10 Things I Wish I Knew When I Was 18

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Photo credit: Flickr / Smithsonian Institution

They say that no day but today, forget regret. But sometimes it doesn’t work like that and the regrets pile up and the only way to feel better about them is to talk them through and try to cope with them.

So these are some of things that I wish I knew when I was 18.

The real world doesn’t exist.

At least not in the way it was told to me. The real world doesn’t have to involve getting a full time job, working at that same job that you don’t like, and spending the rest of your life stuck in that bland little cubicle counting down the days until your four weeks holiday.

The real world is what you choose to believe. I don’t have to spend my life in a job I don’t like, simply so I can have enough money for that full time job and all the things that come with it.

The job you have now doesn’t matter

Don’t want to leave home simply because of your job? It will still be there when you get back and even if it isn’t it doesn’t matter. Odds are you are doing a job you don’t like anyway, so leaving that job is probably the best thing you can do.

You don’t need a safety net of a job to come back to, if worst come to worst, you go away and can’t find another job, crash at your parents, friends, anywhere. The situation really isn’t as bad as it seems.

Travel is not just for rich people

The Professional Hobo is a prime example of that. Nora Dunn said Professional Hobo has shown me, along with a long list of others that travel can be a full time thing and it will only cost about $14,000 to stay away for the entire year.

Quite a jump from the upwards of $20,000 travel packages that are promoted all around the world, that only take you away for a couple of weeks.

It’s all about finding opportunities, and travelling the world on the cheap. More information about travelling the world with little or no money is in my Escapee Guides.

You don’t have to go to uni/TAFE/college/whatever to be successful

They just want your money. For some professions you have to go to uni to get that job. But that doesn’t mean if you don’t want to do any other formal learning after high school that you can’t be successful.

You learn more life skills when travelling around the world then in those classroom settings in uni.

Negotiation skills needed for business?

Try and haggle in a Chinese market that is the best and fastest way to develop your negotiation skills. Who better to teach you how to get a good deal than the Chinese marketers who spend all day, every day, trying to keep in business and get a great deal from tourists.

Money managing skills?

Nothing will teach the skills of good money management than realizing that you are down to your last couple of pounds and are more than 2,000 kms from home.

Time management skills?

The last bus to your next city, that you have to get on to get to your booked hostel is leaving in ten minutes, you are half way across town. You figure it out.

Students are the best people to be

Students get discounts all around the world. If you are a student you can go on a student exchange program with another country. Fresh out of high school you can do a grade 13 in another country, spend a whole year learning a new language and experiencing the world that way.

Students can do volunteer programs and defer their students forever, they can still be a student even if they have no intentions of studying.

The world isn’t a scary place

You are more likely to be in a car crash than a plane crash. More likely to get food poisoning at home than overseas. More likely to get attacked in your home town, because you let your guard down, than overseas. And more likely to be attacked by a mad cow with a knife than a shark.

The world is not a scary place, don’t let fear control you. In most cases it feels more alive and real than any place back home.

You’re teens to mid twenties is the best time to travel

You have no responsibilities, you probably still live at home so you don’t need to worry about rent and board, and it’s the perfect time. You need to see the world before it starts to seem like a trouble, a burden, something taking you away from real life.

If you travel young, it means that it’s so much easier to break away from the real world. Before those Chirpys have fully dug their claws into your neck and before you start to believe them.

There are a million and a half discounts to students and young people and soon those doors will close and then where will you be?

It is cheaper to book flights yourself

Travel agents have commissions for everything. You can get the cheapest airfares by booking directly from the airline you want to travel with website. Singapore Airlines is a key example of this. Personally they are my favourite airline and at the travel agents I was getting air tickets to London for $1,6oo. When checking on their website it was only $1,350.

It’s a huge difference and that applys to everything a travel agent sells. Insurance, car hire, tickets, and hotels, a lot of the time it’s so much cheaper to buy it direct.

Travellers Cheques are useless

No one uses them anymore. Not to mention they are a pain. You have to cash them in at every new city and those locations where you change your money over are never in a convenient location.

It’s a lot easier to have mostly cash on you in a few different currencies if you’re travel around, a cash passport and an international credit card.

You are strange when you travel

Maybe not personally strange or maybe you are, but to the locals no matter how boring you think you are, or actually in fact are, to the locals you will seem very exotic and interesting.

This is something I have gotten a lot personally, as an Australian I have a rather obvious accent, something I didn’t realize I had until I left Australia. So in America and particularly Europe/The UK I got a lot of questions.

They wanted to know if I was from Australia and how it was Down Under all the usual stereotypes were said and you have to take it with good grace.

As soon as you step foot inside the airport of another country anything good or bad that has happened in your home country you are almost personally responsible for. Thankfully for me this is never really a problem. Australia doesn’t really have much to tick people off around the world. Most people don’t even know who our Prime Minister is, including most Australians.

But for other cultures this can be a problem, so be prepared to take whatever your country has done around the world with you.

Regrets are something you wish you had done. Don’t let that list grow longer and longer until you can’t see the end.

What are some of the things that you wished you had known when you were 18?