For all you youngins feeling like you’ve “fallen behind,” “haven’t achieved anything,” “haven’t made it yet,” I want you to sit down with a pen & paper & ask yourself what that truly means to you.

And then write it out.

Reflect on the years passed, & look at everything you’ve done so far with new & creative perspectives.

For example, if one of your goals is “travel more,” consider all the times you went a few cities away to go to the beach or a forest or the museum or to see some friends.

There you go, you’ve traveled. You didn’t need to go all the way to Milan or Changu Island or Tokyo to say you’ve done something fun & adventurous.

Look at the work you do everyday, be it for school or a job or volunteering, & think of the people you’ve helped.

You’ve had to have made somebody’s day a little easier or brighter or happier.

There you go, you’ve “saved lives,” because extending a little kindness & empathy does save lives. It didn’t need to be as dramatic as cardiac surgery.

I promise you, all the older people you see as “established,” they don’t know what they’re doing with their lives either & they didn’t “make it” anywhere, because “it” doesn’t exist. I know that, because I’ve worked with hundreds of them. I see these folks everyday.

Your life isn’t in some far off distance that you have to reach. It’s right here with you, & it isn’t going anywhere.

The entire point of living isn’t to keep hitting “successes,” it’s to live every day as fully as you can.

Don’t measure your life by milestones.

Your life is not defined by one goal at a time, but by a culmination of your daily joys, habits, & struggles overcome, & your character in how you walked through the world with the living beings around you.

You exist, therefore you already have the right to live fully, *today*.