One of the most important things I learned was shifting my mindset into thinking more long-term.

A lot of people nowadays are preaching, start a business, start a business, start a business. But again, the best piece of advice I ever got was work to learn, not to earn. Because unlike most people nowadays, I actually spent the first three years of my career developing skills. I knew that I wanted to have my own online business one day, but I didn't have the skills to do it. So I had to learn the skills. And the way I learned the skills was by actually getting jobs that would teach me those skills. If you're looking for work to do and what meaningful work should should be to you, look at your end goal and reverse engineer the skills you need to have and start working at a job that can teach you those skills while you earn money and learn those skills on the jobs instead of learning through trial and error on your own. Starting a business and wasting a bunch of time and money and potentially discouraging yourself from actually growing that business because you don't have the skills to actually run it. Work to learn, not to earn.