fact, if dumb enough, that exact scenario could actually happen (it probably has, somewhere). And while successes come and go, some failures are forever: teens who become paraplegics for life because they drove drunk or distracted; teens who got pregnant because of loose morals loosened further by alcohol; teens who got criminal records or a drug addiction or an embarrassing tattoo; teens who ruined their education or family forever because they were careless or emotionally immature or downright dumb. 

You’re walking through a minefield. Watch where you put your foot.

5) The adults around you understand a lot more than you think they do.

I know what you’re thinking: they’re so old, and they felt what you feel, or had a [fill in the blank] like you do. But you’re going to just have to trust me on this one, OK? They were your age, felt exactly what you’re feeling, and did exactly what you’re doing (or are thinking about doing). They hated their parents (your grandparents) sometimes. They had boyfriends and girlfriends (probably not your mom or dad), and everything that comes with that—even that dumb notion you have that no one could ever understand how special your love is. If they don’t support whatever it is you want to do it’s not because they don’t understand, it’s because they do, and they want you to learn from their mistakes. If they’ve been where you are, why wouldn’t you want a guide to lead you through? Please tell them what’s going on, and really listen to what they have to say.

6) You are not special.

I know, mom and dad say you are, but come on: they’re your mom and dad. You are special, to them. I know that you feel alone a lot, but you aren’t alone in what you’re feeling. This is your first time around the block, and everything looks so unique and strange and intense. It seems that way to everyone the first time. This is just you discovering yourself and the world. You are not the smartest person in the world, or the dumbest. I know that you have ideas in your head that seem so original, but they aren’t.  I know you think that no one else in the whole world can possibly understand what you’re going through, but that’s pretty much what every teenager has thought since Adam and Eve had Cain and Abel. Like I said earlier, your emotions are not calibrated to reality yet. So, no: you do not have superpowers and you will probably not be one of the ten most significant figures in history. On the other hand, if you feel isolated and worthless and depressed, please find a wise, good, and free adult whose been around the block a few times who will tell you that you are OK and everything is going to work out. Because it will, as long as you recognize that this is just life and you can grow up into it so that it fits.

7) You don’t know how to pick good friends.

You’re already sick of your parents telling you they don’t trust this or that friend, or that they don’t like your boyfriend or girlfriend. “How can you say that?!” you demand. “You don’t know even know them.” OK, maybe not. Of course, it’s possible that you don’t know they, either. See, at your age, you don’t have a lot of experience reading and filtering people, and you can’t put clues about people into context. You will learn, eventually, but mostly by getting burned, or having your heart broken. Most of the mistakes you can make right now come from making bad decisions about people. If some of the wise, good, and free older people around you see some red flags in your friends, pay attention.

8) Give your family a break.

Yes, they drive you they are unfair, you fight with them, and they don’t let you have any fun. Yada, yada, yada. Please give them a break. They are your family, the only one you will ever have. These years, when you are still living with them, will be over before you know it: we grow up, we move out, and we move on. There will be new seasons in your relationship with your family, and those are great, too. But don’t be in too much of a hurry to move on. You will look back on these few quick years for the rest of your life. And unless you have a seriously messed up family (which do exist, but see the next point), let me tell you a secret: they love you more than you can or will ever understand. They work as hard as they can to provide as good a life for you as they can. Yes, they make a thousand mistakes, but they are mistakes: they wouldn’t do anything to intentionally harm you. Despite all their flaws, they are doing their best for you. Please give them a break, and do your best for them.

9) Knock off the whole anger and victimhood routine.

I suspect that if someone took the effort to give you this book and have you read this passage (because I know you didn’t go buy the book yourself and read this many pages in), then you are not a real victim. In fact, if someone gave you this to read, my guess is that they are trying to send you a hint and buy you a clue: please drop the whiny, rebellious attitude. Some teens really do have legitimate complaints. They are victims of abuse, neglect, genuine hardship, or great injustice. Are you sure that you are one if them? If not, then you’re acting like this because you are self-centered and unappreciative of all the gifts and advantages you’ve been given in life. That attitude will corrupt your soul, lead you to make stupid and dangerous choices, drive those who love you away, and poison your opportunities. Stop it.

10) Happiness is a choice.

Happiness is not something that happens to you and which you cannot control, like the flu. It’s something that you can choose, and you need to learn how make that choice early in life because you’re going to have to make that choice almost every single day from here on out. There is so much you will not have control over: the economy, your health, the health of your loved ones, the actions of other people, tsunamis. If happiness is just a condition that happens to you when things are going well, you are going to spend a lot of your life unhappy. So right now, beginning learning to find joy and contentment in any circumstances, under any conditions. Learn the secret of choosing to be cheerful, controlling stress, and cultivating a happy heart. That doesn’t mean you have to settle in life for less than you dream, but does mean that when your dreams are delayed you are not devastated. You will be able to weather life’s storms and come out the other side intact.

