The most common mistakes people make when young

Stop trying to be cool and caring what other people think

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As a teenager or young adult, it’s all too common to talk about ‘when I grow up’ and think about who you’re eventually going to become.

But as you get older, you continue to wonder when you’re going to feel grown-up. And it may be that we never do so we should stop waiting for that moment.

This is just one of the pieces of advice people are sharing by revealing the mistakes they made when they were young:

“Believing that there's some big life-defining moment that's just over the horizon,” one person wrote on the Reddit forum.

“Who you're going to be in life is the accumulation of small choices and built-up habits rather than something that happens in a big jump when you graduate college or get your first ‘real’ job or whatever.”

For other people, mistakes were made in regard to money: “Confusing being able to make minimum payment with being able to afford something,” wrote one.

Whilst many agreed with this statement, others suggested it wasn’t something confined to the young: “I do not think that is exclusively a young people problem. I know tons of people well into their 50s and 60s with hundreds of thousands in debt and no way to EVER pay it off.”

(Monica Ekabutr (Monica Ekabutr)

Many people regret quitting hobbies that they used to enjoy and consider doing so a mistake when they get older.

“It's hard to get back in the habit even when it comes to something you enjoy once you get a little older, and time becomes scarce,” one person explained. “Often you can't just ‘pick up’ from where you left off, and have to spend a little bit of time getting back into the groove of it (which keeps a lot of people from ever coming back).”

Lots of young people suffer from the pressure of keeping up with their peers, particularly when everyone’s sharing their highlights reel on social media.

“You wind up in serious debt just for a new car you didn't really need, some pictures for your Instagram account, and a bigger apartment that you're now paying for by yourself because you and your girlfriend broke up two months after you moved in together,” one person wrote by way of an example.

For another person, their main mistake when young had been putting things off and not being proactive enough, and they urged people not to put off till tomorrow what you could do today: “It always results in an endless cycle up until the due day, when it's too late to fix your habit.”

Smoking, unsurprisingly, is a common regret, along with caring too much about what other people think and trying to hard to be cool in school instead of focussing on learning.

But perhaps the most important thing to remember was suggested by one person in the discussion, who said their biggest mistake was dwelling too much on mistakes: “We all screw up. It's part of life.”