My Note
My highlights
395 highlights from Kindle. These are the lines I stopped at.
You are deciding your life right 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. Don’t be defined by what you didn’t know or didn’t do.
As I gathered up my maps and turned to go, I hesitated and asked the ranger, “Am I going to make it?” He looked at me and said, “You haven’t decided yet.”
The nicest part about getting older is knowing how your life worked out, especially if you like what you wake up to every day. If you are paying attention to your life as a twentysomething, the real glory days are still to come.
In one way or another, almost every twentysomething client I have wonders, “Will things work out for me?” The uncertainty behind that question is what makes twentysomething life so difficult, but it is also what makes twentysomething action so possible and so necessary.
Adulthood is sort of like that. There are things that just are what they are. The smartest thing to do is know as much about them as you can.
MOUNTAINS DON’T CARE.
The best part about being my age is knowing how my life worked out. —Scott Adams, cartoonist
This is how you have your own multigenerational epic with a happy ending. This is how you live your life in real time.
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.
“I always begin with the last sentence”; then I work my way backwards, through the plot, to where the story should begin.”
I thought if I didn’t participate in adulthood, time would stop. But it didn’t. It just kept going. People around me kept going. Now I see I need to get going—and keep going.
But twentysomethings who live beyond time usually aren’t happy. It’s like living in a cave where we never know what time it is or what we ought to do or why, sometimes until it is too late.
going. Our twenties are when we have to start creating our own sense of time, our own plans about how the years ahead will unfold. It is difficult to know how to start our careers or when to start our families. It is tempting to stay distracted and keep everything at a distance.
The problem with feeling distant from the future is that distance leads to abstraction, and abstraction leads to distance, and round and round it goes. The further away love and work seem, the less we need to think about them; the less we think about love and work, the further away they feel. I started to sketch out a timeline to bring the future closer and to make Rachel’s thinking more concrete.
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, like the way that Rachel tossed marriage and kids decades into the future.
“There is a big difference between having a life in your thirties and starting a life in your thirties.”
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.
In my practice, I notice that many twentysomethings—especially those who surround themselves with other twentysomethings—have trouble anticipating life.
Life consisted of being twentysomething or nearly dead. There was no mention of what might go on in his thirties or forties or sixties or seventies, much less the idea that he might want to be around—and well—for it. He could not imagine himself as anything other than a twentysomething whose life revolved around his friends, but the rest of his life was going to come all the same.
Again and again, twentysomethings hear they have infinite time for the dreaded adult things but so little time for the purportedly good stuff. This makes living in the present easy. It’s connecting the present with the future that takes work.
At the same time, twentysomething exploits are met with more enthusiastic clichés, such as “You’re only young once” or “Have fun while you can.” These messages encourage risk-taking and what one researcher calls “now-or-never behaviors” that don’t actually make us happy for long: partying, multiple sex partners, blowing off responsibilities, being lazy, not having a real job.
But twentysomethings are especially prone to present bias. Their brains are still developing the forward thinking it takes to anticipate consequences and plan for the future.
This study brings to life, at least digitally, a core problem in behavior: present bias. People of all ages and walks of life discount the future, favoring the rewards of today over the rewards of tomorrow.
Now, I can honestly say that in all my hours of work with twentysomethings, retirement planning has almost never come up. Saving money in our twenties would be nice, but paying bills and managing debt are usually the pressing issues.
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.
we now know that the brain has difficulty keeping time across long, unpunctuated intervals.
Be ruled by time, the wisest counselor of all. —Plutarch, historian To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time. —Leonard Bernstein, composer
Why didn’t someone drop the manners and tell me I was wasting my life?
Lying there in the MRI, it was like I traded five years of partying or hanging out in coffee shops for five more years I could have had with my son if I’d grown up sooner.
why I spent so many years on nothing. So many years doing things and hanging out with people that don’t even rate a memory. For what? I had a good time in my twenties, but did I need to do all that for eight years?
When people had their kids at twenty-two, it was pretty much a given you’d be around to finish what you started. Nobody worried about it. Now she says a lot of parents come in and say, “Hey, I need to be healthy at least until my kids are off in college. Please be sure I make it that long.” How screwed up is that?
I wasn’t scared of losing my past. I was scared of losing my future. I felt like almost nothing in my life mattered up until just a few years ago. I realized that all the good stuff is still to come. I was so sick and panicked that I might never see my son ride a bike, play soccer, graduate from school, get married, have his own kids. And my career was just getting good.
There is something profoundly sad about seeing an eighty-year-old grandmother come to the hospital to meet a grandchild. It is crushing to realize there won’t be many sunny days at the lake with Grandpa or holidays spent in Grandma’s loving presence. It feels almost wrong to look at our children and wonder how long they will have their grandparents in their lives—or even how long they will have us.
Men and women will soon face caring for two entirely dependent groups of loved ones at precisely the moment they are most needed back at work.
If you have your kids between thirty-five and forty and they have their kids between thirty-five and forty, in one more generation it will be quite common, especially among the well-educated who tend to postpone childbearing the longest, for parents to be pulled in two directions not by twentysomethings and octogenarians but by toddlers and octogenarians.
Being whipsawed by the needs of a twentysomething child in college and a parent in a nursing home may be the case for many today, barely one generation into the widespread delay of marriage and kids.
According to the parents surveyed, about half feel they have too little time with their youngest child, about two-thirds feel they have too little time with their spouse, and another two-thirds report too little time for themselves.
a 2010 study shows that simply postponing marriage and children leads to more stressful lives for families. When babies need to come so quickly and so close together after “I do,” newlywed couples are thrust directly into what research shows are typically the most strained years of marriage. This is especially true as the work of raising young children collides with our peak earning years.
