Don’t worry so much.
Your life is going to happen whether you agree to it or not.
Take a year off.
Or at least fantasize about it.
But definitely spend a year unloading trucks, or skinning fish.
Occasionally do things that don’t look good on a resume.
Do things so big and so weird and so messy and so strange that they never even make it to your resume.
While you’re at it, make mistakes.
Make them big.
Make them full speed ahead.
Be scared.
Because - at times - you’re going to be anyway.
Sometimes the world is a scary place and that’s okay.
Learn to make friends with the scary.
And learn about failure, because it is the best education you will ever get.
Learn how to fail with implacable grace.
Learn to love the people who prop you up when they have to reason to.
Learn to be skeptical of anyone who is trying to sell you anything.
Have that second glass of wine, because no one ever sat there dying, looking back at their life and say to themselves, “I really wish I had had just a little bit less of a good time.”
Accept that you are just one of seven billion people stuck to a not terribly important wet rock spinning around a second-rate star in the boondocks of a weird looking galaxy tumbling endlessly through a universe that was probably some kind of mistake in the first place.
More than 100 billion people have lived on this planet so far and not a single one of them has gotten to live your life.
So be forgiving of yourself.
And be forgiving of the people around you. Everyone you’ll ever meet is living their own first draft in real time.
Don’t worry so much.
It’s entirely possible that no one has any of this figured out any better than you do.