any domain is fine — mental health, physical health, intelligence, friends, productivity, anything that i'd count as leading to a more flourishing life.
EDIT: adding that Sam Atis' ideas about good advice are wonderful. good advice is nonobvious, applicable, and based on some true insight.
if you'd like them, my demographic details can be read on my death market:
keeping the bounty criteria mildly vague to avoid Goodharting.
EDIT: @Dave_9000ish made a market on whether i would implement ideas that i awarded bounties to. go trade on their market, too!
Related questions
Set up projects for yourself and complete them. I can't say which things fit with you specifically, but committing to something and completing it is a good habit if you're young. Later on you will learn when to quit, which is an important skill once time and energy are more scarce.
Thing is, by seeing projects through to the end (write a book, build a home server, invent a new beer) you will pick up generalizable skills and you will get to know yourself. You can reflect on why some things are hard and others are easy for you. You can choose to develop skills that need work.
Self-knowledge is one of the key traits for happiness and well-being. Committing to things (not just starting) grows self-knowledge
Get a mentor and a mentee, each of whom you meet with weekly. Weekly. In-person meetings are the best, bc you need to build a flow and rapport, but digital is almost as good. Inevitably these meetings start at an hour or two, but you can easily get them down to 15-20 minutes most of the time. Relative age of the mentor/mentee is irrelevant, and you don't need to agree with their life choices, but you need to be ready to grow with these people.
Mentors help you with expanded expertise, networks and resources, and can save you headaches by short-circuiting problems they've already encountered or by pointing you to a path that's easier to follow to the same goal.
Mentees reinforce what you already know (even what you don't know you know), challenge you to do better, and are a wellspring of insights you never considered.
A good mentor is one who has skills and experience in your field, but doesn't need to be in your field. More importantly, you want someone who is around for the long haul; avoid coworkers who are grinding on the same project, teachers with whom the relationship ends at the door, and, conversely, people who have too significant of a relationship to you in other ways like immediate family. Those others are great to learn from, but they're not fit for a dedicated mentor role. The ideal mentor is someone who has pools of unquantifiable knowledge you aren't even aware of but that they can't help but share; look for people who have repeatedly encountered failure in their chosen domain but have pressed on a bit beyond it.
A good mentee is someone who is committed to attempting their path, but is anywhere on it after the dreamy wishful stage. You can take just about anyone on as a mentee, but the key is that they aren't crippled by fear. An ideal mentee wants to grow in a direction that you have experience with but also want to grow in further.
The relationships you build with mentors and mentees need to be about actionables, mutual accountability, and most importantly personal wellness. It's a sort of relationship that overlaps with friendship, therapy, and professional development but is orthogonal to all of them. They aren't close friends, teachers/students, or direct leaders/followers; mentors (and mentees) are guides who walk alongside you with a different set of eyes.
If you must pick only one to start finding first, pick the mentee. You'll grow more.
Go through the following list every so often to see how well you're doing on basic life things (from https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/12/13/scrupulosity-sequence-3-load-bearing-things/):
Are you sick or in pain?
Do you do some sort of exercise on a regular basis? (Walks count.)
Are you eating enough food?
Are you getting enough protein? Vegetables?
I said ‘sleep’ two bullet points ago but are you getting enough sleep?
Are you going outside and getting fresh air and sunshine on a regular basis?
Are you either not taking mind-altering drugs or taking a normal, responsible amount of mind-altering drugs that doesn’t make all your druggie friends go “please take fewer drugs”?
Do you experience physical affection from a person or pet? (There is no shame in getting a stuffed animal or body pillow if the answer is ‘no’.)
Does there exist someone who would notice if you were dead? Someone who will talk to you when you’re sad?
Do you talk to a person face-to-face sometimes? Do you get enough introvert time?
Do you do something you think is straightforwardly fun on a fairly regular basis?
Do you have something to take care of, even if it’s just a plant?
Take 15 minutes of your day and close your eyes to focus on your state. Focus on how your senses (breathing, touch with the surfaces your body is interfacing, etc) are being perceived, and try keeping an otherwise blank state where you're not chasing a chain of thoughts. This has been shown to be remarkably effective for people who have ADHD to have better control over their attention; and in people who don't have ADHD, to have ability to sustain focus for long periods of time.
Try a hobby, and don't be afraid to expand from a hobby to a side hustle, but avoid choosing your hobby based on considerations of possible future profit. Find a few people who are among the leading thinkers on that subject (you'll know them because they'll stand out from the crowd, and you'll find them because they'll be among the most popular content creators in that niche) to learn from and a few people who also enjoy the hobby to trade tips with.
Why a hobby? You probably already have some ideas as to what you want to study, and may have ideas about what you'll do with it after that, but having an unrelated (or distantly-connected at best) set of interests makes it easier to make connections with people who don't share that academic or professional background while making you a more memorable and interesting person to those who do (oh, isn't he the guy who brews his own coffee at his desk? or the one who sings in 20 languages? or are they really into relatively niche sport or cultural experience and happy to bring along a newbie?) Pick a relatively common or broad hobby first, then perhaps a few more niche ones, so that if you can't find a common interest, you are likelier to at least have a common dimension (and although there are a few very interesting people who only really do one thing but do it very well, most of the most interesting people are less spiky than that).
Read and listen to books from the gauntlet, courtesy of @DrewSpartz and his bro Emerson https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Bqj6PSFxn1UjctVBgK-1RQW0SeWfL3PZ3xijPjR7cyc/edit
