40 Lessons I’ve Learned in 40 Years

This past week has been a very special week for me as I celebrated my 40th birthday! 

For me this birthday was originally a great excuse to spend time with loved ones. Unfortunately due to the pandemic, I could not have my friends and family around but Mrs. NN put together an epic and surprise getaway in Taiwan where we got to relax for the entire week. And she managed to virtually bring them to the celebration which made for a great highlight.

During this past week, I decided to take the time to reflect about these past 40 years. As part of this reflection, I wrote down 40 lessons I learned as I’m entering my 40s and thought it would be worth sharing with all of you.

I’ve broken them down into the following categories: love, finance, friends & family, hacks, happiness, health and life in general. Let’s get started! 

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About Love

1 – Allocate time for check-in

Scheduling a dedicated time – usually once a month – without any distractions (including phone, laptops) to solely discuss your relationship’s health. This has been a very informative exercise. It is as simple as discussing what works and what can be done better! 

2 – Never skip dates (& fun getaways)

We’ve been planning date nights & fun getaways for the past few years and they have been a great way to break up the routine and keep your relationship alive and sparkling. And the best ones are the one that your partner can’t see coming!

Running out of ideas? Airbnb experiences can provide great ideas no matter where you live. Check out what is available around you using the form below:

3 – Cultivate your individual existence

The healthiest relationships are where each person has their own lives. Build a life together, but don’t lose yourself and your individual purpose.

About Finance 

4 – Forget everything you’ve been told about money 

Think that the stock market is very risky? That buying your primary home is one of the best long term investments you can make? Or that you can postpone saving for your retirement to later? Think again and start learning the basics of personal finance, the 4% rule and debunking many myths about wealth building! While we were late to the game, we managed to follow the right principles early enough which allowed us to make work optional in our mid-30s.

A great book to start on this topic: The Simple Path to Wealth: Your road map to financial independence and a rich, free life

5 – Start making your money work rather than keep working to make money

Invest early and constantly! Thanks to the power of compounding, this will greatly pay off in the long run and will get you to a point when you can live off of your investments and make work optional sooner than you will realize! Definitely much sooner than your friends who focus on climbing up the corporate ladder and don’t control their spending thanks to lifestyle inflation. 

A great blog post on this topic: Our Origin Story

About Friends & Family

6 – Only help people that are willing to improve their lives

You might have people around you that you feel you can help but that actually are not willing to improve their lives. Give them a first chance if you aren’t sure but cut the losses if you see that they aren’t willing to take actions. 

7 – Learn how to remember people’s names!

As Jim Kwik said, “People don’t care how much you know unless they know how much you care”. And when you forget someone’s name, you send them a message: I don’t care about you. Thanks to Jim Kwik’s book I’ve been able to be much better at remembering people’s names and something I’ll highly recommend to anyone struggling with this.

A great book about this: Limitless: Upgrade Your Brain, Learn Anything Faster and Unlock Your Exceptional Life

8 – Spend time with your parents!

Did you know that by the time you graduate from high school, you have already spent 90+% of your in-person parent time? As someone who used to live with my parents until my mid 20s, I went from seeing them multiple times a week to about a week every 18 months as I moved to the USA. One of the reasons I wanted to retire from work earlier was to be able to spend more time with them and catching up on quality time I’ve missed over the past decade since I left home. Plus you probably want to spend time with your parents while they are healthy rather than when they will be very old and not be able to do much.  

A great post about this: The Tail End (from Wait But Why)

9 – Thanks people you care about

It is never too late to call your friends and family to let them know how much you love them and care about having them part of your life! It doesn’t take much time and you won’t have any regret in the future. 

10 – You are the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with

For a long time I thought that the more friends you have, the better until I realized that not all friendships were equal and some could actually be detrimental. So watch who you spend the most time with and don’t feel bad and ditch the relationships in your life that aren’t bringing you happiness in the long run. And also be open to create or seek new relationships as your best one may still be waiting for you!

11 – Understand that most people don’t care about you

And that’s perfectly okay.

About Life Hacks

12 – Keep a journal

I use my journal to write each day about 3 things I have been grateful for and the 3 things you want to achieve today.

A great post about this: Bullet journaling to focus and turbocharge your day

13 – Learn about buddhism + attend a silent meditation retreat

I discovered buddhism (the lifestyle, not the religion) in 2019 during our trip in Thailand and this has been both an eye opening and life changing experience. I have been recommending doing a silent retreat to anyone I’ve met since I’ve done one in Chiang Mai.  

