The Defining Decade Quotes

“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,”
― Meg Jay, The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter--And How to Make the Most of Them Now

“Talia’s friends invalidated what was real about Talia by assuming that searching was better than finding, friends were better than family, and adventure was better than going home.”
― Meg Jay, The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter--And How to Make the Most of Them Now

“Identity capital is our collection of personal assets...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.”
― Meg Jay, The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter - And How to Make the Most of Them Now

“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.”
― Meg Jay, The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter - And How to Make the Most of Them Now

“Knowing you want to do something isn't the same as knowing how to do it, and even knowing how to do something isn't the same as actually doing it well.”
― Meg Jay, The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter - And How to Make the Most of Them Now

“Life stories with themes of ruin can trap us. Life stories that are triumphant can transform us.”
― Meg Jay, The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter - And How to Make the Most of Them Now

“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.”
― Meg Jay, The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter - And How to Make the Most of Them Now

“I kept thinking of an even more robust research finding: that being on the high end of the Neuroticism dimension is toxic for relationships. Neuroticism, or the tendency to be anxious, stressed, critical, and moody, is far more predictive of relationship unhappiness and dissolution than is personality dissimilarity.”
― Meg Jay, The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter - And How to Make the Most of Them Now

“It’s easy to surround yourself with friends who are just like you. As a group, you may decide everyone else is doing it wrong. Friends can form a culture of criticism where differences are seen as deficiencies.” “OK…” “But sometimes differences are just differences. They can even be strengths.”
― Meg Jay, The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter - And How to Make the Most of Them Now

“We even know that larger social networks change our brains for the better as they require us to communicate with more and different others.”
― Meg Jay, The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter - And How to Make the Most of Them Now

“We become what we hear and see and do every day. We don’t become what we don’t hear and see and do every day. In neuroscience, this is known as “survival of the busiest.”
― Meg Jay, The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter - And How to Make the Most of Them Now

“Every day, I work with twentysomethings who feel horribly deceived by the idea that their twenties would be the best years of their lives.”
― Meg Jay, The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter - And How to Make the Most of Them Now

“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.”
― Meg Jay, The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter - And How to Make the Most of Them Now

“In the twentieth century, it was tempting to minimize the effects of divorce. Some adults in unhappy marriages imagined trickle-down happiness: They would be happier after divorce; therefore, so would their kids. But as these kids matured, “the unexpected legacy of divorce” was undeniable. Many children of divorce said they had not much noticed—or cared—whether their parents were happily married. What they did know was that their lives fell apart after their parents split, as resources and parents became stretched too thin.”
― Meg Jay, The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter - And How to Make the Most of Them Now

“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.”
― Meg Jay, The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter - And How to Make the Most of Them Now

“The twentysomething years have never been more in the zeitgeist. Popular culture has an almost obsessive focus on the twenties such that these freebie years appear to be all that exist. Child celebrities and everyday kids spend their youth acting twenty, while mature adults and the Real Housewives dress, and are sculpted, to look twenty-nine. The young look older and the old look younger, collapsing the adult lifespan into one long twentysomething ride.”
― Meg Jay, The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter - And How to Make the Most of Them Now

“The twenties are an inflection point—the great reorganization—a time when the experiences we have disproportionately influence the adult lives we will lead.”
― Meg Jay, The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter - And How to Make the Most of Them Now

“All the thinking I did was really debilitating and unproductive. The one thing I have learned is that you can’t think your way through life. The only way to figure out what to do is to do—something.”
― Meg Jay, The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter - And How to Make the Most of Them Now

“In my practice, I notice that many twentysomethings—especially those who surround themselves with other twentysomethings—have trouble anticipating life. They need memento vivi—or ways to remember they are going to live. They need something to remind them that life is going to continue on past their twenties, and that it might even be great.”
― Meg Jay, The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter--And How to Make the Most of Them Now

“Sometimes Danielle fantasized about “waiting tables or working in some easy job where [she] didn’t have to think or didn’t make mistakes.” But twentysomethings who hide out in underemployment, especially those who are hiding out because of a lack of confidence, are not serving themselves. For work success to lead to confidence, the job has to be challenging and it must require effort. It has to be done without too much help. And it cannot go well every single day. A long run of easy successes creates a sort of fragile confidence, the kind that is shattered when the first failure comes along. A more resilient confidence comes from succeeding—and from surviving some failures.”
― Meg Jay, The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter--And How to Make the Most of Them Now

“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. It is not uncommon for twentysomething clients to come to therapy hoping I can help them increase their confidence. Some wonder if maybe I do hypnosis and a hypnotherapy session might do the trick (I don’t, and it wouldn’t), or they hope I can recommend some herbal remedy (I can’t). The way I help twentysomethings gain confidence is by sending them back to work or back to their relationships with some better information. I teach them about how they can have more mastery over their emotions. I talk to them about what confidence really is. Literally, confidence means “with trust.” In research psychology, the more precise term is self-efficacy, or one’s ability to be effective or produce the desired result. No matter what word you use, confidence is trusting yourself to get the job done—whether that job is public speaking, sales, teaching, or being an assistant—and that trust only comes from having gotten the job done many times before. As was the case for every other twentysomething I’d worked with, Danielle’s confidence on the job could only come from doing well on the job—but not all the time.”
― Meg Jay, The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter--And How to Make the Most of Them Now

“In a longitudinal study of college students, freshmen were evaluated for fixed mindsets or growth mindsets and then followed across their four years of enrollment. When the students with fixed mindsets encountered academic challenges such as daunting projects or low grades, they gave up, while the students with growth mindsets responded by working harder or trying new strategies. Rather than strengthening their skills and toughening their resolve, four years of college left the students with fixed mindsets feeling less confident. The feelings they most associated with school were distress, shame, and upset. Those with growth mindsets performed better in school overall and, at graduation time, they reported feeling confident, determined, enthusiastic, inspired, and strong.”
― Meg Jay, The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter--And How to Make the Most of Them Now

“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.”
― Meg Jay, The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter--And How to Make the Most of Them Now

“Gage’s social recovery, and countless subsequent studies of the brain, tell us that the brain changes in response to the environment. This is especially true in the twentysomething years as the brain caps off its second—and final—growth spurt.”
― Meg Jay, The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter--And How to Make the Most of Them Now

“The Big Five refers to five factors that describe how people interact with the world: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism. Just”
― Meg Jay, The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter--And How to Make the Most of Them Now

“Finding someone like you might seem easy, but there is a twist—not just any similarity will do. Dating and married couples do tend to be similar to each other in attractiveness, age, education, political views, religion, and intelligence. So”
― Meg Jay, The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter--And How to Make the Most of Them Now

“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.”
― Meg Jay, The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter--And How to Make the Most of Them Now

“Because short-term work has replaced long-term careers in our country, as jobs come and go so do twentysomethings themselves. The average twentysomething will have more than a handful of jobs in their twenties alone. One-third will move in any given year, leaving family and friends and résumés and selves scattered. About one in eight go back home to live with Mom or Dad, at least in part because salaries are down and college debt is up, with the number of students owing more than $40,000 having increased tenfold in the past ten years.”
― Meg Jay, The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter--And How to Make the Most of Them Now

“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.”
― Meg Jay, The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter--And How to Make the Most of Them Now

“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, cavelike 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 needs to happen somehow.”
― Meg Jay, The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter--And How to Make the Most of Them Now