Letter to 35 year old self

Hi Akhil,
I hope know you are doing awesome. You must be happily married with the love of your life and maybe have a kid or two. Work must be good too. Being an entrepreneur suits you after all!! Now enough with niceties and let me come straight to the point. The reason I am writing this letter to you is to make sure that you have acquired / retained some good qualities that I wish to have when I turn 35. If everything went well then I am sure I you will have a positive answer to all the points. But if not, I am sure you must have your reasons. Still it’s never too late to realize and work for your goals.

Keep Learning – I evaluate the success / worth of a day based on the sole factor – Did I learn anything new today? Or to rephrase it – Have I added any value to myself by doing whatever I did to spend the day. If the answer is yes, I feel worthy of a good nights sleep otherwise not. I have been doing it for quite some time and am pretty happy with this idea. I just want you to have retained this habit. It does not have to be ground breaking or cutting edge, just make sure every day you acquire some new knowledge.
*Try to find stability *– I am sure you are doing well financially as well as with your family. What I am talking about is my habit of constantly running after new things. This might be stemming from the point mentioned above. I like to learn anything new that is available and the moment something new comes up that becomes the center of my attraction. I am sure that you have let this fickleness of your mind go and have learned to train your head to not be distracted by new shiny things until you have mastered whatever is in your hand.
Don’t let success get to your head - I love what I do and take a lot of pride in doing that. Unless something extremely bad happens I will be successful in my endeavors. I just don’t want this success to get to my head. I want to stay the polite and friendly person I am. So if you have become successful and that success has changed you please try to get back to being the good person that you were 9 years ago. If you are not successful yet, just hang on. It will come to you.
Wear a suit, don’t be one – I am working really hard to get to a position where I get to wear a suit to work every day. I would assume that has happened with you and you have a great collection of suits. Just don’t be a suit. Remember how you reached there, your humble beginning and stay down to earth.
Keep enjoying smaller things in life – This is absolutely important for me. I love the small things in life. I love driving miles to eat a specific dish. I like to get tea at a roadside tea stall and have late night chats with friends and family. These are the things that bring happiness in my otherwise hectic life. Never let them go.
Give back to the world – The world does not become a better place until you give back to it. And by that I don’t mean a donation to some random charity about which you know nothing just for the heck of doing it. As of date I have adopted and am responsible for the education of two underprivileged kids. I am sure you can afford to do the same for 20. Still even if you are doing it for only 5, I will be happy as long as it is done properly.
Keep Writing – I love to write. It makes me happy to pen down my experiences even if I don’t share it with many people. I am sure you have experienced a lot of things in the past 9 years and the people around you could greatly benefit from your experience. I know you must be busy but still try to find some time to write, if you already aren’t.
These are more or less the ideas/aims I wanted to share with you. I will try to make sure that I stay on the correct path and achieve/retain all the qualities I just mentioned. In case I miss one or two, I trust you that you will start working towards acquiring them as well
Best of luck
26 yrs old Akhil*