Seriously, listen to anything except the Top 40 stuff your friends are listening to. I’m not telling you to never listen to it, but you should cultivate a taste for other kinds of music for lots of good reasons you probably wouldn’t think.

My musical taste varied wildly as a teenager. I grew up in the ‘90s, and about halfway through that decade, some of the best music of all time was made. But only for a period of a couple of years, and then music on the radio sucked again. I didn’t know then that there was a such thing as independent music (i.e., music not played on mainstream radio), so I went backwards in time looking for music I liked.

My search led me initially to classic rock, mostly of the Southern rock persuasion, thanks to my childhood and my parents’ tastes. In my early teen years, I discovered jazz thanks to the iconic teenage movie Clueless, in which one of the characters references Billie Holiday. I started listening to her, which led me to Ella Fitzgerald, who in turn led to Louie Armstrong, and on to Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie and through most of the iconic jazz musicians and singers.

At some point in high school, the cool people I had become friends with (thanks to my taste in jazz) introduced me to independent music, like Belle & Sebastian and Braid.

Music might seem like a trivial thing for me to be giving you advice on, but music has been a huge part of my life. It’s soothed me when I was sad, calmed me when I was near the edge, propelled me through long nights of studying as well as countless miles of road, and lifted my spirits when I felt the most alone. Your taste in music is critical to your growth as a person.

Older People Will Respect You

My taste in jazz had an interesting side effect: When adults found out I listened to jazz music voluntarily and that I actually enjoyed it, they looked at me in a different light. Simply by branching out into a different kind of music, it was implied that I wasn’t like other teenagers, that I was somehow more mature. It was as if it hadn’t dawned on them that a teenager could like the same kind of music that they did. They started swapping CDs with me and recommending new artists for me to check out. It was pretty cool to have conversations with people older than me and to feel like I was telling them new things.

You Become More Interesting

Having a varied taste in music gives you a layer of complexity that your friends who only listen to the popular stuff on the radio won’t have. And that complexity makes you more interested to other people. “Oh, you listen to _______? I’ve never heard of them. What are they like?” Knowing about things that other people don’t know about makes you more interesting also.

It Gives You Something in Common With Other Cool, Interesting People

If someone else does listen to the same music you do, it’s like instant friendship. The more esoteric the music, the more instant the friendship. Even being interested in learning more about different kinds of music will draw you into a new circle of friends. The people from my teenage years who were most influential in molding me as a person, were people who either shared a common love of music or introduced me to a new band or type of music.

As an example, one of my fondest is memories is of the first time I heard Chet Baker. I was in a small bookstore when “My Funny Valentine” came on. His voice sliced through the air like a hot knife through butter. I asked the bookstore owner who it was, and we became friends. He guided me to the books who would shape my adventures through my early twenties, and who I am today. By hanging out in the bookstore, I met the people who would become some of my best friends.

It Opens the Doors to Opportunities

When I started listening to jazz, I began to pick out the sounds of the bass and fell in love with it. I quit my guitar lessons, and started bass guitar lessons. The next year I ended up in my high school’s jazz band, playing bass, which might sound dorky but it wasn’t. Playing the bass on stage and jamming out with the other kids on the weekends gave me some serious street cred, and continues to impress even today. I mean, it sounds cool, right? I used to play jazz bass. Cool.

When I got to college, even my limited knowledge of independent music landed me an opportunity that would turn out to shape my entire life’s career. I became a DJ and staff director at my college’s radio station. Thanks to good music, I got to run a radio station, DJ at clubs, and hang out with touring bands all through college. When I graduated, my degree didn’t mean much to employers. My experience at the radio station, however, landed me a job at a magazine, which led me to a job at a newspaper, which led me to marketing and owning my social media business today. Who knew?

So much of life is about who you know, and that ‘whole good music leading to hanging with cool people’ thing will lead you to some pretty cool opportunities.

You Will Be More Creative & Motivated

Good music should inspire you to be better, go faster, dream bigger, keep going, trust yourself, love deeper, be happier. You should be able to put on a pair of headphones, find the right song, and feel whatever you need to feel at that moment. Good music does that. Having that tool can help you get through hard times, train harder physically, concentrate better on studying, and sort through confusing thoughts. Being able to do those things will put light-years ahead of your peers, and heck, most adults too.