Too many men and women grieve not having all the children they want, or not being able to give their child a sibling, as they find that, because of their twentysomething choices, they have now run out of time.
Fertility may seem like a women’s issue, but as more couples have their first child in their thirties and forties, timing affects everybody.
The first signs of decreased fertility are difficulty becoming and staying pregnant. Trying au natural—just having sex around the time of ovulation—a woman has about a 20 to 25 percent chance of conceiving during each cycle, up to about age thirty-five. So when you’re young it takes, on average, about four or five months of having sex to get pregnant.
Fertility, or the ability to reproduce, peaks for women during the late twentysomething years. Biologically speaking, the twenties will be the easiest time to have a baby for most women. Some declines in fertility begin at about thirty and at thirty-five, a woman’s ability to become pregnant and carry a baby to term drops considerably. At forty, fertility plummets.
The availability heuristic is a mental shortcut whereby we decide how likely something is based on how easy it is to bring an example to mind.
timing of babies.
For this reason, and for reasons we will discuss further into the chapter, both men and women ought to be thinking about the
that older sperm may be associated with various neurocognitive problems in children, including autism, schizophrenia, dyslexia, and lower intelligence.
What is about to follow are some sobering statistics about having babies after the age of thirty-five. Medicine has been called “a science of uncertainty and an art of probability”, and this holds especially true for reproductive medicine.
These twentysomethings have a right to know that the years just ahead are their most fertile. They deserve to be educated about fertility statistics before they themselves are the statistics.
These numbers tell us that what many twentysomethings most want is to have happy families, at least eventually.
None of this has changed the way our bodies work. It has just changed how much we need to know about fertility.
setting goals and making commitments was the…
Being chronically uncoupled may be especially detrimental to men, as those who remained single throughout their twenties experienced a significant…
A study that tracked men and women from their early twenties to their later twenties found that of those who remained single—who dated or hooked up but avoided commitments—80 percent were dissatisfied with their dating…
Being single while you’re young may be glorified in the press, but staying single across the twenties…
these relationships can be a source of security and a more mature safe haven than what…
Steady relationships reduce social anxiety and depression as they help us feel less lonely and give us the opportunity to…
entering into stable relationships helps twentysomethings feel more secure and responsible, whether these…
Outside of work, commitments to others also foster change…
Even simply having goals can make us happier and more confident—both now and later. In one study that followed nearly five hundred young adults from college to the mid-thirties, increased goal-setting in the twenties led to greater purpose, mastery, agency, and well-being in the thirties. Goals are how we declare who we are and who we want to be. They are how we structure our years and our lives. Goals have been called the building blocks of adult personality, and it is worth…
Twentysomethings who experience even some workplace success or financial security are more confident, positive, and…
A great relationship or a job to be proud of may seem elusive, but just working toward these…
Twentysomethings who don’t feel like they are getting along or getting ahead, on the other hand, feel…
Settling down simply helps us feel…
The investments we make in work and love trigger personality maturation. Being a cooperative colleague or a successful partner…
Most of these changes are about making adult commitments—to bosses, partners, leases, roommates—and these commitments shift how we are…
These are the years when we move from school to work, from…
Feeling better doesn’t come from avoiding adulthood, it comes from…
“getting along and getting…
In our twenties, positive personality changes come from what…
life starts to feel better across the twentysomething years. We become more emotionally stable and less tossed around by life’s ups and downs. We become more conscientious and responsible. We become more socially competent. We feel more…
I suggested that, in addition to therapy, Sam get a job and, while he was at it, a regular place to sleep.
employed twentysomethings are happier than unemployed twentysomethings.
And because these changes are happening just as long-term careers and relationships are being decided, these same shifts can lead to very different lives. The twenties are a time when people and personalities are poised for transformation.
We now know that, of any time in life, our twenties are our best chance for change. I have seen twentysomethings move from socially anxious to socially confident-enough, or get beyond years of childhood unhappiness, in a relatively short period of time.
Life itself still remains a very effective therapist. —Karen Horney, psychoanalyst Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness. —Sigmund Freud, neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis
“You can go to work and be in love at the same time, you know. In fact, it would be good for you.”
Now when she felt anxious or incompetent, she calmed herself with what had gone well.
Danielle had been avoiding feedback at work because she felt almost terrorized by comments that had come her way. This was not working in her favor. Without concrete information, Danielle was too quick to assume the worst. Positive feedback would give her the opportunity to feel better, and negative feedback would give her the chance to do better.
The real challenge of the twentysomething years is the work itself. Ten thousand hours is five years of focused, full-time work (40 hours × 50 work weeks a year = 2,000 hours a year × 5 years = 10,000 hours) or ten years of less-targeted work (20 hours × 50 work weeks a year = 1,000 hours a year × 10 years = 10,000 hours). My
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.
Sometimes it seems that the challenge of the twentysomething years is to figure out what to do, and then suddenly it will just start happening. We imagine we will show up at work and instantly add value or be taken seriously. This is not the case.
Not everyone wants to be a virtuoso, but most twentysomethings I know want to be exceptionally good at what they choose to do. In most cases, it is going to take at least ten thousand hours of their time.
For the most part, “naturals” are myths. People who are especially good at something may have some innate inclination, or some particular talent, but they have also spent about ten thousand hours practicing or doing that thing.
They have found that a large part of what makes people good—and even great—at what they do is time in.
