Thank your younger self.

I’d never live those ten years again. I wouldn’t undo them either.

By Farhan Terubos · 12 September 2026 · 4 min read · Issue #2

One evening in August, riding my motorcycle home, I was talking to my phone.

It was the first time I had tried it. Instead of waiting until I got home to write things down, I spoke my thoughts into a voice recording while I rode. A grown man talking to himself on a motorcycle. It felt a little silly. It has since become one of the most useful habits I have. That evening, the thing on my mind was a question I had seen online.

“What advice would you give your 20-year-old self?”

Sometimes it’s your 30-year-old self. The question comes around every few months, and each time the replies pour in.

The first time I saw it, I was excited by it. It felt like the right question for anyone who wants to get better. Look back, pull out the lessons, hand them forward.

So on that ride, I tried to answer it properly.

I went back to 2003. I was 13.

From 13 to about 23, I had close to zero empathy. I thought about myself, and very little about anyone else. At school, outside school, at home. Almost everywhere I went.

It cost me more than I understood then. Friendships. My reputation. My confidence. The simple ability to connect with another person. All of it slid down, close to nothing.

If I’m honest, more people disliked me than liked me in those years.

Ten years is a long time to be that person. More than a quarter of my life so far.

So there it was, the obvious answer. Tell the 13-year-old to think about other people. Spare him the whole decade.

I didn’t send it.

The longer I sat with those ten years, the less I wanted to take them out.

Because I can see what they built. The way I think before I speak now. The reason I care how my words land on someone else. I didn’t learn any of that from a book or a talk. I learned it by being the person who got it wrong for ten years, and then finally noticing.

Some people don’t need that road. They grow up with everything in place. Enough support, a good education, an older person who tells them early what to do and what to stay away from. They skip a lot of mistakes and save a lot of time.

That’s good for them. I mean it.

Most of us didn’t get that. I didn’t.

For people like me, the past was the school. There was no other one on offer.

So I changed my answer.

I don’t have advice for my younger self. I have a thank you. Thank you for getting me here. Thank you for making the mistakes early enough that there was time left to fix them.

That same day, I was reading a book called Redah Sampai Allah Reda, by Pak Cik Lan (Haji Roslan Mohamad). Before anything else, the book reminds you that this life is short, and that what comes after it lasts forever. Then Pak Cik Lan, drawing on the Quran, lists five things about this worldly life.

It is a test.

It is an adornment.

It is amusement.

It is a game.

And it is full of pleasures that can fool you if you are not careful.

Reading those five after that ride put my ten years in their place. Not small. Not forgotten. Just the right size, inside a life that is short and was always going to test me.

And a test is passed by learning from it. Not by getting everything right the first time.

The younger me paid for every lesson I use today.

You don’t hand the person who paid a list of complaints. You thank him.

I know how that sounds. It sounds soft. It isn’t. I don’t pretend those years were fine. I lost real things in them, and I know it.

But I also know what I would have to give back if I could undo them. The lessons would go too. I’d be 36, with none of the care I have now, still waiting for somebody to tell me how to treat people.

Alhamdulillah, I got the lessons. The hard way, but I got them. What’s left is to use the years I have now to keep getting better. Not to keep going back.

So if anyone asks me that question again, on the ride home or anywhere else, I already know what I’ll say.

Thank you.

That’s all for this week.
See you next Saturday.

Cheers,
Farhan