Time & hindsight

What advice would you give your twenty-year-old self, and what should they ignore?

95 answers answered between 1930 and 2026

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Public figures who have answered a question like this elsewhere. Quoted from the source shown, not written for FLAPSS.

Read by field Everyone Science and medicine 16 Arts and letters 20 Politics and public life 18 Business and finance 13 Technology 17 Sport 11
Read by age Any age Before thirty 3 In their thirties 9 In their forties 13 In their fifties 12 In their sixties 13 Seventy and beyond 19
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Margaret Thatcher Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, 1979–1990; Leader of the Conservative Party 1975–1990; MP for Finchley 1959–1992
You never follow the crowd. You work things out for yourself. And therefore if you think differently from the crowd, you must put your own view and try to get people taking your line. But you never follow the crowd. You never do things just because other people are doing them.
Recorded Chris Ogden, Time magazine, No. 10 Downing Street, Margaret Thatcher Foundation, from Thatcher MSS (Churchill Archive Centre), 16 January 1989 source ↗
Elie Wiesel Writer and human rights advocate; Nobel Peace Prize laureate, 1986
Sensitivity. Be sensitive in every way possible about everything in life. Be sensitive. Insensitivity brings indifference and nothing is worse than indifference. Indifference makes that person dead before the person dies.
Recorded Academy of Achievement interview, 29 June 1996 source ↗
Ruth Bader Ginsburg Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, 1993–2020; Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit 1980–1993
Having advanced well beyond what the French call "a certain age," I am often asked to convey to younger people helpful advice and counsel. So I will open these remarks with the best advice I ever received. The advice, which I have several times shared with others, was given to me by my mother-in-law on my wedding day. She had a prescription for a happy, enduring marriage: "It pays," she said, "it pays sometimes to be a little deaf."
Recorded New York Law School Law Review dinner, on accepting the Froessel Award, New York Law School Law Review (digitalcommons.nyls.edu), 12 February 1999 source ↗

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