With Age, Comes Wisdom

A young person said something to me a few weeks ago that I haven’t been able to shake.

He said, “I loved your talk. It made me want to change the way I’m doing things and lock in! If you had one piece of advice for me when you were my age, what would it be?”

I wanted to give him something life-changing. Something profound. Something that would stop him in his tracks. I’d just finished a 30-minute talk to a Year 11 group in Birmingham, students with seven weeks until their GCSEs. We spoke about the knowing-doing gap. The space between what we know we should do… and what we actually do.

They knew they should revise.
They knew they should ask for help.
They knew they should use their time better.

But they weren’t doing it.

I spoke to them about getting out of their own way. About being honest. About changing how they look at things. I even quoted Dr Wayne Dwyer: “If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”

You could see it land. Some of them sat up. Some of them leaned forward. Some of them quietly realised they were part of the knowing-doing gap.

We spoke about simple things:
Writing timetables.
Using timers.
No multitasking.
Working through past papers.
Going back to teachers, even the ones they don’t like, and asking for help, asking, “What’s one small thing I could do to be better?”

It takes courage to admit you’re not doing what you need to do. It takes even more courage to change direction.

I asked them to raise their hands if they knew they could be doing better.

Almost every hand went up.

Then we talked about being 1% better each day. That idea seemed to wake something up.

But I also knew the truth. Some of them would revert back to type. They’d nod, agree, feel inspired… and then go back to exactly what they were doing before.

That’s the knowing-doing gap again.

I told them something else. Something I believe deeply.

Human beings are the only species that can choose to change.

If you plant a tree, that’s it.
It stays where it is.

If buildings block its light, tough.
It can’t move.

But we can.

If something is standing in our light, we can move.
Yet most of us don’t.

We choose to stay in other people’s shadows.

I asked them how long they spent on their phones each day. Most admitted to more than eight hours. When we did the maths together, they realised they were scrolling until nearly midnight.

They hadn’t seen it before.
Not really.

I suggested something simple, take just a quarter of that time and invest it in revision. Suddenly, the idea of doing better became realistic.

Some accepted it. Some rejected it. Both were making a choice.

So when that young man asked me for one piece of advice, I told him this:

‘No matter what everyone else is doing, find your own path. The friends around you now may not be with you forever but you will. So the decisions you make from this moment on must be made for you.’

He nodded and walked away.

But I didn’t feel satisfied. I felt like I hadn’t given him enough.

Then I thought back to my own childhood. To the words that shaped me. The one that stayed with me most was this:

“Somebody else’s idea of you does not have to become your reality.”

The truth is, I didn’t fully understand that until much later. I left school with very little. No qualifications that I could shout about from a mountain top. No clear direction. It took time, and mistakes, to realise what those words really meant.

I also realised something else.

If someone like me had come into my school when I was 16, I probably wouldn’t have listened either.

With age comes knowledge.
With knowledge comes choice.
And the choices we make define us.

But wisdom… that often comes later.

Which is why I still give the advice.
Even knowing some won’t hear it.

Because, even if it’s later on in life, one will.