Gifts for the future

Everything compounds. Time invested in curating beneficial habits now will reduce the friction of building and maintaining them later, as well as increasing the cumulative reward should you successfully stick with them.

The time of your best decision-making is likely in your 50s. It's something of a mental prime. At this point, you should have sufficiently traversed the plane of explore-exploit tradeoffs, and have gathered enough data on what works and what doesn't to make robust decisions. An underlying assumption is that you have sufficiently experimented and encountered enough new ideas in the course of your life. Your palate has been refined. The bank of your mind's river has been hewn through repetition.

The great cost of using and developing something as metabolically expensive as your brain means that anything you don't use gets shaved away over time, and some skills are lost altogether. So it's equally vital to think ahead and ensure tomorrow's self is well-equipped to navigate the world it will occupy.

The knowledge you can deploy effectively in your 50s and beyond is an accumulation of your prior decisions and experiments. To make that pool as wide as possible, start early.