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

That’s why I wish I had done more during my first few years out of college. I wish I had pushed myself to take some work leaps or a wider range of jobs. I wish I had experimented—with work—in a way I feel I can’t right now at almost thirty.

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.

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.

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 manageably organized into semester-sized chunks with microgoals nestled within. There are syllabi and tests and papers and assignments that keep us on track. There are teachers (or parents) to tell us wha

This gives millions of young people unfettered access to the internet—and to comparisons and distractions and porn and online shopping and hate speech and fake news and the list goes on—with little information about, or maybe even regard for, the consequences. No one really knows what the effects of all this will be. As the first generations of dig

We spent even more sessions helping her shift from being wanted to wanting. Cathy had never thought about what she wanted or needed in a partner. She never thought she could do the wanting.

Without a doubt, then, friends play a crucial role for many twentysomethings, and they provide lots of good times. With all the attention paid to the urban tribe, however, many twentysomethings have limited themselves to huddling together with the same few people. This is a problem because, while the urban tribe may be the most supportive figures i

I felt a lot of internal pressure to figure it out, but 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.

What this means is that, in our twenties, the quick, hot, impulsive, pleasure-seeking, emotional brain is ready to go, while the slow, cool, rational, forward-thinking frontal lobe is still a work in progress.

If you take care of the minutes, the years will take care of themselves. —Tibetan proverb