A great post about this: Destination Report: Chiang Mai

14 – Read books!

Not only successful people are readers, reading a book will improve your focus, conversation skills and let you gain knowledge that people have spent decades gathering and that you can process in just a few hours. The best part is that you can access this information for free by going to your public library (or borrowing online from it).

I’m guilty of that for not reading too many books for about a decade but I’m getting better at this.

A great resource about this: Books that changed our lives + Check out our books reviews.

15 – Practice delayed gratification

Mastering delayed gratification will let you thrive in your career (not expecting a raise for everything you are doing), relationship (long courtship while dating, cultivating patience with one another after marriage), health (fasting), finances (spending money on what is truly essential).

16 – Live in the present!

Living is a beautiful gift we receive as we enter this world, yet it is shorter than we think. Don’t get fixated on your past or get too anxious about the future. Instead embrace the simple things that surround you everyday.
You Live Only Once so make the most out of it!

17 – Use January to reflect on the past year

Each year, in January I sit down to review the entire year from finance, health, relationship, project/hobbies, community and fun and look at what was good and what was bad. It can be a lot of work, especially if you don’t capture throughout the year the major highlights and achievements. But it is way better than calling the past year gone and hoping for the new year to be even better without having a direction or specific goals in mind.

Want to get started? Check our 2020 Year End Review blog post.

18 – Everything is negotiable

We book Airbnb all the time and we always negotiate our rate. When we buy groceries in countries when bargaining is expected, we negotiate. When I used to apply for new jobs, I negotiated my salary, benefits and even the conditions to leave such a job.
Negotiation is powerful and people should not feel ashamed about it. As kids we used to negotiate everything so don’t let this skill go!

A great book about this: Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It + How we negotiate to save money on Airbnb

19 – Buy a zero waste kit

Whether you are traveling or not, you could get a zero waste kit that takes little space and would help reduce your impact on the environment whether you like to order food to go, your favorite coffee/tea or your favorite snack.  

Looking for a great zero waste kit? Try this Bamboo Travel Utensils Set 

20 – Always choose experiences over things

Experience has the great benefit to always be different, so from a brain chemistry perspective an experience can provide you with a constant hit of dopamine that will keep you in this happy state, while your brain will quickly adapt to your possessions. Not only that but experiences help us connect and even find new passions we never knew about.    

21 – Be optimistic

We can’t control everything that happens around us and while some terrible things happen everyday, I’ve found that being optimistic and looking at the bright side of things leads to the best outcome than being pessimistic. 

About Happiness

22 – Chase and cultivate your internal happiness

External happiness is derived from our job, our friends or our possessions. Internal happiness is the happiness within us (that we are all born with). Chase internal happiness and you will cultivate true and everlasting happiness.

23 – Life doesn’t have to be perfect to be wonderful 

In a time where we are bombarded with picture perfect lives through the lens of our social media feeds, it is important to remember that this isn’t reality and that perfection doesn’t equal a wonderful life.  

24 – Stuff doesn’t bring happiness

Only value what is truly essential to you & ignore the rest.

A great blog post about this: Minimalism (or how to live a more fulfilled life with less)

25 – Don’t look at what others have that you don’t but rather remind yourself about what you have and what others don’t

My parents taught me about this perspective as a kid and it has a profound impact on me.

26 – Happiness is a state of mind, not a destination

Don’t constantly chase for a happy ending but instead make the most of your current situation.

About Health

27 – Become a sleep olympian!

Our society values people that can perform on 4 hours of sleep a day, which turns out to be the way to shorten your lifespan and quality of life. We are treating sleep as our priority number #1 as we want to live a long and healthy life.

A great video about this: Why Sleep is More Important Than Diet | Shawn Stevenson on Health Theory

28 – Pay attention to water & air quality

As a couple who travels often, we started to pay close attention to the quality of the air and the water we drink in every place we stay and the quality widely differs. 

Check out this great portable monitor to measure air quality: Air Quality Monitor, Detect & Test Indoor Pollution as well as this water filter you can pack with you while hiking: Sawyer Products Squeeze Water Filtration System.

29 – Forget everything you’ve been told about food

Do you think that eating fat will make your fat, that cholesterol is bad for you, that all calories are equals or that what you eat isn’t the cause of some chronic issue you might have? Well, you might want to revisit these assumptions and learn what are good and bad foods and how to use food to live a healthy and happy life.
By cooking most of our meals and buying our own produce we appreciate much more what goes into our body and have been the healthiest we have ever been.

