What’s the best advice you’d give to someone younger than you?

When I was twenty-three, I sat across from my first real boss in a meeting at the Public Health Office conference room in Seychelles and watched him write a single word on a notepad: patience. Then he tore it off, slid it across the table, and said, “You’ll understand this later.” I thought he was being condescending. I was wrong.

Growing up on a small tropical island — where everyone knows your mother’s name, where the mango tree in the yard marks the seasons better than any calendar, and where “urgent” means the ferry is leaving in twenty minutes — gives you a particular relationship with time. It’s both a gift and a trap. Life moves differently there. You learn to read the weather before it changes, to fix things with whatever is available, to sit with uncertainty without panicking. But you don’t always learn urgency. You don’t always learn that some windows close before you notice them opening.

So here’s what I wish someone had handed me, folded in a note, when I was still young enough to be annoyed by it.

1. Your career is not a ladder — it’s a reef

Back home, the coral reef doesn’t grow in a straight line up. It grows outward, sideways, in unexpected bursts, shaped entirely by currents and conditions around it. A career is exactly like that. The colleague who told me to “just climb the ladder” in my first Pretoria job was describing a structure that barely exists anymore. The people I’ve watched thrive — in Harare, in Johannesburg, in Geneva— moved laterally, took strange detours, followed curiosity into rooms that had no obvious ceiling.

The best investment you can make before thirty is not the obvious promotion. It’s the uncomfortable project nobody wants. The cross-functional team. The market you don’t understand yet. Each one deposits something in you that compound interest can’t touch.

2. Learn to be bored without reaching for your phone

I know. This sounds like something your grandfather would say. But hear me out.

The most useful thinking I’ve ever done happened in the gaps — on a bus from Port Louis with no data signal, waiting in a monsoon for a delayed flight, sitting on the veranda at home with nothing but the sound of the sea and a problem I couldn’t solve yet. Boredom is not a failure state. It’s the substrate on which real ideas grow. Every generation that grows up with instant stimulation available pays a cognitive tax: they outsource their patience, and with it, their depth.

Schedule ten minutes a day to simply sit. Don’t meditate. Don’t journal. Just exist with the problem you’re working on. You’ll be surprised what surfaces.

3. Relationships are the only currency that appreciates

There’s a university colleague I again met at a conference in Lesotho in 2003. We spoke for maybe forty minutes over terrible canapés. I followed up. He followed up. Ten years later, she’s the reason I landed the most meaningful job of my career — not because he owed me anything, but because we’d stayed genuinely curious about each other’s work over a decade of occasional emails.

The island I grew up on operates on favours, memory, and reciprocity. Everyone shows up at everyone else’s important events. It’s inefficient and beautiful. Urban professional life strips this away and replaces it with LinkedIn connections that feel like nothing. Fight that. Be the person who remembers birthdays, who checks in when someone changes jobs, who sends the article with “thought of you.” Not transactionally. Actually.

4. Discomfort is data, not danger

When I moved from a familiar environment to a major city to work in a sector I knew almost nothing about, I was uncomfortable every single day for a year. I regularly confused cultural signals, misread rooms, stumbled over assumptions that turned out to be wrong. I almost came home twice.

I didn’t, and it became the most formative period of my professional life. Not because it stopped being uncomfortable — it didn’t, not entirely — but because I learned to treat the discomfort as a signal that I was still learning. The day you stop feeling that low hum of uncertainty is often the day you’ve plateaued. If everything feels easy, ask yourself honestly: am I growing, or am I just very comfortable with this particular groove?

5. Write things down — not for memory, but for clarity

I don’t keep a diary. But I reflect every evening Friday about what I learned that during the day and on Fridays every lessons learnt during the week. Not what I did. What I learned. After six months, you have a map of your own mind. After five years, you have something extraordinary: evidence of who you used to be, proof that you’ve changed, and a pattern of what keeps teaching you the same lesson over and over again.

That recurring lesson, by the way, is where the real work is.

None of this is complicated. The ocean I grew up near doesn’t make complicated things — it makes persistent ones. Water wears down rock not through force but through repetition, through showing up every single day.