The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter and How to Make the Most of Them Now

by Meg Jay

while attitudes influence behavior, behavior can also shape attitudes.

altruism has been linked to happiness, health, and longevity— as long as the help we give is not a burden.

He presented himself as a serious person with a need that matched. He made himself interesting. He made himself relevant. And he asked for a clearly defined favor: the use of a book.

The fastest route to something new is one phone call, one e-mail, one box of books, one favor, one thirtieth birthday party.

this is the time to be connecting, not just with the same people having the same conversations about how work is lame or how there

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.

“Not making choices isn’t safe. The consequences are just further away in time, like in your thirties or forties.”

“In my experience, these are the most uncertain and some of the most difficult years of life.”

Scrambling after ideals, we become alienated from what is true about ourselves and the world.

Goals feel like authentic dreams while shoulds feel like oppressive obligations.

I had to stop worrying about how life was supposed to look, because it wasn’t pretty.

bigness came from investing in what I had, from taking part in what was in front of me.

I told her that an adult life is built not out of eating, praying, and loving but out of person, place, and thing: who we are with, where we live, and what we do for a living.

often the first thing we know about ourselves is not what we are—it’s what we aren’t. We mark ourselves as not-this or not-that,

I worried that by making that choice, I was closing all the other doors open to me at that moment. But it was sort of liberating to make a choice about something. Finally.

Twentysomethings who aren’t at least a little scared about their relationships are often the ones who are being the least thoughtful.

It meant she was taking love as seriously as she had always taken work.

In psychotherapy, there’s a saying that “the slower you go, the faster you get there.” Sometimes the best way to help people is to slow them down long enough to examine their own thinking. Everyone has gaps in their reasoning. If you stop and shine a light on these mental ellipses, you find assumptions that drive behavior without our being aware of them.

Lock-in is the decreased likelihood to search for other options, or change to another option, once an investment in something has been made.

Two people who are similar are going to have the same reactions to a rainy day, a new car, a long vacation, an anniversary, a Sunday morning, and a big party.

“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?”

Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward.

The more you use your brain, the more brain you will have to use.

Twentysomethings who don’t feel anxious and incompetent at work are usually overconfident or underemployed.

Knowing what to overlook is one way that older adults are typically wiser than young adults. With age comes what is known as a positivity effect. We become more interested in positive information, and our brains react less strongly to what negative information we do encounter. We disengage with interpersonal conflict, choosing to let it be, especially when those in our network are involved.

As criticism blows us every which way, we feel—at work and in love—only as good as the last thing that happened.

But older adults—and even twentysomethings who work at it—can be rooted in the confidence that problems can be solved, or at least survived.

She was reaching out in a moment of need and letting someone else’s frontal lobe do the work. We all need to do that sometimes, but if we externalize our distress too much, we don’t learn to handle bad days on our own. We don’t practice soothing ourselves just when our brains are in the best position to pick up new skills.

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.

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. Twentysomethings who don’t feel like they are getting along or getting ahead, on the other hand, feel stressed and angry and alienated

Twentysomethings who experience even some workplace success or financial security are more confident, positive, and responsible than those who do not.

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,

The management of fertility is one of the most important functions of adulthood. —Germaine Greer, feminist theorist

Present bias is especially strong in twentysomethings who put a lot of psychological distance between now and later. Love or work can seem far off in time, like the way that Rachel tossed marriage and kids decades into the future. The future can also seem socially distant when we hang out with people who are not talking about it either. Later can even feel spatially far away if we imagine ultimately settling down in some other place.

A timeline may not be a virtual reality chamber, but it can help our brains see time for what it really is: limited. It can give us a reason to get up in the morning and get going.