Maddie recommended this book last weekend when she visited. I’m always game for self-help books and this sounded especially topical as I begin my early 20s. I found a few quiet hours on Easter Sunday and blasted through the ~200 pages of insightful and thoughtful advice.
High-level highlights:
Meg Jay pulls anecdotes from her experience as a clinical psychologist seeing in their late-20s, 30s and 40s who are handicapped by their “lack of vision” in their 20s. I.e. lack of intentionality, commitment, and planning in the “defining decade” have led them to carry out rather unfulfilling 30s, with a constricted timeline and not as much optionality as they had hoped.
The book is broken down into three sections (& corresponding advice):
- Work: We’re more educated than ever before and have heightened expectations about our careers because other life commitments (marriage, children, mortgages, etc.) are delayed
- Choose jobs that give you the most identity capital. You might be underemployed, underpaid, etc. but understand that this is part of the journey so long as you are building solid skills
- Your friends aren’t going to employ you (for the most part), and the majority of our career network and opportunities come from weak ties (alum networks, friend of friends, etc.)
- It’s good to have positive optionality, but do not be paralyzed by choice and don’t feel that commitment is letting go of freedom. Jay alludes to the jam experiment – the more options there are, the less motivating and less satisfied over all (link)
- Love: Marriage is pushed back, and the 20s allow us to date with no commitment, pushing the thought of serious relationships to much later in life
- You can’t pick your own family, but you can pick the family you will marry in to
- Don’t live with your partner before you are committed to marry each other. The act needs to be intentional vs. for convenience sake. Living together before marriage is not a trial-run for a relationship and those who do so are more likely to divorce post-marriage
- Personality compatibility matters, and traveling to a third world country is the best way to stress test a relationships. Also, being neurotic is bad for relationships – you have to learn how to control it
- The Brain & Body: Our brains continue to develop into our 20s as we learn to adapt, commit despite uncertainty, and challenge our intellect vs. solving clear problems (in school)
- We’re wired to react worse than normal to negative information / take criticisms more personally and jump to conclusions. Self-regulation needs to be developed during this time
- Ask yourself where you want to be and start building backwards to figure out what the timeline is / how to get to your goals
- Don’t have present bias. Invest in ourselves and our relationships. The 20s do have an ending, and they get better so long as we devote time & effort to it
Select quotes:
On the 20s:
“Our 20s are the defining decade of adulthood. 80% of life’s most defining moments take place by about age 35. 2/3 of lifetime wage growth happens during the first ten years of a career. More than half of Americans are married or are dating or living with their future partner by age 30. Personality can change more during our 20s than at any other decade in life. Female fertility peaks at 28. The brain caps off its last major growth spurt. When it comes to adult development, 30 is not the new 20. Even if you do nothing, not making choices is a choice all the same. Don’t be defined by what you didn’t know or didn’t do.”
“Our twenties can be like living beyond time. When we graduate from school, we leave behind the only lives we have ever known, ones that have been neatly packaged in semester-sized chunks with goals nestled within. Suddenly, life opens up and the syllabi are gone. There are days and weeks and months and years, but no clear way to know when or why any one thing should happen. It can be a disorienting, cave-like existence. As one twentysomething astutely put it, “The twentysomething years are a whole new way of thinking about time. There’s this big chunk of time and a whole bunch of stuff that needs to happen somehow.”
“Knowing what to overlook is one way older adults are typically wiser than young adults. With age comes what is known as “positivity effect”. We become more interested in positive information, and our brains react less strongly to what negative information we do encounter.”
On Work:
“The Ben Franklin Effect: If weak ties do favors for us, they start to like us. Then they become even more likely to grant us additional favors in the future. Franklin decided that if he wanted to get someone in his side, he ought to ask for a favor. And he did.”
“Weak ties feel too different or, in some cases, literally too far away to be close friends. But that’s the point. Because they’re not just figures in an already ingrown cluster, weak ties give us access to something fresh. They know things and people that we don’t know. Information and opportunity spread farther and faster through weak ties than through close friends because weak ties have fewer overlapping contacts. Weak ties are like bridges you cannot see all the way across, so there is no telling where they might lead.”
“Goals have been called the building blocks of adult personality, and it is worth considering that who you will be in your thirties and beyond is being built out of goals you are setting for yourself today.”
“Confidence doesn’t come from the inside out. It moves from the outside in. People feel less anxious–and more confident–on the inside when they can point to things they have done well on the outside. Fake confidence comes from stuffing our self-doubt. Empty confidence comes from parental platitudes on our lunch hour. Real confidence comes from mastery experiences, which are actual, lived moments of success, especially when things seem difficult. Whether we are talking about love or work, the confidence that overrides insecurity comes from experience. There is no other way.”
On Love:
“Marriage is one of our most defining moments because so much is wrapped up in it. If building a career is like spending twelve hours at the blackjack table—seeing the cards as you make your decisions, playing each hand with current winnings in mind, having a new opportunity to take a chance or play it safe with every card dealt—then choosing a mate is like walking over to the roulette wheel and putting all your chips on red 32.”
“Traveling in a third-world country is the closest thing there is to being married and raising kids. You have glorious hikes and perfect days on the beach. You go on adventures you would never try, or enjoy, alone. But you also can’t get away from each other. Everything is unfamiliar. Money is tight or you get robbed. Someone gets sick or sunburned. You get bored. It is harder than you expected, but you are glad you didn’t just sit home.”
“Older spouses may be more mature, but later marriage has its own challenges. Rather than growing together while their twentysomething selves are still forming, partners who marry older may be more set in their ways. And a series of low-commitment, possibly destructive relationships can create bad habits and erode faith in love. And even though searching may help you find a better partner, the pool of available singles shallows over time, perhaps in more ways than one.”
“Neuroticism, or the tendency to be anxious, stressed, critical, and moody, is far more predictive of relationship unhappiness and dissolution than is personality dissimilarity. While personality similarity can help the years run smoothly, any two people will be different in some way or another. How a person responds to these differences can be more important than the differences themselves. To a person who runs high in Neuroticism, differences are seen in a negative light. Anxiety and judgments about these differences then lead to criticism and contempt, two leading relationship killers.”
On Goals & Commitment:
“Unthought knowns are those things we know about ourselves but forget somehow. These are the dreams we have lost sight of or the truths we sense but don’t say out loud. We may be afraid of acknowledging the unthought known to other people because we are afraid of what they might think. Even more often, we fear what the unthought known will then mean for ourselves and our lives. Ian pretended that not knowing what to do was the hard part when, somewhere inside, I think he knew that making a choice about something is when the real uncertainty begins. The more terrifying uncertainty is wanting something but not knowing how to get it. It is working toward something even though there is no sure thing. When we make choices, we open ourselves up to hard work and failure and heartbreak, so sometimes it feels easier not to know, not to choose, and not to do. But it isn’t.”
“Being confused about choices is nothing more than hoping that maybe there is a way to get through life without taking charge.”
“While most would agree with Socrates that, “the unexamined life is not worth living,” a lesser-known quote by Sheldon Kopp might be more important here: “The unlived life is not worth examining.”
Nat's Corner 