15 Life Skills You Need To Learn In Your 20s Before It’s Too Late

You don’t want to wake up one day and realize you’re a third of the way through your life and still unable to perform some pretty basic life tasks, right? Here are 15 life skills you need to learn while you’re still in your 20s that will serve you in the next decade and beyond:

1. How To Not Spend So Much Time On Instagram It makes you care too much about other people’s lives and not enough on your own and forces you to care what people think about you and the way you look. And for what?? So you can base your popularity off of how many likes you get? Nah. Now is the perfect time to learn how to live without your phone.
2. How To Eat well and not be a total couch potato In college, working out and eating healthy probably weren’t your main focal points. That’s fine because your metabolism was probably way more friendly to you in college. Now that you’re getting older, what you eat and how you much you move actually matters. If you want to stay fit for the rest of your life, you need to make eating healthy and working out a part of your current lifestyle.
3. How To Cook something besides Ramen noodles You don’t need to be Martha Stewart in the kitchen but you should know how to cook a few different meals—and no, a bowl of cereal and scrambled eggs don’t count. If the only meal you can prepare is a frozen pizza or a box of mac and cheese, talk to your mother and have her teach you how to cook some basic meals. Trust me, your mom will be thrilled to pass down her cooking skills to you.
4. How To Learn From Your Mistakes If you want to learn from your mistakes, you first have to learn to embrace them. You can’t defend them or try to blame them on someone else. You have to take claim them as yours—that’s the only way to really truly learn from them and ensure you don’t make the same ones twice.
5. How To Be A Good Employee and have a strong work ethic It’s easy! All you have to do is your job. Go to work every day—on time!— and actually work. Don’t sit there scrolling through your Facebook feed all day. Do your job! In fact, do a little more than is expected of you from time to time. Talk to your co-workers (but don’t gossip) and make sure your boss knows your name for good reasons, not bad. That’s it. Work hard and you’ll be a model employee in no time.
6. How To Not Kill Plants All most plants need is water and sunlight. It’s really not that hard. I mean, if you can’t keep a plant alive, how are you going to be able to keep a dog alive or a kid, if you see one of those in your future? Plants are good practice; they teach you responsibility AND they’re beautiful. Stop killing them!
7. How To Build Credit Building credit is crucial and it’s better to start sooner than later. You don’t want to be 40 and have to ask your parents to co-sign a lease for you (that would be acca-embarrassing). Start building your credit now. If you don’t have a credit card already, apply for one, use it on small purchases, and pay off the balance in full on a monthly basis. It’s pretty simple, but it does require responsibility.
8. How To Actually Save Money Knowing how to keep your finances in check is probably the best thing you can learn while you’re in your 20s. If you can create a budget for yourself and stick to it, save money, build credit, and still have a semblance of a social life, you can do anything!
9. How To Clean Like A Pro You don’t need to learn how to clean, you just need to do it. How? By not being lazy, that’s how! Don’t settle for a quick monthly vacuum. Really clean your living space. Shampoo your carpets, wipe off your vanity, hang up the clothes you usually see on your bedroom floor. A messy space is not cute. If you don’t take some pride into your living space now, you probably never will.
10. How To Be Happy Alone All your friends are in relationships and that’s cute and all, but there’s something really crucial about knowing how to be happy alone. Boyfriends come and go. Who you’re dating now might not be who you’ll be dating a few years from now. That’s life, but that’s why it’s important you learn how to be single now. You don’t want to rely on other people to make you happy—you need to be able to make yourself happy.
11. How To Stop Judging Other People Judging someone says way more about who you are than who they are. Do you want to be a negative person? Keep judging. If you want to be a positive person, spend more time lifting people up than bringing them down.
12. How To Let Go Of Your Ex-Boyfriends If you’re hanging onto an ex-boyfriend who has no problem acting like you don’t exist, reevaluate. You might think he loves you but for whatever reason, he’s just too shy or damaged to express it. I doubt it. He’s probably just an a-hole who gets off on knowing someone wants him, which is why he keeps you around just enough to keep you wanting more. BE DONE WITH HIM!
13. How To Stay Close To Your Friends Some of your friends might not be worth staying close to but hopefully a good majority of them are. You might be focused on your job or a romantic relationship but that doesn’t mean you should let go of the people who’ve had your back since day one. Keep in contact with your ride or dies.
14. How To Stop Complaining Complaining won’t get you anywhere in this world, so instead of spending your precious time whining about where you currently are in life, do something to get to where you want to be. It’s that simple.