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

Inaction breeds fear and doubt. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy. —Dale Carnegie, writer and lecturer Knowledge is not skill. Knowledge plus 10,000 times is skill. —Shinichi Suzuki, founder of the Suzuki Method for music instruction

They have higher self-esteem and are more persevering and realistic. This path to identity is associated with a host of positive outcomes, including a clearer sense of self, greater life satisfaction, better stress management, stronger reasoning, and resistance to conformity—all the things Helen wanted.

Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward. —Søren Kierkegaard, philosopher

Lock-in is the decreased likelihood to search for other options, or change to another option, once an investment in something has been made. The initial investment, called a setup cost, can be big or small. A form. An entrance fee. The hassle of creating an online account. A down payment on a car. The greater the setup costs, the less likely we are

Life does not need to be linear but it does, as this executive said, need to make sense.

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.

Like the easiest way to explain black is to call it the opposite of white, 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, the way Ian was quick to say he didn’t want to sit at the same desk all day. But self-definition cannot end there. An identity or a career cannot

Irving lets us know that good stories, and happy endings, are more intentional than that. Most twentysomethings can’t write the last sentence of their lives, but when pressed, they usually can identify things they want in their thirties or forties or sixties—or things they don’t want—and work backward from there. This is how you have your own multi

[Society] is structured to distract people from the decisions that have a huge impact on happiness in order to focus attention on the decisions that have a marginal impact on happiness. The most important decision any of us make is who we marry. Yet there are no courses on how to choose a spouse. —David Brooks, political and cultural commentator