You have time to mess up, recover and still build something good. Most adults you admire did exactly that.

STILLNESS

WHAT THIS MEANS

The route to a decent life is not clean, and the people who look like they did it cleanly have mostly edited. A failed year, a job that went badly, a stretch of being completely lost: that is standard equipment in the biography of almost anybody you admire, and the recovery took longer than the story suggests. Messing up at sixteen is early data rather than a disqualification.

If something has gone wrong, give yourself a week to be annoyed and then pick one repair to start. Ask an adult you respect about a time they got it badly wrong. Those answers are usually more encouraging than advice.

A QUESTION TO SIT WITH

Do you believe you still have time to recover and build?

MORE IN TIME, MORTALITY & LEGACY

Free, with nothing to buy inside it.