I turned 23 yesterday. As with any birthday, I sat back, took a paper and listed out everything that had happened in the previous year. And, as same as all my previous 5 birthdays, I wrote down way more stuff than I did in the previous year. However, I am not going to bore you with all those details. In today's piece, I'll just share 3 key things I learnt that I believe completely changed me as a person.

Lesson-1: Environment Matters the most

Until this April, I lived in a dump of a house. It can hardly be called a house. It was mostly a single room, randomly divided by walls that aren't even straight. I thought it wasn't a big deal, and even economical that I found that place for very cheap. However, the same house was limiting my thoughts. Honestly, I couldn't even imagine going back to that house after travelling to a mildly decent place.

All that changed when I impulse-shifted to a nearby house that costed more than 150% of what I was originally paying. And man! I love this new house. Of course, this one has it's own issues too! But visually at least it was way more "liveable".

I still can't exactly put every change I observed into words, but I can say one thing. I am now more outgoing and disciplined than how I lived at my previous house, mostly because my cognitive clutter/noise cleared up by a significant margin. To put it in simple terms, my CPU was freed from the "irritation and self-deprecation" programs that were a consequence of my environment.

Lesson-2: Hanlon's Razor

This is a game-changer in my relationships. As someone with social anxiety, I tend to over estimate other's reactions, and to be more precise "non-reactions" for my actions. I often overthink of what I did wrong, and how things were received by others. Similarly, with a mildly funny joke or negative remark, I used to take it as a straight-up attack.

However, all that changed when I came across the one line:

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

It’s common to think that you are the central role in everyone else’s story but the truth is that people’s behaviour will often have little to do with us. No one is generally "out" to get us, and no one even has the time to do that. It's a natural reaction as we are the main characters in our lives. Hanlon's Razor has somehow pushed me to see things differently. I struggled to view other's actions through this mindset, however, as time passed I realised how often this statement can be true.

When you have time, do take a step back and view one of your own experiences through this lens. It'd definitely be funny.

Lesson-3: Don't be a Mental Miser

We often prefer the ease of hanging on to old views over the difficulty of grappling with new ones. And with age, this tendency is only going to be higher. By interacting with people who are 7,15 and even 20 years older than me, I realised that this would definitely be a problem in the long run,

People hesitate to do simple things, just because it involved learning something new or re-learning something they already now. However, the amazing ones, I have seen/read about till now have always stayed on their toes, constantly re-thinking and re-learning about their beliefs and processes.

I plan to keep this as a mantra, and re-attack those tiny things I hesitated to try out, and the ones I did actually showed me a whole new world.

These are the three key things I learnt last year. I hope they helped you somehow. I am definitely going to keep visiting these three for the next year, and hopefully learn and re-learn more about these beliefs. Now, I am only 23, so there's definitely a lot to explore! I will keep sharing the progress in my exploration here! So feel free to follow if you'd like more such content.

Thanks for staying till the end! Hopefully, will meet you in a different discussion. Until then, Peace. ✌️