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

The fastest route to something new is one phone call, one email, one box of books, one favor, one thirtieth birthday party, one chance meeting, one weak tie.

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

But it’s just so easy. It’s hard to resist this power handed to me.” “Power . . .” “The power to be desired. The power to feel special.” “And if a man doesn’t want you, you feel unspecial?”

What I most notice about spending less time on social media is that I finally get to think my own thoughts.

The frontal lobe is where we move beyond the futile search for black-and-white solutions as we learn to tolerate—and act on—shades of gray.

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

Literally, confidence means “with trust.” Confidence is trusting yourself to get the job done—whether that job is public speaking or sales or 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 co

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.