The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter and How to Make the Most of Them Now — Illustrative Highlights
Identity Capital
Identity capital is our collection of personal assets. It is the repertoire of individual resources that we assemble over time. These are the investments we make in ourselves, the things we do well enough, or long enough, that they become a part of who we are. Some identity capital goes on a résumé, such as degrees, jobs, test scores, and clubs. Other identity capital is more personal, such as how we speak, where we are from, how we solve problems, how we look.
Weak Ties
“Our strong ties feel comfortable and familiar but, other than support, they may have little to offer. They are usually too similar — even too similarly stuck — to provide more than sympathy. They often don’t know any more about jobs or relationships than we do.
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.
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. while attitudes influence behavior, behavior can also shape attitudes. If we do a favor for someone, we come to believe we like that person. This liking leads back to another favor, and so on. A close variant of what is called the foot-in-the-door technique, or the strategy of making small requests before larger ones, the Ben Franklin effect tells us that one favor begets more favors and, over time, small favors beget larger ones.
The Unthought Known
You’ve spent more than two decades shaping who you are. You have experiences, interests, strengths, weaknesses, diplomas, hang-ups, and priorities. You didn’t just this moment drop onto the planet. You’re avoiding knowing what you know.
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.
My Life Should Look Better on Facebook
Most twentysomethings know better than to compare their lives to celebrity microblogs, yet they treat Facebook images and posts from their peers as real. We don’t recognize that most everyone is keeping their troubles hidden. This underestimation of how much other twentysomethings are struggling makes everything feel like an upward social comparison, one where our not-so-perfect lives look low compared to the high life everyone else seems to be living.
When you hear yourself saying — “life should look better than it did.”
remember that ..
Shoulds can masquerade as high standards or lofty goals, but they are not the same. Goals direct us from the inside, but shoulds are paralyzing judgments from the outside. Goals feel like authentic dreams while shoulds feel like oppressive obligations. Shoulds set up a false dichotomy between either meeting an ideal or being a failure, between perfection or settling. The tyranny of the should even pits us against our own best interests.
The Customized Life
A good story goes further in the twentysomething years than perhaps at any other time in life. College is done and résumés are fledgling, so the personal narrative is one of the few things currently under our control. As a twentysomething, life is still more about potential than proof. Those who can tell a good story about who they are and what they want leap over those who can’t.
Sometimes making choices feels like planning for my life in a way that seems boring. Sometimes making choices to pursue things that seem like good fits, or that match my interests, seems boring simply because it makes sense. I know that the way to live a good life is to pursue things that are not only interesting to you but that make sense.
Above all else in my life, I feared being ordinary. Now I guess you could say I had a revelation of the day-to-day. I finally got it there’s a reason everybody in the world lives this way — or at least starts out this way — because this is how it’s done.
An Upmarket Conversation
With one decision you choose your partner in all adult things. Money, work, lifestyle, family, health, leisure, retirement, and even death become a three-legged race. Almost every aspect of your life will be intertwined with almost every aspect of your partner’s life. And let’s face it, if things don’t work out, a marriage cannot just be left off a résumé like a failed job. Even as a divorced couple, you may be forever tied, financially and logistically, as you pay for schools and meet every other weekend in the driveway to exchange the kids.
Being choosy about the right things when you can still think clearly about claiming your life. Besides, like with work, good relationships don’t just appear when we’re ready. It may take a few thoughtful tries before we know what love and commitment really are.
Picking Your Family
There is something scary about picking your family. It’s not romantic. It means you aren’t just waiting for your soulmate to arrive. It means you know you are making decisions that will affect the rest of your life. It means you are thinking about the fact that your relationship needs to work not only in the here and now but also in the there and then.
Twentysomethings who aren’t at least a little scared about their relationships are often the ones who are being the least thoughtful.
Today, we see marriage as a commitment between two individuals. Western culture is generally individualistic, prizing independence and self-fulfillment in almost all areas. We emphasize rights over duties and choice over obligation. This extends especially to marriage. With some notable exceptions, there has never been more freedom to decide whether, when, and how to partner, and with whom. There is no question that this has led to countless happy unions, as well as the experience of owning one of the most important decisions of our lives. At the same time, the foregrounding of the individual in relationships has caused us to forget about one of our greatest twentysomething opportunities: picking and creating our families.
The Cohabitation Effect
Sliding into cohabitation wouldn’t be a problem if sliding out were as easy. It isn’t. In behavioral economics, it’s known as consumer lock-in.
