Learning how to grow up and be more mature starts with knowing what you truly value. Being an adult means sticking to your values, even when it's not popular or doesn't benefit you.
When I was like four years old, despite my mother warning me not to, I put my finger on a hot stove. The stove was red and bright and shiny and I knew yummy food came from it, so the allure was irresistible.
That day I learned an important lesson: really hot things suck. They burn you. And you want to avoid touching them again.
Around the same time, I made another important discovery. The ice cream that my parents would treat me on occasion was stored in the freezer, on a shelf that could be easily accessed if I stood on my tippy toes.
One day, while my mother was in the other room (poor mom), I grabbed the ice cream, sat on the floor, and proceeded to engorge myself with my bare hands.
It was the closest I would come to an orgasm for another ten years. If there was a heaven in my little four-year-old mind, I had just found it. Fucking perfection. My own little bucket of Elysium filled with congealed divinity.
As the ice cream began to melt, I smeared an extra helping across my face, letting it dribble all over my shirt, practically bathing in that sweet, sweet goodness. Oh yes, glorious sugary-milk, share with me your secrets, for today I will know greatness.
…then my mom walked in. And all hell broke loose — including but not limited to a much-needed bath. I learned a lesson that day too. Stealing ice cream and then dumping it all over yourself and the kitchen floor makes your mother extremely angry. And angry mothers suck. They are not pleasant to be around. They scold you and punish you. And that day, much like the day with the stove, I learned what not to do.
But there was a third, meta-lesson going on here as well. It was a simple lesson — a lesson so obvious that we don’t even notice when it happens. But this lesson was actually far more important than the other lessons: eating ice cream is better than being burned.
That might not strike you as profound. But it is. That’s because it’s a value judgment. Ice cream is better than hot stoves. I prefer sugary sweetness in my mouth than a bit of fire on my hand. It’s a discovery of preference and, therefore, prioritization. It’s the knowledge that one thing in the world is preferable to the other and, therefore, all future behaviors will consider that fact.
And this is the job of drooly little four-year-olds. To explore ceaselessly. To discover the world around them — to determine what feels good and what feels bad — and then create value hierarchies out of this knowledge. Ice cream is better than being burned. Playing with the dog is more fun than playing with a rock. Sunny days are better than rainy days. Coloring is more fun to me than singing. These feelings of pleasure and pain become the bedrock of all our preferences and knowledge going forward in life and actually lay the foundation for what will become our identity later.