Mastering your emotions at work builds confidence. Then you can hang around long enough to have other successes at work. It’s going to take time. You need more mastery experiences.”
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.
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.
But twentysomethings who hide out in underemployment, especially those who are hiding out because of a lack of confidence, are not serving themselves.
Danielle’s confidence on the job could only come from doing well on the job—but not all the time.
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.
The way I help twentysomethings gain confidence is by sending them back to work or back to their relationships with some better information.
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.
to things they have done well on the outside.
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
As it goes for students, twentysomethings’ theories about success and confidence can have a profound effect on their performance on the job.
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.
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
Schoolkids with fixed mindsets enjoy work that affirms their belief that they have it—whether the it is science smarts or talent on the basketball court. But once the work becomes challenging, these same kids stop enjoying school. They feel threatened by hard work, fearing it means they don’t have it after all. Struggle means being a have-not.
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.
Those who use what is called a growth mindset believe that people can change, that success is something to be achieved.
We can have fixed mindsets about different things—intelligence, athletic ability, social savvy, thinness—but, whatever the case, a fixed mindset is a way of thinking in black and white.
Danielle’s idea that people were innately confident on the job, or they weren’t, is called a fixed mindset
Danielle looked at some of her coworkers and was just sure they were born with self-assurance, or at least graduated with it, when, in fact, most of the people she compared herself to were older than she was or had been working longer than she had. She
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
We all need to do that sometimes, but if we externalize our distress too much, we don’t learn to handle bad days on our own. We don’t practice soothing ourselves just when our brains are in the best position to pick up new skills.
When Danielle called her mother, she was doing what psychologists call “borrowing an ego.” She was reaching out in a moment of need and letting someone else’s frontal lobe do the work.
it. Research shows that people who have some control over their emotions report greater life satisfaction, optimism, purpose, and better relationships with others.
Danielle needed to understand that tough days were just winds blowing by and that work was not as personal as she imagined it to be.
Psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl describes our attitudes and reactions as being the last of our human freedoms.
“No. Stuffing your feelings—that’s not a root. That’s no better than chronic worrying. Suppressing your feelings keeps your body and brain stressed, and it impairs your memory. It will leave you in sort of a fog.”
Danielle made up her mind to stay with her boss for at least one year, and she shifted to a different, also problematic, strategy: She started worrying all the time.
If Danielle left her job, she would feel better for a time. But quitting would also only confirm her fear: that she was a poseur who didn’t belong in a good job anyway.
Twentysomethings and their active amygdalae often want to change their feelings by changing their jobs. They quit work that becomes messy or unpleasant, or they storm in and complain to their bosses’ bosses, not realizing that their bosses’ bosses’ amygdalae are unlikely to be as worked up as their own.
But older adults—and even twentysomethings who work at it—can be rooted in the confidence that problems can be solved, or at least survived.
As we age, we feel less like leaves and more like trees. We have roots that ground us and sturdy trunks that may sway, but don’t break, in the wind. The wind that blows by can be more serious. “You’re fired!” is much scarier when you have a mortgage. The things we do wrong at work are no longer typos but may be losing a $500,000 account or releasing software that crashes the company website for a day.
William James, the father of research psychology in the United States, said “The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook.”
When twentysomethings have their competence criticized, they become anxious and angry. They are tempted to march in and take action. They generate negative feelings toward others and obsess about the why: “Why did my boss say that? Why doesn’t my boss like me?” Taking work so intensely personally can make a forty-hour workweek long indeed.
MRI studies show that twentysomething brains simply react more strongly to negative information than do the brains of older adults. There is more activity in the amygdala—the seat of the emotional brain.
Twentysomethings take these difficult moments particularly hard. Compared to older adults, they find negative information—the bad news—more memorable than positive information—or the good news.
Some of these memories are unusually happy, such as getting a dream job or going on a great first date.
In fact, multiple studies have shown that more vivid memories come from early adulthood than any other developmental stage.
Because our twenties are when we transition into so many new things, twentysomething life is full of new and surprising moments, even flashbulb memories.
When something surprising happens, especially if it arouses emotions, we tend to remember it—vividly—for a long time.
Similarly, people are more likely to remember highly emotional events, such as times when they were happy or sad or embarrassed.
Danielle sounded a lot like the other twentysomethings I know who have good jobs. To understand what it can be like to be a twentysomething at work, it helps to know more about how the brain—and the twentysomething brain in particular—processes information.
Twentysomethings who don’t feel anxious and incompetent at work are usually overconfident or underemployed.
Danielle didn’t feel so well. She loved the work (the producing, not the lattes), but she had never felt so anxious and incompetent in her life. She called herself “the accidental producer.” Her confidence was “at an all-time low.”
what I do makes a difference for my boss and everyone else here. That’s what I lose sleep over. Every day I feel like I’m going to be fired. Or I’m going to disappoint someone. They are going to figure out they don’t need me. That I don’t belong here. Like I’ve lied on my résumé or something and I’m just pretending to be a grown-up. Then I’ll be waiting tables somewhere.”
I wasn’t going to fail out, and as long as I made decent grades I was going to walk away with a diploma just like everyone else. The end point was the same. Now
What happens at work every day matters. Typos matter and sick days matter, not just for the worker but for the company’s bottom line.