Cohabitation is loaded with setup and switching costs, the basic ingredients of lock-in. Moving in together can be fun and economical, and the setup costs are subtly woven in. After years living among a roommate’s junky old stuff, we happily split the rent on a nice one-bedroom apartment. Couples share Wi-Fi and pets and enjoy shopping for new furniture together. Later, these setup costs have an effect on how likely we are to leave.
Cohabitating couples can break up and are a bit more likely to split than married couples. But many cohabitating couples don’t break up. They slide from dating to cohabitation. Then they lock into marriage because getting married seems easier than dividing up the furniture and starting over, especially when friends start walking down the aisle. The more aware singles are of this, the more they can understand what living together is… and what it isn’t. I am not for or against living together, but I am for twentysomethings knowing that, far from safeguarding against divorce, moving in with someone increases your chances of locking in on someone, whether he or she is right for you or not.
On Dating Down
Adolescence is a time of many firsts, including our first attempt to form life stories. As we become capable of — and interested in — abstract thought, we start to put together stories about who we are and why. As our social networks expand across our teens and twenties, we repeat these stories to others and to ourselves. We use them to feel a sense of coherence as we move from place to place.
Our stories need to be edited and revised over time. When you write a story, there are probably some good instincts there, but you’re blinded by the feelings of the moment. When you look back on a story later, you can be more objective. A story you wrote might have made sense to you at the time you wrote it, but it has to make sense for everyone who reads it. You can see where it doesn’t make sense.
Twentysomething women and men who are dating down — or working down, for that matter — usually have untold, or at least unedited, stories. These stories originated in old conversations and experiences and, so, they change only through new conversations and new experiences.
Being in the Like
To be ‘in like.’ By this I mean two things: being alike in ways that matter and genuinely liking who the other person is. Often these go hand in hand. That is because the more similar two people are, the more they are able to understand each other. Each appreciates how the other acts and how he or she goes about the day.
The problem is, while people are good at matching themselves and others on relatively obvious criteria, such as age and education, it turns out that these qualities are what researchers call ‘deal breakers, not matchmakers’.
Deal breakers are your own personal sine qua non in relationships. They are qualities — almost always similarities — you feel are non-negotiable. The absence of these similarities allows you to weed out people with whom you have fundamental differences. But these conspicuous similarities are not matchmakers. They may bring us together, but they don’t necessarily make us happy.
One matchmaker to consider is personality. unlike deal breakers, personality is less obvious and not as easy to categorize. Personality is not about what we have done or even about what we like. It is about how we are in the world, and this infuses everything we do. Personality is the part of ourselves that we take everywhere, so it is worth knowing something about.
There will always be differences of some kind but, statistically speaking, that’s not what will kill a relationship. It’s what you do with the differences. Do you know what the differences are going in? Have you thought about how they will affect your life? Are you prepared to bridge or even accept them?
Forward Thinking
From MRI scans of healthy adolescents and twentysomethings, we now know that the frontal lobe does not fully mature until sometime between the ages of twenty and thirty. In our twenties, the pleasure-seeking, emotional brain is ready to go while the forward-thinking frontal lobe is still a work in progress.
Being smart in school is about how well you solve problems that have correct answers and clear time limits. But being a forward-thinking adult is about how you think and act even (and especially) in uncertain situations. The frontal lobe doesn’t just allow us to coolly solve the problem of what exactly we should do with our lives. Adult dilemmas — which job to take, where to live, whom to partner with, or when to start a family — don’t have right answers. The frontal lobe is where we move beyond the futile search for black-and-white solutions as we learn to tolerate — and act on — better shades of gray.
Forward thinking doesn’t just come with age. It comes with practice and experience. Twentysomethings who use their brains by engaging with good jobs and real relationships are learning the language of adulthood just when their brains are primed to learn it. Twentysomethings who don’t use their brains become thirtysomethings who feel behind as professionals and as partners — and as people, and they miss out on making the most of life still to come.
Because our twenties are the capstone of this last critical period, they are, as one neurologist said, a time of “great risk and great opportunity.” The post-twentysomething brain is still plastic, of course, but the opportunity is that never again in our lifetime will the brain offer up countless new connections and see what we make of them. Never again will we be so quick to learn new things. Never again will it be so easy to become the people we hope to be. The risk is that we may not act now.