Music Gives Your Life a Soundtrack

Here’s another cool thing about getting into cool music as a teenager: you can turn on a song when you’re older, and instantly be transported back to the time period in your life when you were listening to it. Chet Baker takes me back to that bookstore and the days when I was discovering who I was, and Braid takes me back to the cafe I loved where the barista gave me a mixed tape with them on it. I can’t tell you how happy it makes me to be able to listen to a song, and remember what I was feeling when I first listened to it. I feel so strongly about creating a soundtrack to your life, I wrote about it here.

Good music gives your life scope and context. I can guarantee your life will be better in ways you never thought. Keep an open mind and listen to some new things. You’ll thank me.

This post is part of a series called Letters to a Teenage Girl. Read the intro and other posts from the series here.

I can’t remember the first time I threw my mom under the bus, but try as I might, I can’t forget the worst time. I was 17 and thought I was the hardest working, most put-upon high school girl on the planet. I went off-campus to college for all but one class, worked a weekend job in catering, and volunteered in an at-risk classroom every week. I was pretty self-sufficient.

So when my mom got onto me about something one day, in a fit of self-righteousness, I threw her personal life history in her face. I yelled something along the lines of, “Yeah, well when you were my age you had a baby.”

Real mature. If you want to be treated like an adult and think of yourself as an adult, this is not the way to go, FYI.

The ironic thing is that I’ll bet my mom forgot about that after a few weeks. Having raised two daughters through their teenage years, I’m guessing my mom grew some tough skin. But me? I’ve never forgotten those words and what saying them took away from me. I’ll remember those bitter words for the rest of my life.

The Longer You Live, the More Mistakes You’ll Make

What changed between the me I was when I said those words to my mom and the me that regrets them today (although, to be honest, I regretted them instantly) is a whole heckuva lot of life experience.

You’re mom isn’t perfect; no mother is. So if you’re already at the stage of your life where you’re measuring her up against a stick of what you think a mother “ought to be” – stop it. All you’re going to achieve with that is a lot of resentment from unmet expectations. I’ll write about the pitfalls of expectations in another letter. Those are generally no good anyway.

You’re not going to be perfect when you’re your mom’s age either. And that’s a good thing. Life provides us with plenty of opportunities for “mistakes” and the older you get, the more “mistakes” you’re going to accumulate.

Mistakes Make Us Smarter

Mistakes are what make us grow into better people. If your mom never made a mistake, then she would never learn how to be a better person. And none of us are born “better” than others. Some people just choose to turn their mistakes into growth opportunities, while others will wonder why the same mistake keeps happening to them over and over again.

Socrates said that the truly intelligent man knows that he knows nothing. There’s so much that life is going to teach you through mistakes, that maybe it’s impossible for you to understand that kind of intelligence right now.

There’s No Satisfaction in Being Better Than Anyone

Just know this: the satisfaction you think you’ll feel by belittling your mom doesn’t exist. The impulse to yell at her or throw her faults in her face is momentary and unfulfilling. Putting people down because you feel superior (or because you think it will make you superior) never works. It’s like quicksand; quicksand pulls you in further every time you try to climb out. That’s how putting people down works, too. You’ll actually only feel smaller, less superior.

That’s what I lost the moment I uttered (or rather, yelled) those words that day. I felt a sinking in my stomach that I recognize today as disappointment in myself, because I had attempted to make my mother feel small because I thought I was so much bigger than the person she was at my age. What really sucks is now that I’m an adult, I realize what my mom sacrificed at my age to give me the kind of life that allowed me to be in a better situation than she was in.

You’re not better than your mom right now. You simply haven’t had the opportunity to make your mistakes. And you will make them. It’s not a bad thing as long as you choose to grow.

Maybe one of your mistakes will be taking out your frustrations on your mom. That’s OK too. You’ll get to learn how to apologize, find out how good an honest apology can feel, and discover a new way to communicate when you’re hurt or upset. That’s how it’s worked for me, anyway.

This post is part of a series called Letters to a Teenage Girl. Read the intro and other posts from the series here.

Let me first say this: I was not a fashionable teenager. To be honest, I’m not sure any  teenagers are… The ones I see who are trendy look totally ridiculous. I think your school becomes your own little world, and whatever is cool there, you think is cool everywhere.

Which isn’t actually true.

