Why your 20s aren't just for having fun—Lessons from the early days of Apple Inc

Age isn’t just a number, and young people who believe it is, might be in for some serious trouble.

Let me tell you an interesting story.

You probably have heard of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, and how they founded apple.

But what you might not have known is that they had a third co-founder named Ron Wayne.

I came across this year’s ago, when I read the book Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson.

In 1976, Wayne was given a 10 percent stake in apple but he sold his shares less than two weeks later, for $2,300.

His reason was that Jobs and Wozniak where young and he wasn’t comfortable with the kind of business risks they were taking.

Ronald Wayne was the person who illustrated the first Apple logo and wrote the Apple I manual.

Here’s something mind-blowing…

If Wayne had held unto that 10 percent stake till today, it would have been worth $22 billion, which would have made Wayne one of the richest people in the world.

Funny enough jobs only wanted Wayne to be what he called Apple’s “adult-in-chief,” an older person who would resolve disputes between him and Woz.

Today Wayne is 88 years old, and isn’t even a millionaire and he might never become one again in his lifetime.

Don’t blame Wayne too soon because if you were in his shoes you might have done the same, and here’s why.

At the time that the three founded Apple, Wayne was 41 years old, Steve Jobs was 21 and Wozniak was 25.

Both Steve Jobs and Wozniak had something that Wayne didn’t have, and that was the time to take any investment risks that he wanted.

At age 41 he already had more responsibilities than Jobs and Wozniak did. He had been burned from previous investments and wanted to be careful.

If he was maybe in his 20s I doubt if he would have sold his 10 percent stake. But he didn’t have what you have now and that is time.

You might have thought that Wayne had learned his lessons with the Apple shares but he didn’t.

And that’s because when time is no longer on your side there are some lessons that are hard to learn.

In the early 1990s, Wayne sold the original Apple partnership contract paper, signed in 1976 by Jobs, Wozniak, and himself, for US$500.

In 2011, that same contract paper was sold at auction for $1.6 million. Wayne later stated that he regrets selling it.

Warren Buffet bought his first stock at the age of 11 and he credits his entire fortune to the fact that he started investing very early.

Starting early made all the difference. By the time he was 30 he had a net worth of $1 million.

What if he was just like the average person who spent their teens and 20s having fun, and by age 30 his net worth was, say, $25,000?

And let’s say he still went on to earn the profound annual investment returns that he’s been able to generate (22% annually).

And then quit investing and retired at age 60. What would a rough estimate of his net worth be today? It would be $11.9 million and not $84.5 billion.

Can you see the astronomical difference? That’s the power of investing early. That’s why age isn’t just a number — it has great significance.

As the author Morgan Housel wrote about Buffet’s success, “His skill is investing, but his secret is time.”

As a young person, you have to understand that age plays a vital role in how the phases of your life turn out, that’s why it’s very significant.

Age is a metric of your time on Earth, and time is what life is made of. So if you write off the concept of age as insignificant, then you are trying to say that your time is unimportant? And without time you don’t have a life.

No matter who you’re, the day you run of out time, you run out of life. So please understand with me if I refuse to agree that age is just a number.

Have you ever heard of chaos theory? It’s the idea that seemingly insignificant initial circumstances can effect global, even universal events.

For example, the theory says that a butterfly flapping its wings in one country can help to cause a tornado in another.

The same idea applies in our lives, especially as young people.

The uninformed ideologies and philosophies you hold unto in your youth can ruin your entire future.