35 Years, 6 Lessons I Wish I Had Learned Earlier

I recently had a strange realization.

I'm 35.

If I'm fortunate enough to live a long and healthy life, I may already be somewhere around the halfway point.

I don't know why, but that thought stayed with me.

Maybe because it came at an unusual moment in my life.

Professionally, I'm going through one of the biggest transitions I've ever experienced. After almost a decade spent building a career in public administration, defence and diplomacy, I decided to leave that path and step into something far less predictable.

I don't have everything figured out.

Far from it.

But this period has also given me something incredibly valuable: more quality time with my family and enough space to think about where I've been and where I want to go next.

So I asked myself a simple question:

What have the first 35 years actually taught me?

Not the polished lessons we sometimes share after everything has worked out.

The lessons I learned from decisions I got right, mistakes I made, time I wasted, risks I took and things I understood much later than I should have.

Six stood out.

1. Family and health come first. Everything else comes after.

This is probably the least original lesson on this list.

It is also the most important.

I've learned the hard way, through people close to me, how quickly health can change everything.

Becoming a father reinforced that lesson.

We spend enormous amounts of energy thinking about careers, money, status, businesses, houses, cars and the next achievement.

I still have ambitions. Probably more than ever.

I want to build businesses. I want financial independence. I want to accomplish things professionally that I haven't accomplished yet.

But my definition of success has changed.

None of those achievements mean very much if I don't have my health or the people I love beside me to share them with.

Everything else comes after that.

2. It's not too late to radically change your career.

For almost ten years, I built a career in public administration, defence and diplomacy.

Walking away from a path you spent a decade building is difficult.

There are 5,000 perfectly reasonable arguments for staying.

Financial security.

Experience.

Seniority.

Reputation.

Predictability.

The fear of starting again.

And perhaps the most dangerous one:

I've already invested too much to change now.

The transition has been harder than I imagined.

There are moments when you inevitably question your decision.

But I've also discovered something on the other side.

Trying something new — and giving yourself permission to pursue work that genuinely interests you — can completely change how you feel about your own life.

I don't think everyone who is unhappy at work should resign tomorrow.

Responsibilities are real. Bills are real. Families depend on us.

But I do think we sometimes confuse stability with happiness.

They are not the same thing.

And spending another ten or twenty years doing something simply because you've already spent ten years doing it isn't necessarily the safe decision we tell ourselves it is.

Sometimes the greater risk is staying exactly where you are.

3. There has probably never been a better time to build something of your own.

This is one of the things that fascinates me most about 2026.

Technology has dramatically reduced the cost of turning an idea into something real.

Today, one person with a laptop can build a website, create a brand, open an online store, design products, automate processes, produce content and reach potential customers on the other side of the world.

Things that would have required a team and significant capital in our parents' generation can now sometimes be started with a surprisingly small budget.

I've experienced this myself while building my own projects.

But there is an important distinction:

Starting has become easier. Succeeding has not.

Technology can lower the barrier to entry.

It cannot make people want your product.

It cannot fix a bad business model.

And it certainly cannot guarantee success.

If you identify a genuine market need, build the right solution and execute well, you may be able to create something significant with relatively little capital.

But most of us won't get all of that right on our first attempt.

I certainly haven't.

Then you have choices.

Invest more money.

Invest more time.

Improve the idea.

Change direction.

Or accept that an idea doesn't work, learn from it and start again.

I'm currently somewhere inside that process myself.

And I've learned that there is nothing wrong with that.

4. School gives you a foundation. Your education cannot end there.

Romanian education gets criticized constantly.

Some of that criticism is justified.

But I also think it is easy to forget that the education system gave many of us a solid foundation.

It certainly gave me one.

The mistake would be assuming that foundation is enough.

The world is changing too quickly.

Skills that were valuable ten years ago are changing. Entire industries are being reshaped. AI alone is transforming how millions of people work.

When I started building my own digital projects, I had practically zero experience in e-commerce, web design, digital marketing, product development or many of the tools I now use regularly.

So I learned.

Courses.

Tutorials.

Articles.

Experimentation.

And, most importantly, actually building things.

That has changed how I think about education.

A diploma can be the beginning of your education.

It cannot be the end of it.

In today's economy, the ability to teach yourself something new may eventually become more valuable than many of the things you already know.

5. I wasted more time in my 20s than I realized.

This one is uncomfortable to admit.

When I was younger, I spent plenty of nights in clubs.

I spent countless hours watching things that I don't remember today.

And, like most people, I've probably lost an embarrassing amount of time scrolling through a screen.

I enjoyed some of it.

I'm not going to rewrite my past and pretend every night out was a terrible mistake.

It wasn't.

But if I could sit down with my 20-year-old self today, I would tell him something very simple:

Your time is worth far more than you think it is.

Imagine investing just five hours every week into learning a valuable skill.

That's around 260 hours per year.

Over ten years, that's more than 2,500 hours.

Think about what you could learn in 2,500 focused hours.

Sales.

Marketing.

Coding.

Design.

Investing.

A foreign language.

Building a business.

Whatever interests you.

I wouldn't tell my younger self to stop having fun.

I'd tell him to understand the opportunity cost.

You don't need to eliminate entertainment from your life.

But if every free hour disappears into clubs, streaming, gaming or endless scrolling, you shouldn't be surprised when someone who spent part of those same years building valuable skills eventually has opportunities you don't.

Money compounds.

Knowledge compounds.

Relationships compound.

And time compounds too.

I wish I had understood that earlier.

6. When possible, hire for character — then develop skills.

My professional life has put me in very different environments and around very different people.

One lesson has remained remarkably consistent.

Skills matter.

For many roles, technical competence is obviously non-negotiable.

But when I'm choosing between people who can realistically learn the technical requirements of a role, I pay enormous attention to character.

Skills can often be taught.

Experience can be acquired.

Processes can be learned.

Character is much harder to change.

I would rather work with someone who is reliable, curious, accountable and willing to learn than someone exceptionally talented who cannot be trusted or refuses to take responsibility.

The same applies when building teams.

A group of brilliant individuals doesn't automatically create a brilliant organization.

Trust matters.

Integrity matters.

How someone behaves when things go wrong matters.

How they treat people when there is nothing to gain from it matters.

And over a long enough period, those qualities compound too.

What I Want From the Next 35 Years

I don't know whether 35 is actually the halfway point of my life.

None of us knows where that point is.

Maybe that's precisely why thinking about it is useful.

The first part of my life was largely about following established paths.

School.

University.

Career.

Progression.

Responsibilities.

The next part feels different.

I want to build more.

Learn more.

Experiment more.

Spend more time with the people who matter.

Take calculated risks.

Create businesses.

Fail at some of them.

Hopefully succeed at others.

Develop skills that I don't have today.

And remain curious enough to change direction when the evidence tells me I'm wrong.

I don't regret the first 35 years.

They gave me experiences, relationships, opportunities and lessons that shaped who I am today.

But would I do some things differently if I could start again?

Absolutely.

I can't.

None of us can.

So there is only one useful thing to do with the lessons we learn from the past:

Use them to build the next chapter better than the last one.

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