“The Gettysburg Address would not have been a better speech if Lincoln had opened with a joke or thrown in some punchy anecdotes.”

Somewhere in your career you might have the opportunity to give a speech. The very thought terrifies some people, but others seek the spotlight. Either way, if you do get up in front of a room, there will be plenty of people giving you advice about how to win the crowd.

Some of that advice will be good, but not all of it. Among the worst is this: always establish a jokey familiarity with your audience. Start by trying to get a laugh, the theory goes, and then use lots of homey, hokey stories. If you’re using presentation slides or video, some will advise you to toss in some goofy graphics to lighten the mood. All of this is based on the rather questionable premise that if the audience sees you as a “regular person,” just like them, they will trust you and listen to what you have to say.

On some occasions, this might make sense. At some events, you might be called on to lighten the mood, or establish rapport. But those are almost never ends, only means. Why are you at the front of the room in the first place? No one wants to waste their time listening to a speaker who is just like them. If you’re just like them, why aren’t they giving the speech?

Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is only 263 words. The entire text is carved in marble next to his statue in his memorial in Washington D.C. There was not a joke in it. People looked up to Lincoln. They didn’t want him to be just like them, they wanted him to know more than them, to say something that made them wiser, better, and more free.

When and if you get the chance to speak, humor can be a powerful tool. But it’s a means to communicate more effectively. The whole point of you being up there is that they expect that you know something that they don’t, that you have something valuable to say. Don’t waste their time, and squander your credibility by weirdly trying to prove that you don’t belong behind the podium in the first place. 

“We have lost the idea of honor, and we are a worse people without it.”

The concept of honor was a fixture of civilization for thousands of years. Of course, it was an ideal like chastity or charity that we didn’t always live up to, but at least we aspired to it. We measured ourselves by it, and held others accountable to it. To label a man or woman honorable or dishonorable was to say something important about them. 

Honor wasn’t hereditary. You could be born noble, but you could not inherit honor. You couldn’t buy or borrow it. You weren’t entitled to it; there was no right to honor. It couldn’t be demanded or given, only earned. As Liam Neeson’s character in the 1995 movie Rob Roy tells his children, “Honor is the gift a man gives himself.”

Honor is like a bank account of your wisdom, goodness, and freedom. A fool cannot be honorable. A bad man or woman is not honorable. You are not honorable if you squander your liberty with drink, debt, or a thousand other masters that can enslave a life.

Honor is expensive, but it doesn’t cost money. Honor is accrued through a shrewd mind, integrity, courage, honesty, decency, virtue, self-discipline, and a fierce commitment to take as much responsibility as possible for your own life.

Yes, the idea of honor was sometimes abused. Some people who claimed it didn’t deserve it, but that didn’t invalidate the ideal. And yes, honor can lead to the spiritual disease of pride, but it doesn’t have to. Properly understood, it is self-correcting: an arrogant man is dishonorable.

For all its potential faults, a society with the ideal of honor is better than one without it, in which we are defined as a helpless bag of offended victimhood and entitled rights which demand to be filled, regardless of our merit.

America’s Founding Fathers enumerated some rights in the Declaration of Independence: the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (not happiness, but its pursuit, which is a crucial distinction). We are entitled to an opportunity to earn honor. We have a right to choose wisdom, goodness, and freedom. But over the years, we have so diluted the notion of personal responsibility that honor no longer has a place in our social contract. We now assert that just because someone is foolish, immoral, or voluntarily enslaves themselves to debt, destructive behavior, or bad relationships, they should not be disqualified from their right to everything from housing and healthcare, cell phones and all the erectile dysfunction drugs they “need.”

But if nothing can be our fault, then nothing can be to our credit. If it is impossible to be dishonorable, then no one can earn honor. Forget winning in modern America: all the players get a participant’s ribbon. As a nation, we have defined ourselves by the lowest common denominator, and then wonder where all the honorable men and women went.

Yes, our Founding Fathers enshrined the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the Declaration of Independence. But do you know how they signed it? This is the last sentence of that document:

And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.

No one in our public life talks like that anymore, and we are not better off because of it.