As one human resources professional said to me, “I wish someone would tell twentysomethings that the office has a completely different culture than what they are used to. You can’t start an e-mail with ‘Hey!’ You’re probably going to have to work at one thing for quite a while before being promoted—or even complimented. People are going to tell you not to tweet about work or put stupid posts on your Gchat status. Not to wear certain clothes. You have to think about how you speak and write. How you act. Twentysomethings who’ve never had jobs don’t know this. Neither do the scanners and baristas who’ve been hanging out at work chatting with their friends.”
These very same bosses are often the ones who are tasked with teaching twentysomethings how to navigate the brand-new world of work. It may be a match made in hell, but that’s the way it is.
When twentysomethings enter the workforce, and I mean really enter the workforce by getting a job that isn’t safe or easy, they are in for a shock. With no freshman class to huddle in, they may find themselves all alone at the absolute bottom.
We all have difficult, even outlandish, work experiences we have to find a way through.
The twenties are, indeed, the time to get busy. It’s forward thinking for an uncertain age.
But that’s not how the brain works. And that’s not how life works. Besides, even if our brains could wait, love and work can’t.
It is easy to feel overwhelmed by uncertainty, to want to lie low with the urban tribe, or our parents, until our brains just mature on their own and somehow suddenly know the sure answers to our lives.
Twentysomethings who don’t use their brains become thirtysomethings who feel behind as professionals and as partners—and as people, and they miss out on making the most of life still to come.
Twentysomethings who use their brains by engaging with good jobs and real relationships are learning the language of adulthood just when their brains are primed to learn it.
In a use-it-or-lose-it fashion, the new frontal lobe connections we use are preserved and quickened; those we don’t use just waste away through pruning. 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.”
Never again will we be so quick to learn new things. Never again will it be so easy to become the people we hope to be. The risk is that we may not act now.
never again in our lifetime will the brain offer up countless new connections and see what we make of them.
How we learn to cope with twentysomething setbacks readies us for handling our spouses and bosses and children.
Twentysomething plans help us think across the years and decades ahead.
Twentysomething relationships are prepping us for marriage and other partnerships.
Twentysomething work and school are our best chance to acquire the technical, sophisticated skills needed in so many careers today.
Twentysomething jobs teach us about regulating our emotions and negotiating the complicated social interactions that make up adult life.
in our twenties we are especially sensitive to whatever is within earshot.
Early childhood may be the time for language, but evolutionary theorists say this critical period primes us to learn about the complex challenges of adulthood: how to find a professional niche, how to choose and live with a mate, how to be a parent, where and when to stake our claims. This last critical period is rapidly wiring us for adulthood.
Most of the thousands of new connections that sprout in adolescence do so in the frontal lobe and, again, the brain overprepares—but, this time, for the uncertainty of adult life.
but it is still refining its network of connections.
By the time we reach our twenties, the brain has gotten as big as it is going to be,
Forward thinking doesn’t just come with age. It comes with practice and experience. That’s why some twenty-two-year-olds are incredibly self-possessed, future-oriented people who already know how to face the unknown, while some thirty-four-year-olds still have brains that run the other way.
Adult dilemmas—which job to take, where to live, whom to partner with, or when to start a family—don’t have right answers. The frontal lobe is where we move beyond the futile search for black-and-white solutions as we learn to tolerate—and act on—better shades of gray.
Being smart in school is about how well you solve problems that have correct answers and clear time limits. But being a forward-thinking adult is about how you think and act even (and especially) in uncertain situations.
In our twenties, the pleasure-seeking, emotional brain is ready to go while the forward-thinking frontal lobe is still a work in progress.
we now know that the frontal lobe does not fully mature until sometime between the ages of twenty and thirty
Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward. —Søren Kierkegaard, philosopher
“There will always be differences of some kind but, statistically speaking, that’s not what will kill a relationship. It’s what you do with the differences.
The trick for you is going to be to listen to what matters, not to every single thing that makes you dissatisfied or anxious.”
“I’m challenging you to be picky about things that might matter in twenty years, such as extreme differences in values or goals or personality—or whether you love each other. But the differences you’re sounding off about seem like everyday discrepancies that are part of any real relationship.”
By our forties and beyond, as work, children, home, activities, extended family, and community come to the fore, marriage is typically less couple-centered. When couples are juggling more than dinners and shared weekends, a diversification of skills and interests can be helpful. Differences can keep life fresh.
Research on long-term marriages suggests what we need in marriage changes over time. It is a young couple’s job to create a shared vision and a shared life.
To a person who runs high in Neuroticism, differences are seen in a negative light. Anxiety and judgments about these differences then lead to criticism and contempt, two leading relationship killers.
Neuroticism, or the tendency to be anxious, stressed, critical, and moody, is far more predictive of relationship unhappiness and dissolution than is personality dissimilarity.
I kept thinking of an even more robust research finding: that being on the high end of the Neuroticism dimension is toxic for relationships.
Your Big Five won’t match exactly, of course, but the more similar your personalities, the smoother things may be.
When and if you commit, chances are that you will choose someone who is similar to you in ways that are convenient. But long-term relationships are inevitably inconvenient. Psychologist Daniel Gilbert calls them “the gateway to hard work”” as they open the door to mortgages, children, and the like. Personality tells us something about how you and your partner will go about the good and bad days together.
Sometimes dating or married couples decide to split because things change—someone cheated or had to move—but, more often, people split up because things don’t change.
They felt confused as their dissimilar personalities continually clashed. Not sure what to make of this, each hoped the other might change.
Eli and his girlfriend did not understand each other. They were fooled into thinking they were compatible because they had many plain-sight commonalities.
Sometimes the only thing wrong with another person is that he or she is a poor match for your own personality.
Big Five, it is often the case that we like or dislike people because of the way their extremes compare to our own.
