25 things I learned before 25

25 things I learned before 25

August 2026

Jane Zhang

Sep 01, 2026

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Credits to my friend Jessica, captured nine days before I turned 25.

Today, I turn 25.

It feels like just yesterday I was hoola hooping in the backyard with my sister. I was sitting at the dinner table with my mom. I was practicing Mozart flute concertos and writing my homework in my room, late into the night.

It feels like just yesterday I was sitting in my computer architecture lecture. I was moving into my first apartment in San Francisco. I was trying to start a company with my sister. I was sitting at cafes, writing about the things at the forefront of my mind.

I forget that I’ve lived through so many days and experienced so many things. That although I am young, there is intuition, wisdom, and love built into my bones. 9,125 days of it.

To celebrate my first decade of life, I reflect on 25 things I learned before 25.

Relationship with self.

You have to pick yourself back up. No one else will.

When I am unhappy with my job, I make the decision to change the way I feel about my work or to switch my job. When I am sick, I have to advocate for myself to get the treatment I need and take my medication every day. When I am heartbroken, I have to wrap my hands around my heart and pick myself back up. I can ask friends and family for help, but ultimately I am the one that chooses to stand up.

Everything becomes easier when you love yourself.

I am the person I will spend the most time with in my life. Learning to understand who I am, trusting that I can make the right decisions, and being there for myself when I need it—that is the foundation of what makes me a full person and ready to live a full life.

The words, phrases, and stories you tell yourself affect your experience as much as the objective does.

I can stop saying the words “I should” and “I can’t” and replace them with “I want” and “I can” and suddenly I am living more of the life I want and with a can-do attitude.

Grieving your body

, relationships, and life stages are all a beautiful part of the human experience.

There are many things I will never experience again: people, cities, jobs, mobility, freedoms. I want to fully experience and play in my current circumstances. And when I change and my environment changes, I want to feel the sadness and the loss. I want to appreciate how special moments in my life are.

Forgiveness is more of a gift to yourself than it is to the receiving party.

Sometimes people hurt me. I forgive them to give myself the energy to do something that makes my life more fun and worth living.

Just start.

I saw

this post

the other day about how people start personal websites, write an essay about how they are going to write more, and then never post again. I was once one of those people, and now that I’m twenty consecutive monthly essays in, I am here to say that you can just start! Life is more fun when I stop dwelling on what I did yesterday and just start being what I want to be today.

Subscribe to get my monthly essays in your inbox!

Relationship with work.

You have a lot of years to do great work.

As someone who is not trying to retire early, I remind myself that I have forty years to work. There is time to explore different industries, roles, skills, and ideas, and most great contributions take many years of effort. I have time to be an engineer, to be a writer, to lead a team, to change behavior through product, and I will do them all.

Put effort into evaluating opportunities. Then trust that the decision will come to you.

When it comes to decisions like choosing jobs, I like to go through the exercise of talking to current and past team members, writing down what I think the company could become, how I would tackle their most pressing technical problems, and what the financial outcomes can look like. Then, I stop the analysis, sleep on it, and trust my intuition.

Take a break before you need one.

It is easier to recover from 50 to 100 than from 0 to 100.

People pay for outcomes.

Not for narratives. And not for effort.

It really doesn’t matter what the solution is, what the story was, and how much time it took to make it. If I help someone get the outcome they want, I get paid.

You can always change your mind.

It is okay if I spent the last five years of my life believing I wanted to go down one path and, after trying it on, decide that it’s not for me. This is my life to live, and no one else’s.

Be selfless in your job.

If my team creates the product that everyone uses (or equivalent goal), then we win. Anything that goes against achieving this outcome is a distraction. If people on the team are only working on the projects that are technically interesting or have high visibility and recognition, then we are not going to get the job done, and we will lose to a team who can function selflessly.

No effort is wasted.

I started writing monthly essays for my own fulfillment. Since, I’ve discovered my practice churning out writing has made me a deft technical writer in my day job. Another example: I’ve worked in consumer hardware, enterprise event planning, call automation, insurance prior authorization, alcohol shipping, startup recruiting, growth marketing and social media. And somehow, whether in my day job or in my side projects, knowing even a small bit about what makes these roles and industries challenging has helped me grok new ones quickly and build trust with a diversity of people I work with.

