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

Identity capital is our stock of personal assets. It is how we add value to who we are, and it is what we have to show for how we have spent our time. These are the investments we make in ourselves, or the things we do well enough or long enough that they become a part of who we are. Rather than coming from that “lightning bolt of intuition” Helen

But some underemployment doesn’t pay off. Sometimes it is just a way to pretend we aren’t working,

I have watched smart, interesting twentysomethings avoid “real jobs” in the “real world” only to drag themselves through years of underemployment, all the while becoming too tired and too alienated to look for something that might actually make them happy. Later, such work is even harder to find.

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 think they want leap over those who can’t.

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

When Danielle called her mother, she was doing what therapists call “borrowing an ego.” 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 toss our distress like a hot potato too much, we don’t learn to handle bad days on our own.

Many of these things are incompatible and, as research is just starting to show, simply harder to do all at the same time in our thirties.

the fact that I never felt like I was better than those around me, and that I was just focused on learning and getting results, is what has led me to better and better things at my company.

Unthought knowns are those things we know about ourselves but forget somehow. They are the dreams we have lost sight of or the truths we sense but don’t say out loud.