There is no right or wrong personality, there is just your personality and how it fits with the personalities of other people.
worries a lot,
anxious,
tense,
takes things at face value, emotionally resilient
not easily bothered,
trusting,
friendly,
kind,
has trouble understanding others
talkative
novelty-seeking,
enthusiastic,
outgoing,
energized by being alone,
likes solitary time,
self-directed,
disciplined, efficient, organized, responsible,
prone to addiction
spontaneous,
can be careless,
curious,
open to new experiences,
rational,
prefers routine,
practical,
The Big Five tells us how you wake up in the morning and how you go about doing most anything. It has to do with how you experience the world and, as a result, how others experience you. This is important because, when it comes to personality, wherever you go, there you are.
The Big Five is not about what you like—it is about who you are, it is about how you live.
. The Big Five refers to five factors that describe how people interact with the world: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism.
These sorts of sites say they are more concerned with who you are than with what you want.
Personality is not about what we have done or even about what we like. It is about how we are in the world, and this infuses everything we do. Personality is the part of ourselves that we take everywhere, even to Nicaragua, so it is worth knowing something about.
One match maker to consider is personality. Some research tells us that, especially in young couples, the more similar two people’s personalities are, the more likely they are to be satisfied with their relationship.
But these conspicuous similarities are not match makers. They may bring us together, but they don’t necessarily make us happy.
people decide for themselves early on what their own deal breakers are, and, typically, we select partners accordingly.
Deal breakers are your own personal sine qua non in relationships. They are qualities—almost always similarities—you feel are nonnegotiable. The absence of these similarities allows you to weed out people with whom you have fundamental differences.
The problem is, while people are good at matching themselves and others on relatively obvious criteria, such as age and education, it turns out that these qualities are what researchers call “deal breakers, not match makers.”
Studies have repeatedly found that couples who are similar in areas such as socioeconomic status, education, age, ethnicity, religion, attractiveness, attitudes, values, and intelligence are more likely to be satisfied with their relationships and are less likely to seek divorce.
similarity is the essence of compatibility.
Often these go hand in hand. That is because the more similar two people are, the more they are able to understand each other.
being alike in ways that matter and genuinely liking who the other person is.
Traveling in a third-world country is the closest thing there is to being married and raising kids.
People love those who are like themselves. —Aristotle, philosopher What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are, but how you deal with incompatibility. —Leo Tolstoy, writer
Twentysomething women and men who are dating down—or working down, for that matter—usually have untold, or at least unedited, stories. These stories originated in old conversations and experiences and, so, they change only through new conversations and new experiences.
Life stories with themes of ruin can trap us. Life stories that are triumphant can transform us.
Research—and clinical experience—suggest that these untold stories are most often about shame.
High school and our twenties are not only the time when we have our most self-defining experiences, study after study shows they are also the time when we have our most self-defining memories.
I am for twentysomethings knowing that, far from safeguarding and divorce and unhappiness, moving in with someone can increase your chances of making a mistake—or of spending too much time on a mistake.
It also makes sense to anticipate and regularly evaluate those constraints that may keep you from leaving even if you want to.
researchers also recommend getting clear on each person’s commitment level before you move in.
Cohabitation is here to stay and there are things twentysomethings can do to protect themselves from the cohabitation effect. One is, obviously, don’t cohabitate.
A life built on top of “Maybe You’ll Do” simply may not feel as dedicated as a life built on top of the “We Do” of commitment or marriage.
Founding a relationship on convenience and ambiguity can interfere with the process of claiming the people we love.
Many, many clients in their late twenties or early thirties wish they hadn’t sunk years of their twenties into relationships that would have only lasted months had they not been living together. They ended up killing more
the most recent research suggests that serial cohabitors, couples with different levels of commitment, and those who use cohabitation as a test are most at risk for the cohabitation effect.
After years living among a roommate’s junky old stuff, we happily split the rent on a nice one-bedroom apartment. Couples share Wi-Fi and pets and enjoy shopping for new furniture together. Later, these setup costs have an effect on how likely we are to leave.
Cohabitation is loaded with setup and switching costs, the basic ingredients of lock-in.
The problem is when the time does come, the switching costs seem bigger up close than they did from far away.
When we make an initial investment in something, switching costs are hypothetical and in the future, so we tend to underestimate them.
Switching costs—or the time, money, or effort it requires to make a change—are more complex.
But even a minimal investment can lead to lock-in, especially when we are faced with switching costs.
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.
Sliding into cohabitation wouldn’t be a problem if sliding out were as easy. It isn’t.
Multiple studies have shown that these couples are less dedicated before, and even after, marriage. This has been found to be especially true for men.
It is the couples who live together before being clearly and mutually committed to each other who are more likely to experience poorer communication, lower levels of commitment to the relationship, and greater marital instability down the road.
Couples who live together before marriage but after becoming engaged, who combine their lives after making a clear and public commitment, are not any more likely to have distressed or dissolved marriages than couples who do not cohabitate before marriage.
the cohabitation effect is technically a pre-engagement, or pre-commitment, cohabitation effect, not a premarital cohabitation effect.
That fuzziness ended up being the most frustrating part.
This is especially true at a time when the twentysomething years are touted as a chance to have fun.
Living with someone may have benefits, but approximating marriage is not necessarily one of them.
Like many twentysomethings who cohabitate, Jennifer and Carter’s life together sounded more like an intersection between college roommate and sex partner than a lifelong commitment between two spouses.
as “sliding, not deciding.” Moving from dating to sleeping over to sleeping over a lot to cohabitation can be a gradual slope, one not marked by rings or ceremonies or sometimes even a conversation. Couples often bypass talking about why they want to live together and what it will mean.