Any kid who’s been moved from city to city while in middle and high school can tell you that. One brand is hot in one city, and kids in another city have never even heard of it.

But what happens is the one kid who has the balls to wear something new and be confident in it is the one who sets the trends. I’m not talking about the kids who dress purposely ugly (goths spring to mind), ridiculous (Uggs in the summer? Really?), or skimpy (enough said).

I’m talking about that girl who seems to wear whatever she likes, and then everyone wants to wear it too. That girl. Be that girl.

Here’s what I’ve figured out about following trends.

They aren’t you, and you’ll feel uncomfortable and look uncomfortable in them.

When I was in high school, around 10th grade, I finally came around to “normal” clothes after an ill-advised stint in novelty t-shirts and big jeans. I started dressing like all the popular kids. In those days, it was khakis from The Gap and Doc Martens sandals. It wasn’t me, and I still didn’t really fit in. I didn’t figure it out until much, much later in life. I never looked good in them because I never felt good in them.

Not all trends are all that flattering.

(Bubble skirts pop into my mind.) Pick clothes that actually look good on you. I kept trying to pick clothes that looked like what I saw in magazines or catalogs, but they looked horrible on me. My mom would do this thing when she took me shopping, where she would pick up something I didn’t like and say, “Humor me.” Which loosely translated means, “Go try this on or you’re not getting anything.” Then, if it looked good, she would say, “That looks so becoming on you.”

Becoming on you. Not really the words every teenage girl is dying to hear in the dressing room. But she was onto something. There are lots of beautiful clothes out there. Just because you put them on, doesn’t mean you’ll look beautiful in them. It doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you. It just means that some clothes look good on certain shapes, lengths, and sizes of woman. There are some clothes that just don’t look good on anyone. Period.

Pick stuff you like, whether anyone else likes it or not.

Now, this piece of advice, I sometimes followed and sometimes didn’t as a teenager. Sometimes I followed it to my own detriment (like the Star Wars athletic tee I wouldn’t take off for most of age 15), and sometimes I didn’t follow it, also to my detriment (see above, where I wore clothes because they were trendy).

The times in my life I remember enjoying my style, and consequently felt the most confident, is when I wore what made me feel good. A lot of times it included really, really short hair, which didn’t always thrill my mom and certain types of boys, but I pulled it off because I felt good in it. I actually kind of rocked the short hair.

Cultivate a personal sense of style.

I spent a lot of time trying to look exactly like things I saw in magazines and catalogs, but that stuff passes. What’s hot today isn’t hot tomorrow. And then you wasted money on clothes that aren’t cool anymore. And you just got them like, last month. (I still make this mistake sometimes. That’s why I have 5 embellished t-shirts in my closet that I just got 6 months ago and probably won’t wear ever again.)

You’ll find items that you’ll literally cry over when something irreparable happens to them. I’m not talking about materialism; I mean pieces of clothing that you feel like are a perfect representation of you and your own style, that make you look and feel great. Look for things like that, and hang onto them.

The girls I remember wishing I could look like weren’t following trends or letting what everyone else was wearing dictate their style. Well, they weren’t trendy anyway. There was just something about them… they were comfortable, they owned their look, and most of them probably still do today, over a decade later.

Find your own clothing personality, and live outside of the trends. Ironically, this will make you the trendsetter.

Just a little advice from the me I am now to the me I was then.

This is the first post in a series called Letters to a Teenage Girl. Read the intro here.

I haven’t found much to blog about recently (oh, you noticed?), especially since my mind seems to be occupied with my start-up and our clients, etc. I’ve felt like I don’t have much to say in the way of advice. I’m feeling my way through new phases of my life, including marriage, and everything is going by so fast, there’s not much time to process it.

But, lately, I’ve been writing letters in my head to a teenage girl. One of my close friends has a 13-year-old daughter, and she relates her most recent adventures in the world of having a teenage daughter to me from time to time. So much of it sounds so familiar to me that I end up smiling to myself, and wishing someone would’ve told me all the things I didn’t figure out until I was in my mid-twenties.

Maybe someone did. Maybe it was my mom or my sister, and I just couldn’t hear it.

And so, these letters are for M. I hope she hears them.

Here are the current posts in order:
Be The Trendsetter: Letters to a Teenage Girl
Don’t Throw Your Mom Under the Bus: Letters to a Teenage Girl