The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter―And How to Make the Most of Them Now
by Meg Jay, PhD
August 7, 2020 — August 13, 2020
Los Angeles, CA
An interesting book that I would recommend to every person to read before they go to college and to re-read when they begin their first job out of college. The book is actually more of a collection of discussions from sessions between the author (a psychiatrist) and different people from different backgrounds, stages in their life, and with different topics/problems/dreams. The three parts discussed are regarding work, love, and brain and the body.
In sum, the older we get the more limited we become and usually end up doing things that are based off or building on top of what we began, planned for, or accomplished in our 20’s. The 20’s are the most significant, transformative, and crucial years within our lives; it’s NOT our 30’s as many assume. The future isn't written and there’s no guarantees, this is the time to claim adulthood and be intentional, get to work, start picking your family, doing the math and planning right, to make our own future certainty as the 20’s is a time of uncertainty. We can’t allow ourselves to be defined by what we didn’t know or didn’t do, because if we’re in our 20’s: we're deciding our lives and creating the future now.
A few highlights that intrigued me were the fact that all jobs will be bullshit in your early-mid twenties, you’ll always be overqualified. That being said, you should never take a counter job or become a starbucks employee, it would actually serve you better to go out and be broke and adventurous than to work a job like that just to pay bills. The book emphasized the power of weak ties being better than strong and old ties to get you through different aspects of your career. How we are born in our current families, whether we are happy in them or not, we are responsible for choosing and creating our future family so we must be conscious. How we are attempting to make our lives look better on facebook to make a useless point or to prove to someone who’s not even relevant or watching your posts that you made it. Overall, planning is essential during the twenties in order to live well throughout life.