But couples who “live together first” are actually less satisfied with their marriages and more likely to divorce than couples who do not. This is what sociologists call the cohabitation effect.
Living together is a good test for marriage. This is a common misperception.
Sometimes the best way to help people is to slow them down long enough to examine their own thinking.
What no one tells twentysomethings like Emma is that finally, and suddenly, they can pick their own families—they can create their own families—and these are the families that life will be about. These are the families that will define the decades ahead.
the foregrounding of the individual in relationships has caused us to forget about one of our greatest twentysomething opportunities: picking and creating our families.
Twentysomethings who aren’t at least a little scared about their relationships are often the ones who are being the least thoughtful.
There is something scary about picking your family. It’s not romantic. It means you aren’t just waiting for your soulmate to arrive. It means you know you are making decisions that will affect the rest of your life. It means you are thinking about the fact that your relationship needs to work not only in the here and now but also in the there and then.
Friends can do long talks and good cries, but at holiday time or very hard times everyone teamed up with family, and Emma was left standing alone.
Too often, being successful when you are young is about survival. Some people are good at hiding their troubles. They are good at “falling up.”
Being young means, as a colleague once put it, “that you haven’t completely screwed up your life yet.”
Besides, like with work, good relationships don’t just appear when we’re ready. It may take a few thoughtful tries before we know what love and commitment really are.
These chapters are about not waiting to get picky until you are in your thirties and the save-the-dates start pouring in. They are about being choosy about the right things when you can still think clearly about claiming your life.
The chapters ahead are about twentysomething men and women not settling—not settling for spending their twenties on no-criteria or low-criteria relationships that likely have little hope or intention of succeeding.
What I really wish I’d done is thought more about marriage sooner. Like when I was in my twenties.
So many of my twentysomething clients either don’t take their relationships seriously or don’t think they are allowed to.
When, then, is the time to really think about partnership?
In my experience, the Age Thirty Deadline is more of an Age Thirty Bait and Switch. Everything that was OK at twenty-nine suddenly feels awful and, in an instant, we feel behind.
The Age Thirty Deadline is the quiet but nagging concern that so many twentysomethings have. What to do about relationships in our twenties may not be clear—or even seem imminently important—but “I’d better not be alone at thirty” is a common refrain.
And even though searching may help you find a better partner, the pool of available singles shallows over time, perhaps in more ways than one.
Rather than growing together while their twentysomething selves are still forming, partners who marry older may be more set in their ways.
After twenty-five, one’s age at marriage does not predict divorce.
The most recent studies show that marrying later than the teen years does indeed protect against divorce, but this only holds true until about age twenty-five.
Now I know that postponing marriage, in and of itself, does not make for a better union.
More and more twentysomethings are careful not to rush into marriage at a young age, yet many do not know what else to consider.
But doing something later is not necessarily the same as doing something better. This may explain why, even as the average age of marriage rises, the divorce rate holds steady at about 40 percent
So while we hear a lot about twentysomethings who just want to have fun before marriage, many are also waiting to commit in hopes of being luckier in love than their parents were.
Half of today’s twentysomethings have been left in the wake of divorce, and all know someone who was.
David Brooks meant when he said that whom you marry is the most important decision in your life.
Claiming a career or getting a good job isn’t the end; it’s the beginning. And, then, there is still a lot more to know and a lot more to do.
Sometimes making choices feels like planning for my life in a way that seems boring. Sometimes making choices to pursue things that seem like good fits, or that match my interests, seems boring simply because it makes sense. I find myself wanting to go off in an unexpected direction—Arabic! Cambodia! I know this is a sort of crazy impulse. I know that the way to live a good life is to pursue things that are not only interesting to you but that make sense.
Life does not need to be linear but it does, as this executive said, need to make sense.
Everyone realizes most applicants don’t actually know what their careers will look like. Even the ones who think they do often change their minds.
Interviewers want to hear a reasonable story about the past, present, and future.
If the first step in establishing a professional identity is claiming our interests and talents, then the next step is claiming a story about our interests and talents, a narrative we can take with us to interviews and coffee dates.
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 want leap over those who can’t.
Having an uncommon life wasn’t going to come from resisting these choices, it was going to come from making these choices. Same as the bike.
In the twenty-first century, careers and lives don’t roll off an assembly line. We have to put together the pieces ourselves. Ian’s life could be personalized and changeable, but it was going to take some time and effort—and he would probably need to start with some common parts.
“I’m not talking about settling. I’m talking about starting. Twentysomethings who don’t get started wind up with blank résumés and out-of-touch lives only to settle far more down the road. What’s so original about that?”
“That you can’t pull some great career out of a hat in your thirties. You’ve got to start in your twenties.”
If Ian didn’t say yes to something, his life was going to become unremarkable and limited.
Saying yes to one concrete thing felt like saying no to an interesting or limitless life. In fact, it’s the other way around.
An identity or a career cannot be built around what you don’t want. We have to shift from a negative identity, or a sense of what I’m not, to a positive one, or a sense of what I am. This takes courage.
Conventionality wasn’t his niche. Ian’s search for glory was the lure of being different, so he displayed what has been called a common symptom of youth: “the dread of doing what has been done before.” If he ever chose something to do for work, he didn’t want it to be some same-old, everyday thing; his life could be unique.
choosing a place can be incredibly useful. Whether it is moving closer to family or building a life in a city you love, knowing your place is something not to be overlooked.