Calm Yourself
When twentysomethings enter the workforce, and I mean really enter the workforce by getting a job that isn’t safe or easy, they are in for a shock. With no freshman class to huddle in, they may find themselves all alone at the absolute bottom. At the top may be bosses who are not interested in being mentors. Others don’t know how. These very same bosses are often the ones who are tasked with teaching twentysomethings how to navigate the brand-new world of work. It may be a match made in hell, but that’s the way it is.
Twentysomethings take these difficult moments particularly hard. Compared to older adults, they find negative information — the bad news — more memorable than positive information — or the good news. MRI studies show that twentysomething brains simply react more strongly to negative information than do the brains of older adults. There is more activity in the amygdala — the seat of the emotional brain.
Research shows that people who have some control over their emotions report greater life satisfaction, optimism, purpose, and better relationships with others. When something difficult happens at work, you can answer your emotional brain with reason. You think: What about the facts?
Outside In
Those who use what is called a growth mindset believe that people can change, that success is something to be achieved. Maybe it’s not the case that any person can be anything, but it is still true that within certain parameters, people can learn and grow. For those who have a growth mindset, failures may sting but they are also viewed as opportunities for improvement and change.
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.
Getting Along and Getting Ahead
In our twenties, positive personality changes come from what researchers call “getting along and getting ahead.” Feeling better doesn’t come from avoiding adulthood, it comes from investing in adulthood. These are the years when we move from school to work, from hookups to relationships or, from couches to apartments. Most of these changes are about making adult commitments — to bosses, partners, leases, roommates — and these commitments shift how we are in the world and who we are inside.
The investments we make in work and love trigger personality maturation. Being a cooperative colleague or a successful partner is what drives personality change. Settling down simply helps us feel more settled.
Even simply having goals can make us happier and more confident — both now and later. In one study that followed nearly five hundred young adults from college to the mid-thirties, increased goal-setting in the twenties led to greater purpose, mastery, agency, and well-being in the thirties. Goals are how we declare who we are and who we want to be. They are how we structure our years and our lives. 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 the goals you are setting for yourself today.
Every Body
For many, it just isn’t feasible to have children before work and love are figured out, and research consistently shows that educated moms are on the rise and good for kids. And, for the first time in history, women outnumber men in the workplace, which means that more women — and men — are balancing work and family. None of this has changed the way our bodies work. It has just changed how much we need to know about fertility.
Most of these changes are about female fertility, because this is something scientists know a lot about. Still, a biological clock ticks in both women and men. Researchers are beginning to find that older sperm may be associated with various neurocognitive problems in children, including autism, schizophrenia, dyslexia, and lower intelligence. Fertility, or the ability to reproduce, peaks for women during the late twentysomething years. Biologically speaking, the twenties will be the easiest time to have a baby for most women. Some declines in fertility begin at about thirty and at thirty-five, a woman’s ability to become pregnant and carry a baby to term drops considerably. At forty, fertility plummets.
Even if we assume couples will have all the children they hope for with no trouble whatsoever, a 2010 study shows that simply postponing marriage and children leads to more stressful lives for families. When babies need to come so quickly and so close together after ‘I do,’ newlywed couples are thrust directly into what research shows are typically the most strained years of marriage. This is especially true as the work of raising young children collides with our peak earning years.
When people had their kids at twenty-two, it was pretty much a given you’d be around to finish what you started. Nobody worried about it. Now a lot of parents come in and say, “Hey, I need to be healthy at least until my kids are off in college. Please be sure I make it that long.” How screwed up is that?
Do the Math
Twentysomething exploits are met with more enthusiastic clichés, such as “You’re only young once” or “Have fun while you can.” These messages encourage risk-taking and what one researcher calls “now-or-never behaviors” that don’t actually make us happy for long. Again and again, twentysomethings hear they have infinite time for the dreaded adult things but so little time for the purportedly good stuff. This makes living in the present easy. It’s connecting the present with the future that takes work.
Most twentysomethings can’t write the last sentence of their lives, but when pressed, they usually can identify things they want in their thirties or forties or sixties — or things they don’t want — and work backward from there. This is how you have your own multigenerational epic with a happy ending. This is how you live your life in real time.
Will Things Work Out for Me?
The future isn’t written in the stars.
There are no guarantees.
So claim your adulthood.
Be intentional.
Get to work.
Pick your family.
Do the math.
Make your own certainty.
Don’t be defined by what you didn’t know or didn’t do.
You are deciding your life right now.
PS : The images are collected from various sources for the purpose of illustration. All the texts are excerpts from the Book.