Here are a few books to get to relearn what we know about food: 

• What the Health: The Startling Truth Behind the Foods We Eat
• The Plant Paradox: The Hidden Dangers in “Healthy” Foods That Cause Disease and Weight Gain
• The Longevity Paradox: How to die at a Ripe Old Age
• The Paleovedic Diet: A Complete Program to Burn Fat, Increase Energy, and Reverse Disease

30 – Bed is only for sleep and sex!

Everytime we move to a new place, we make sure our bedroom becomes our sanctuary, free of lights, phones and any disturbance. We also only use our bed to sleep and love making. We even turn off the wifi before we go to bed. 

A great blog post to get started: How to Hack Your Sleep for Deeper Rest, Epic Health and Superhuman Productivity

31 – Stop reading the daily news

I haven’t checked any news feeds for a few years now and surprisingly I don’t feel less informed than I was before. And the best part is that I’ve recouped precious hours in my life I can use to do something more important. And this is without saying that 99% of the daily news is there only to catch our attention and hijack our brain because of the Fear Or Missing Out (FOMO).

A great blog post on this topic: Why You Should Stop Reading News

32 – Learn about Intermittent Fasting

The first time I heard about Intermittent Fasting (IF) and its benefits was in 2015 and I started experimenting with various protocols at the time. I am currently sticking to a 18-6 fasting protocol where I eat for 6 hours (between 12-6pm) and restrain myself from eating the rest of the time. Intermittent Fasting benefits range from weight loss, reducing risk of cancer to increased longevity.

To learn more about Intermittent Fasting I recommend the following interviews:

• Valter Longo, Ph.D. on Fasting-Mimicking Diet & Fasting for Longevity, Cancer & Multiple Sclerosis
• Dr. Satchin Panda on Time-Restricted Feeding and Its Effects on Obesity, Muscle Mass & Heart Health
• Ruth Patterson, Ph.D. on Time-Restricted Eating in Humans & Breast Cancer Prevention

Also if you want a great app to start tracking your fasting, I recommend Zero.

33 – Turn off your notifications!

Has it ever happened to you where you pick up your phone for a given task and because of a notification you find yourself 30 minutes later looking at something else and forgetting what you wanted to use your phone for in the first place? Well this happened to me a lot during my working days and by turning off 99% of my notifications from my phone I regain a lot of focus and productivity. By turning off notifications, you will recoup precious hours in your day, you will also be less stressed.   

A great book to dive into this (and much more): Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

About Life (in general)

34 – Don’t get stuck when something bad happens

When something bad or annoying happens, I tend not to get stuck into anger, denial or frustration and rather focus on learning from the situation to prevent it from happening in the future.

35 – Seek exploration

I have loved exploration since I was exposed to it as a kid when my parents took my brother and me to different parts of France. As I started working, I still prioritize time to travel/explore above anything else but it wasn’t until I freed myself from work (in 2018) that I could make exploration and full time travel my new lifestyle. In the past 2.5 years alone, I’ve spent more time in a foreigner country than I did my entire life and the results have been amazing.
Exploration has been the best way for us to meet new and interesting people, discover new languages and culture and sample amazing food – some of which I never heard of before. Exploration is also the best way to see different horizons and perspectives in your life.

A good read on this topic: Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel 

36 – Life is always shorter than you think

Never postpone your dream to tomorrow because tomorrow is never guaranteed. Ask yourself this simple question: “Are you living your ideal life today?”? If the answer is No, then what are you waiting for!?

37 – You can’t improve what you can’t measure

Saying that I love tracking would be an understatement but it has helped me improve various aspects of my life. So when you want to improve something, make sure to get a baseline first and then compare yourself against it as you go through the change process.

38 – Slow down!

As we live in an extremely fast paced environment, slowing down is a luxury but once you can afford it, you will reap many benefits. Whether it is about eating, traveling or simply living.

A great blog post on this topic: Slow Travel: because why rush it?

39 – Time is the only thing you can’t buy

So make use of it wisely & never waste it!

40 – Still act like a kid!

Mrs. NN keeps saying that I’m a funny person and it’s probably because I don’t take myself too seriously and maybe because I never really grew up? Who knows! In any case, there is nothing to lose to be less serious and more playful and fun with yourself and the people surrounding you. 

Bottom Line

So here you have it, 40 lessons I’ve learned as I celebrated my 40th birthday.

Are some of them really resonating with you? Please feel free to share them in the comments section or add anything else from the list.