Thomas Jefferson, the primary author of the Declaration, once said, “Nobody can acquire honor by doing what is wrong.” Ironically, Jefferson was a tragic figure. We all know about his brilliance and accomplishments: few have written more eloquently about wisdom, goodness, and freedom. But his life was marked by foolishness, bad behavior, and denial of liberty—his own enslavement to debt and his personal enslavement of men, women, and children (he acknowledged slavery was wrong, but he could never bring himself to free his own slaves, even in his will). Jefferson understood honor, but I don’t think he was an honorable man.

Anyone who delights in mocking the ideals Jefferson could not live up to, and erecting in their place a culture of shrill and slouching mediocrity, should remember the words of two other presidents. In his Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln said that only time would tell if a government of the people, by the people, for the people would perish from the earth. The United States was intended to be a reflection of the American people. If we are dishonorable, so will our country. And in 1916, Woodrow Wilson said, “The nation’s honor is dearer than the nation's comfort; yes, than the nation’s life itself.”

The world needs America to be a wise, good, and free nation. That begins with me, and you. Our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor are at stake.

No matter how advanced our technology is, we still depend on people who can build and fix and fight. We who cannot do these things shouldn’t be so stupid and suicidal as to despise the people who can.

Some people like to say that the United States has evolved into a “creative economy.” Meaning that while we don’t make a lot of things, we invent them, and new ways to use them. So, for example: the MacBook Air I’m typing this on was invented in Cupertino, California, but manufactured in China, and I’m using it to write a book which will be sold on Amazon.com, a company that has created a new kind of relationship between writers and readers.

Fair enough. But while I have no idea what percentage of Americans make their living in the “creative economy” (I count myself blessed to be one of them), I suspect that it isn’t more than ten percent or so. It is, however, the ideal for those who work in it and many who aspire to. We feel liberated, enlightened, and evolved. We are so much more clever than the uncreative types. Yeah us!

More Americans work in government and service jobs. They teach school or work in restaurants or retail stores. But in their free time they surf on their smart phones, and aspire to do something creative. We want to live in gleaming cities full of smart electronics powered by clean energy, surrounded by flat screens suggesting brands to our hungry consumer dreams. Few of us wants to do something dirty or dangerous, we don’t want to see anything dirty or dangerous, and we don’t want to be reminded that all of this only exists because some people do things that are dirty or dangerous.

But we want our devices to power up. We want our heating and air conditioning to work every time. We want our planes to stay in the air and our poop to flush away, never to be seen again. We want the seas to be safe and tourists not to be kidnapped or blown up in some equatorial resort.

All of these things require people who can do more than type on a MacBook, or build websites, or pick interior colors. Our creative economy rests on those who can build and fix and fight. We had better not despise them. Not because they might revolt, but because we need more of them. If we don’t honor what they do, our kids will continue to aspire to doing anything except building, fixing, and fighting. Then we’ll be importing guest workers to keep the power on and the poop flushing while they sit in coffee houses and play games on our iPhones paid for by government benefits. We’ll become Europe. That is not a stable and prosperous future.

Why are you getting life advice from songs and movies? Have you ever met the people who write songs and movies? If you did, you wouldn't take their advice on anything.

Pop music and movies entertain and inspire us, but they also fill our minds with powerful images and ideas. Those images and ideas put down roots in our imagination, which bear fruit. And we pluck and eat it.

We think we know about love and life, but too many of our opinions are the unexamined harvest of a lifetime of popular culture. Decades of listening and watching has shaped our internal landscape. We don’t understand why we feel the way we do, and it really doesn’t bother us that we don’t know. While the primary influences on earlier generations might have been the Bible, teachers, or elders, our wise men are song and screen writers.

And that is a problem.

If you were to sit across from one of them in a coffee shop and listen to them describe their lives, you would probably snicker or gape in disbelief. Because these are mostly people who cannot maintain a relationship, hold a job, or even keep their plants alive. You wouldn’t hire them if you owned a business, you wouldn’t trust them with your children, and you certainly wouldn’t turn to them for counseling.

But put their opinions into a film with a good soundtrack, or have them croon it under a spotlight with a room of screaming, swooning fans, and it seems to us like the wisdom of the ages.

Here’s a better idea. When you are faced with a choice, get advice from someone who has proven success solving that problem. If you’re looking for advice on love and marriage, don’t get it from a singer-songwriter with twenty-seven failed relationships, talk to someone who’s been happily married for fifty or sixty years. Whatever they tell you, do that. If you are trying to find your career path, don’t make decisions based on a movie you saw. The screenwriter has never held a job for more than nine months. Talk to someone who just retired from a successful career.

The wise, good, and free person seeks the wealth of the generations, the accumulated experience of those who have lived shrewdly, decently, and maintained their liberty from all the snares of foolishness and evil.