Adult Stuff: Things You Need to Know to Win at Real Life

by Robert Boesel, Matt Moore

Your future is...limited!
Wait, we mean...limiting...
No, hold on...limitless.

Sometimes your first steps into the "real world" send you falling flat on your face. It's natural to be optimistic about new experiences, but most of us set ourselves up only to be let down every time. And disappointment hurts like a $%&*#.

News flash: You don't have to be an Einstein to survive adult life. You don't even have to abandon your standards to get what you want. All you have to do is keep your expectations realistic.

Don't worry if you're not feeling 100 percent confident about your abilities to live like a grown-up, Robert Boesel and Matt Moore (a.k.a. your new best friends/big brothers) will guide you over the impending hurdles of adulthood, including:

Your First Apartment you can't have nice things
Business Trips if they were meant to be fun, they'd be called vacations
Pets you are in no position to keep a creature alive! Plants are iffy too...

And much more! From constructing your first IKEA-filled apartment to trying to land your dream job (and landing at the bottom of the corporate ladder instead), Adult Stuff gives every aspiring grown-up a much-needed reality check on how to conquer life's challenges like a champ."

Genres: Nonfiction

224 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2016

Reviews

[Kay ☾ · Rating 2 out of 5]

I would have benefited from the book if I was in the 18-22 age range. At 27 this book did nothing but made me chuckle a few times. Gifting this to my sister on her 22nd birthday later on this year. She needs it more than I do.

[Morgan · Rating 3 out of 5]

While humorous and enlightening, some parts of it felt a little niche-y. I'm also not sure if I liked how subsections would flip-flop between guy and girl centric without any real... Logic? I feel like I would have enjoyed it much more if it were more consistently gender-neutral when it comes to adulting.

But it was still incredibly funny in a lot of places, and because it made me laugh, I'd still recommend it to friends.

[Julio Biason · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alright, right up front, let me say that it is weird to read a book about "How to Survive Real Life When You Just Got Passed Your Teens and Now Need to Work and Keep a Place and Have a Life" when you're 43. But here we are.

One thing the book does (although a bit too flourish for my taste) is to destroy all those dreams of a perfect life: Oh, you're out of your parents apartment? Sure, you can have that huge loft Tom Hanks have in "Big", or a nice apartment like the ones in "Friends"? NOT! Oh, sharing with someone you go fine? It will be like "Friends", every day! SIKE!

So, yeah, it is not that bad, but it is not a dream.

But instead of saying "Nope" all the time, the book tries to give some advice on how to survive this dark times. I think it missed the point sometimes; for example: dripping faucet? Hire someone. Why not buy two, play with one till you understand how it fits and then try the other one. Sure, hiring someone and watching over their shoulder how to do is something I do all this time -- I'm not kidding here -- but you can also experiment yourself. You'd pay double, but if you manage to understand how things work, you'll have a spare and if you break it, at least you got it shouldn't work.

[Alex · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m technically the target age of this book, but tbh I think it would be better suited towards a younger crowd than me, at 24. Most of the advice was stuff I’ve been-there-done-that already. I’m sure it’d be helpful for those freshly 18 - 21 aged people, but literally anyone older than that and it’s a reiteration of what you already know. That said, I still gave it 3 stars cause it was amusing to read, and a great time-waster in the middle of my current read

[Cordelia · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book was both unfunny and unhelpful. The authors had a very pessimistic way of looking at this world, which I understand because not everything is like the books or movies, but it was so overly pessimistic. If I met people who talked like this book in real life I don't think we'd be friends or even talk really past the first convo.

The lack of humor wasn't even made up for in suggestions on what to do. There wasn't any meat to this book and felt like a waste of 205 pages.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pros:

* Decent advice.
* Hilariously written.
* I really didn't know half of this stuff in my 20s. Would have been genuinely useful.

Cons:

* Quite American-centric, although the problems I saw were very apparent for me in the UK too.
* Mostly applies to graduates moving into big cities for the first time.

[Johanna Eichner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hilarious and accurate!

[Delphine · Rating 1 out of 5]

*DNF*

[Kat · Rating 1 out of 5]

I picked up "Adult Stuff" thinking it would be an amusing read, if nothing else. As a twenty-something myself making my way in the world, why not see what kind of advice they could give me? Perhaps it was the way I was raised- but almost everything in Adult Stuff is common sense. Maybe the younger generations don't know the things being mentioned, like how you don't have the bank account for that vacation or a road trip shows people's true colors, but I do. As someone who also doesn't bother with alcohol, this book was mostly a waste of time for me to read. While I'm sure it was meant to be funny and sarcastic, some of the text came across very demeaning and rude. Very disappointed.

[Shanna · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked up this book on a whim through my library. It intrigued me as I was its target audience: a young twenty something who is doing her best to navigate this crazy world. I did not expect to take this book as a serious self help guide to adulthood and I'm glad that I didn't. Most of what you will find between the covers of this book is common sense dashed with mediocre humor. Sure, this book made me laugh audibly a couple of times, but it's not worth spending money over. I give it a weak 3 stars merely because it was fun to dive into some quick and light reading between my book group picks.

[nikki]

i expected this to be a humour book, but apparently this is more of a sincere self-help type of book with humour sprinkled in. which isn't what i wanted when i borrowed this book. my bad... (the cover is little cut-out people with cut-out clothes and accessories and a cut-out dog! my brain looks at that and the title "adult stuff" and categorizes the book immediately as humour!)

[Marcus · Rating 5 out of 5]

I expected this book to be a satire of self-help books. I was surprised to find it was a genuine self-help book. As someone who is twenty years outside his twenties, I'm not qualified to say whether the advice given is actually helpful, but it's an entertaining read nonetheless.

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hilarious!

[Lauren · Rating 3 out of 5]

A case of: What you see is what you get.
It wasn't very in-depth or groundbreaking, but I enjoyed it well enough.

[Valerie Jackson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fun read. Written for people way younger than I am, but still a fun read. Full of the stuff you wish you had known.

[Ashley Reusora]

Absolutely hilarious! Really tells you how it is in the adult world. I should know since I've already discovered the do's and donts of their choice topics.

[A Poste · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not for me. Written for a late-teens person just going on their own for the first time.

[Imaculate Mosha]

Short , real book for a good laugh. Relevant to American, outgoing young adult , but still .. LOL!