Adrian Savage, an author and a retired business executive, is an older gentleman with some perspective.  He wrote an excellent post on Lifehack about giving yourself the best shot at a good life.  He offers some wonderful lessons for those of us in our twenties and thirties who constantly sabotage our own happiness by allowing ourselves to think too much about the wrong things.  Some gems of wisdom from Adrian:

Stop paying so much attention to how you feel. No one can control their emotions, good or bad. If you spend your attention on how you feel, you’ll be in a constant state of anxiety. If you feel good, you’ll start worrying about how to keep that feeling. If you feel bad, you’ll fret over how to feel better. You feel whatever you feel. Get over it. Just go on doing what you need to do, regardless of your emotions. Don’t mistake excitement for progress. It’s easy to set out in a blaze of enthusiasm, only to run out of steam long before you’ve achieved anything that is going to stick. Decide what you are going to do, then do it. 

Bet on continuous, incremental improvements, not sudden breakthroughs. This is one of the biggest differences between Japanese and American ways of doing business. The Japanese tend to work away steadily at many small improvements, never making too much fuss about finding some huge leap forward. American businesses tend to favor the idea of sudden, dramatic breakthroughs. Breakthroughs are great when they happen, but depending on them is a high-risk strategy. A single breakthrough that fails or doesn’t come on time can set you back to square one. In life, as in business, lots of small steps often take you further than one or two huge leaps.

Most people get the essentials of life in the wrong order. They expect to feel good (or happy, or motivated) first; then, and only then, begin to tackle what they need to do. That makes all progress dependent on something as unpredictable and fleeting as a feeling. If you do what you need to do first, regardless of your motivation or state of mind, you’re more likely to feel better because you’ve just achieved something.

Thanks, Adrian.  May all of us try to take advantage of these lessons now, before we've disrupted some of the best years of our lives.