Relationship with things.

You don’t need that much money. P

eople in SF tech like to worry that they don’t make enough money, yet we all make more money in one year than most people in five. We’ve all already won the lottery, enjoy it and do something with it.

Things are meant to be worn, torn, and lost.

No physical object I’ve ever let go of affects how I feel today.

You don’t need to consume any TV to live a good life.

I have never had a TV/movie streaming subscription and never once regretted it. I already look at a screen for so much of my day job, why decompress with another one?

Design your physical and digital spaces to help you make the choices you want to make.

I write about this in

Help me put the laundry basket where I throw my clothes.

If I’m trying to keep my clothes off the floor, the solution is not to buy something

attractive

—an autonomous cleaning laundry hamper with a mid-century modern aesthetic. The solution is to move my laundry basket where I throw my clothes.

Relationships with people.

Being a friend is showing up for someone when they need you.

The moments when my friend is sick, going through a breakup, and grieving loss, I call them, check in, show up to their place in person, and lighten their load—these are the moments that create a deep relationship. The hours of spontaneous, fun times are important but pale in comparison.

You always have more to give.

When I am tired after a long week of work, I can find it within myself to call my parents or go to my close friend’s birthday party. Over time, these choices no longer feel like obligations. They are simply the things I want to do.

Believe that all people can change.

This world is harsh and difficult because we like to extrapolate one action someone did yesterday with who they will be for the rest of their lives. If I don’t want people to react this way when I inevitably make a mistake, then I choose to have faith that all people can change and welcome it with open arms.

It is better to be single than to be in a relationship you don’t believe in.

I was single for about three years while actively going on dates the entire time. I do not regret one bit the effort I put in and the discipline I had to say no to every relationship I did not believe was right for me.

Pay more attention to how something makes you feel rather than what it is at face value.

Most aptly applied to dating, I can look at the person across the table and assess their appearance, intelligence, mannerisms, and character. Or I can experience them and reflect on whether they make me feel kinder, smarter, more beautiful, more motivated. I live to experience, not to judge.

Tell people how they make you feel.

I like to tell people when they make me feel more patient, kind, thoughtful, and motivated because I want them to understand how much I value their time and presence in my life. When someone makes me feel negatively, I tell them how they make me feel so they can feel my emotions with me and we can more deeply understand each other than we did before.

Relationship with writing.

Write as a practice to help you introspect and imagine. Publish when you have something to say.

A lot of my private and public writing is noting things that confuse me—my own emotions and ideas, something I read, some event of interaction I saw—and asking many whys until I have more clarity and truth as to why things work the way they do. Another chunk of my writing is imagining what I want life to look like for myself and others. I publish my writing when I have something I want to say to people.

Writing monthly essays about your life is awesome.

As I grow older, the years seem to go by faster. My monthly writing practice gives me an anchor to go back to where my mind was in January of 2025, March of 2026, and now August of 2026. I can remember who I was at each month and appreciate the life I’ve lived.

Thank you for reading my August essay! Subscribe to get my monthly essays in your inbox!

If you made it this far, thank you for reading my August essay. If you have questions, opinions, experiences about any of these topics, I would love to discuss! That’s why I write after all :) You can find me @jjanezhang on X.

A special shoutout to Suchir, Jessica, Chris, Kunal, Joyce, Andrew and Amy!

Other topics I thought about but didn’t write about:

1.

Communication is game where the prize is feeling closer to someone.

I was catching up with my friend Suchir and we talked about our fascination with understanding ourselves and other people. I asked him if it ever bothers him when someone he meets isn’t willing to share vulnerably. And he says, this never happens to him, that there are always ways to help someone open up, and that he loves learning to be better at communication—the game where the prize is feeling close to someone.

2.

I cannot hear my thoughts.

Every time I come to NYC, I am always so impressed by how many people are here and how big the city feels. In many ways, it feels more curious, vibrant, and celebratory than San Francisco. But with everything moving around me, the constant chatter in every establishment and street, I feel like I can’t hear my thoughts. I wish I could turn it all off.

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