I told her that an adult life is built not out of eating, praying, and loving but out of person, place, and thing: who we are with, where we live, and what we do for a living. We start our lives with whichever of these we know something about.
I think 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.
I stopped thinking about whether what I was doing was below me. I learned to not worry about how to make it to the next level and just focus on the job at hand.
Contrary to what we see and hear, reaching your potential isn’t even something that usually happens in your twenties—it happens in your thirties or forties or fifties. And starting that process often means doing what doesn’t look so good, such as carting granola around in vans or choosing a starter job.
Goals direct us from the inside, but shoulds are paralyzing judgments from the outside. Goals feel like authentic dreams while shoulds feel like oppressive obligations. Shoulds set up a false dichotomy between either meeting an ideal or being a failure, between perfection or settling. The tyranny of the should even pits us against our own best interests.
Scrambling after ideals, we become alienated from what is true about ourselves and the world.
Maybe we feel the cultural press to be an engineer before we find out what exactly that entails. Or our parents tell us more about what we should be like than what we are like.
we learn more about what is ideal than about what is real.
Part of realizing our potential is recognizing how our particular gifts and limitations fit with the world around us. We realize where our authentic potential actually lies.
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. This
It can be just another place, not to be, but to seem.
For many, Facebook is less about looking up friends than it is about looking at friends.
You might be surprised by the number of hours a week I spend hearing about Facebook. Many of my clients feel their lives on Facebook are evaluated, even judged, daily.
I don’t know how to get an A in my twenties. I feel like I am failing for the first time.”
If we only wanted to be happy, it would be easy; but we want to be happier than other people, which is almost always difficult, since we think them happier than they are. —Charles de Montesquieu, writer/philosopher
The best is the enemy of the good. —Voltaire, writer/philosopher
“I just keep thinking my parents will say I should be doing something more prestigious like law. Or I think I should do something more interesting like the Arabic thing. I don’t want my life to be a jar of jam. That’s boring.” “That’s also what gets in the way of knowing what you know and acting on it,” I said. “It’s called the tyranny of the should.”
“I get hung up thinking I should know if this is going to work out if I’m going try it. It feels safer not to pick.” “Not making choices isn’t safe. The consequences are just further away in time, like in your thirties or forties.”
Can you make a living? Will you like the work?
The more terrifying uncertainty is wanting something but not knowing how to get it. It is working toward something even though there is no sure thing. 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.
Ian pretended that not knowing what to do was the hard part when, somewhere inside, I think he knew that making a choice about something is when the real uncertainty begins.
By thinking through his actual options, Ian stumbled onto a twentysomething version of what psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas calls the unthought known. Unthought knowns are those things we know about ourselves but forget somehow. These are the dreams we have lost sight of or the truths we sense but don’t say out loud. We may be afraid of acknowledging the unthought known to other people because we are afraid of what they might think. Even more often, we fear what the unthought known will then mean for ourselves and our lives.
What might you be able to do well enough to support the life you want? And what might you enjoy enough that you won’t mind working at it in some form or another for years to come?”
The question twentysomethings need to ask themselves is what they would do with their lives if they didn’t win the lottery.
part of making any decision in your twenties is realizing there is no twenty-four-flavor table. It’s a myth.”
“You’re the best! The sky is the limit!” They reminded him he could do anything he set his mind to. They didn’t understand that this undefined encouragement was not helpful. It led less to courage than it did to confusion.
Being confused about choices is nothing more than hoping that maybe there is a way to get through life without taking charge.
The search of youth is not for all-permissibility, but rather for new ways of directly facing up to what truly counts.
Weak ties are the people who will better your life right now—and again and again in the years to come—if you have the courage to know what you want.
Perhaps the single best thing we can do to make our own luck in our twenties is say yes to our weak ties or give them a reason to say yes to us.
A WISE MAN MAKES HIS OWN LUCK.
Make yourself interesting. Make yourself relevant. Do your homework so you know precisely what you want or need. Then, respectfully, ask for it.
He presented himself as a serious person with a need that matched. He made himself interesting. He made himself relevant. And he asked for a clearly defined favor: the use of a book.
questions. Don’t just ask how long I’ve been at the company to make conversation until I can tell you what to do with your life.’
one favor begets more favors and, over time, small favors beget larger ones.
A close variant of what is called the foot-in-the-door technique, or the strategy of making small requests before larger ones,
while attitudes influence behavior, behavior can also shape attitudes.
If weak ties do favors for us, they start to like us. Then they become even more likely to grant us additional favors in the future.
“He that hath once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another than he whom you yourself have obliged.”
The more we know about the way things work, the more we feel a part of things.
True interconnectedness rests not on texting best friends at one a.m., but on reaching out to weak ties that make a difference in our lives even though they don’t have to. When weak ties help, the communities around us—even the adult community that twentysomethings are warily in the process of entering—seem less impersonal and impenetrable.
Everything can change in a day. Especially if you put yourself out there.
it is the people we know the least well who will be the most transformative.
Weak ties, on the other hand, force us to communicate from a place of difference, to use what is called elaborated speech.
But in-group members share more than slang and vocabulary. They share assumptions about one another and the world. They may have gone to the same schools or have the same ideas about love.
It’s not just who and what our ties know that matters. It is how we communicate with them as well.
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.
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.
Weak ties are the people we have met, or are connected to somehow, but do not currently know well.
titled “The Strength of Weak Ties” about the unique value of people we do not know well.
