What’s one thing you wish you had started doing earlier in life?

What’s One Thing You Wish You Had Started Doing Earlier in Life
If you asked me this a few years ago, I probably would have given you something practical — start saving money earlier, start networking earlier, start applying for that scholarship earlier. And all of that would have been true. But if I’m honest with myself today, the answer that sits closest to my chest is simpler than all of that: I wish I had started journaling earlier.
Not blogging. Not writing for an audience. Just the quiet, unglamorous act of sitting with a pen and a blank page and being honest with myself about what I was actually feeling.
For a long time, I confused being busy with being self-aware. Between lectures, ward rounds, running King David Properties, building the Foundation, and trying to keep up with everyone who needed something from me, I told myself that reflection was a luxury I’d get to “later” — after this exam, after this project, after this season. But later kept moving. And in the meantime, I was making decisions — about relationships, about priorities, about who I was becoming — without ever really pausing to ask myself why.
It was only when I started writing more seriously, when the blog and “If Love Is a Crime” forced me to sit still and listen to my own thoughts, that I realized how much clarity I had been missing. Writing didn’t just help me express what I already knew. It helped me discover what I actually believed — about faith, about ambition, about love, about the kind of man I wanted to be. Some of my most important realizations about myself have come not in a moment of crisis, but in the middle of an ordinary paragraph, when a sentence I didn’t plan to write suddenly told me something true.
I think about the version of me in secondary school, or even in my early years at UNIBEN, who carried so much — ambition, pressure, faith, doubt — and had no outlet for any of it except to keep moving forward. If that version of me had a journal, I wonder how many mistakes I could have avoided simply by catching my own thoughts before they turned into decisions. I wonder how much earlier I would have understood my own patterns — the way I overcommit, the way I sometimes measure my worth by output rather than by who I am becoming.
So if there’s one thing I wish I had started doing earlier, it’s this: giving myself permission to stop and reflect, without needing a reason, without needing it to be productive. Not every page has to become a blog post. Not every thought has to be useful. Sometimes the most valuable thing you can do is write something nobody will ever read, just so you can finally hear yourself think.
If you’re young and reading this — whether you’re in school, building something, chasing a calling like medicine or ministry or business — don’t wait until you’re overwhelmed to start listening to yourself. Start now. Buy the notebook. Open the notes app. Write the messy, unfinished sentence. You don’t need to have it all figured out. You just need to start showing up for your own mind, the same way you show up for everyone else’s expectations of you.
Future you will thank you for it.