To Hollister and Gideon,You have arrived at that age when everyone you meet will ask you about your plans for the future. I am older, happier, and probably more successful than those people, so ignore them. Listen to me.Knowledge is important, but experience is what really matters. School can give you knowledge, but it cannot give you experience.Experience is the name we give to our mistakes.Success is simply a matter of surviving your mistakes. But first you have to make them. So take chances. Feel the pain of disappointment. Then pull yourself together.Avoid the mistakes that are bigger than you.Don’t die.Don’t create a baby until you’re ready.Don’t go to prison.Those mistakes are hard to undo.Surviving all your other mistakes will require nothing more than financial and emotional “staying power.”Financial staying power isn’t measured by how much money you have. In fact, an abundance of cash will tempt you to calculate your burn rate. You will say, “At my current rate of spending, I can last until such-and-such a date before I run out of money.”When you calculate your burn rate, you create an unconscious plan. You have looked into the future and seen yourself collapsing in defeat on that day. Personally, I have never known anyone who succeeded after calculating their burn rate. They imagined running out of money, and then they did.I knew they had calculated their burn rate because everywhere they went, they said, “I have to be profitable by such-and-such a date or I will run out of money.”Boys, no matter how much money you have, you can run out of money. True financial staying power isn’t measured by how much money you have; it’s measured by how little money you need to stay in the game. The secret is to keep your monthly obligations so low that it takes very little to cover your living expenses.The most successful of my Wizard of Ads partners kept their jobs until they were making enough money as my partner that they could afford to walk away from their previous employment. Some of the others were lucky enough to have a life partner who made enough money to cover all the monthly expenses of the household. The partners who struggled in the early days were the ones who had significant monthly expenses and a lot of money in the bank. These were the ones who calculated their burn rate and then slowly began to panic as they saw that money disappear month after month.Financial staying power is easy. Live modestly. Don’t owe money.Emotional staying power is what makes you successful. It gives you the ability to fail without thinking of yourself as a failure. So take chances. Feel the pain of disappointment, then pull yourself together, like I said.Failure, like success, is a temporary condition.You are going to need encouragers. I have your MeMaw and the encouragement of God that I find in my Bible.Mistakes are inevitable. Don’t fear mistakes.Encourage people. Be slow to offer advice, but quick to offer encouragement. Tell people what you admire about them. No one likes a flatterer, but if you speak the truth, they will hear it as the truth.Marry your best friend. You will know they are your best friend when you look forward to being with that person, even when you are not imagining them naked. Pennie – your MeMaw – believes in me more than I believe in me. I have asked God to give each of you a life partner like that.I am not the only person who thinks these things. On May 1, 2024, Jason Fried wrote,“Occasionally a 17-year-old will write, asking for entrepreneurial or business advice. Oftentimes they’re early bloomers and already have something going on. Others are chomping at the bit once they get out of high school. It’s great to hear from them. But my advice is generally that they don’t need advice. You don’t need...