Rather, more than three-quarters of new jobs had come from leads from contacts who were seen only “occasionally” or “rarely.”
The urban tribe may bring us soup when we are sick, but it is the people we hardly know—those who never make it into our tribe—who will swiftly and dramatically change our lives for the better.
the urban tribe helps us survive, it does not help us thrive.
urban tribe
strength of weak ties.
Yes is how you get your first job, and your next job, and your spouse, and even your kids. Even if it’s a bit edgy, a bit out of your comfort zone, saying yes means you will do something new, meet someone new, and make a difference. —Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google
[Those] deeply enmeshed in [a close-knit group] may never become aware of the fact that their lives do not actually depend on what happens within the group but on forces far beyond their perception.
Five or ten years later, the difference between coffee-shop Helen and digital-animation Helen could be remarkable. Sadly remarkable. Helen’s life got going when she used the bits of capital she had to get the next piece of capital she wanted—and it didn’t hurt that she and the hiring manager’s wife shared the same alma mater. That’s almost always the way it works.
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.
I felt a lot of internal pressure to figure it out, but all the thinking I did was really debilitating and unproductive.
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.
None of us knew any of these jobs even existed when we graduated.
No one I know really knew what they wanted to do when they graduated. What people are doing now is usually not something that they’d ever even heard of in undergrad.
not one person has asked for my GPA since I graduated. So unless you are applying to grad schools, yeah, everyone was right, no one cares. Nor do they care if you did the “wrong” major.
So what is a twentysomething to do? Fortunately, not all underemployment is the same. I always advise twentysomethings to take the job with the most capital.
Midlife is when we may realize that our twentysomething choices cannot be undone. Drinking and depression can enter from stage left.
No matter how smoothly this goes, late bloomers will likely never close the gap between themselves and those who got started earlier.
but the latest data from the US Census Bureau shows that, on average, salaries peak—and plateau—in our forties.
Economists and sociologists agree that twentysomething work has an inordinate influence on our long-run career success.
Twentysomething unemployment is associated with heavy drinking and depression in middle age even after becoming regularly employed.
Research on underemployed twentysomethings tells us that those who are underemployed for as little as nine months tend to be more depressed and less motivated than their peers—than even their unemployed peers.
A degree from a university followed by too many unexplained retail and coffee-shop gigs looks backward. Those sorts of jobs can hurt our résumés and even our lives.
While these sorts of jobs can be fun, they also signal to future employers a period of lostness.
But some underemployment is not a means to an end. Sometimes it is just a way to pretend we aren’t working,
some underemployment generates capital that trumps everything else.
More often, identities and careers are made not out of college majors and GPAs but out of a couple of door-opening pieces of identity capital—and
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
Twentysomethings who take the time to explore and also have the nerve to make commitments along the way construct stronger identities. They have higher self-esteem and are more persevering and realistic.
He was concerned that too many young people were “in danger of becoming irrelevant.”
Erikson himself warned against spending too much time in “disengaged confusion.”
crisis and capital can—and should—go together, like they did for Erikson. Researchers who have looked at how people resolve identity crises have found that lives that are all capital and no crisis—all work and no exploration—feel rigid and conventional. On the other hand, more crisis than capital is a problem too.
Identity capital is how we build ourselves—bit by bit, over time. Most important, identity capital is what we bring to the adult marketplace. It is the currency we use to metaphorically purchase jobs and relationships and other things we want.
Identity capital is our collection of personal assets. It is the repertoire of individual resources that we assemble over time. 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.
Likewise, in the twentysomething years, even a small shift can radically change where we end up in our thirties and beyond.
These are the years when it will be easiest to start the lives we want. And no matter what we do, the twenties are an inflection point—the great reorganization—a time when the experiences we have disproportionately influence the adult lives we will lead.
The twenties are that critical period of adulthood.
It is realizing that doing something later is not automatically the same as doing something better. Too many smart, well-meaning thirtysomethings and fortysomethings grieve a little as they face a lifetime of catching up.
spotty résumé that used to reflect twentysomething freedom suddenly seems suspect and embarrassing.
We think that by avoiding decisions now, we keep all of our options open for later—but not making choices is a choice all the same.
Most simply, they don’t know if their lives will work out and they don’t know what to do.
zeitgeist.
Freud once said, “Love and work, work and love… that’s all there is,”
The twentysomething years are real time and ought to be lived that way.
“The unlived life is not worth examining.”
Sheldon Kopp
What is worse are the tears shed by thirtysomethings and fortysomethings because they are now paying a steep price—professionally, romantically, economically, reproductively—for a lack of vision in their twenties.
time. As a clinical psychologist who specializes in adult development, I have seen countless twentysomethings spend too many years living without perspective.
“Thirty is the new twenty,”
It is easy to imagine that life’s significant experiences begin with big moments and exciting encounters, but this is not how it happens. Researchers in this same study found that most of the substantial and lasting events—those that led to career success, family fortune, personal bliss, or lack thereof—developed across days or weeks or months with little immediate dramatic effect.
life’s most significant events taking place by age thirty-five, as thirtysomethings and beyond we largely either continue with, or correct for, the moves we made during our twentysomething years.
With about 80 percent of
It might even seem like adulthood is one long stretch of autobiographically consequential experiences—that the older we get, the more we direct our own lives. This is not true.
Personality changes more during our twenties than at any time before or after.
More than half of us are married, or dating, or living with our future partner, by age thirty.
ten years of a career.
Your twenties matter. Eighty percent of life’s most defining moments take place by age thirty-five. Two-thirds of lifetime wage growth happens in the first