Overview
Book Title: The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter And How to Make the Most of Them Now
Author: Meg Jay
Year: 1st edition 2013, Revised edition 2021
Cameron’s Rating: 9.5/10
My Thoughts
The Defining Decade is one of the best books for young people I’ve ever read. Does this book have all of the answers? No. But it does bring up most of the important questions you should be asking yourself in the early stages of adulthood.
There are many common, yet incorrect assumptions young people have about how the world works. This book challenges these assumptions with compelling arguments backed by research as well as anecdotal evidence gathered by the author Meg Jay, a clinical psychologist.
A lot of uncertainty surrounds the 20s. Some people don’t know how to deal with this and worry about if everything will work out. Others say that everything will work itself out eventually and then distract themselves from having to linger on these thoughts any longer.
Regardless of which type of person you are, you’re likely to find yourself feeling more proactive to create the life you want after reading this book.
Best Quotes
Uncertainty makes people anxious, and distraction is the 21st century opiate of the masses.
We think that by avoiding decisions now we keep our options open for later, but not making choices is a choice all the same.
Doing something later is not necessarily the same as doing something better.
In your 20s and beyond it is the people you know the least well that may be positioned to do you the most good.
The cure for your symptoms is getting rid of whatever caused or influenced them the most.
Many of the problems we have were once solutions.
If you don’t pay attention to what you are doing in the moment, the years will pass you by.
20 somethings who don’t feel incompetent at work are usually overconfident or underemployed.
Confidence is trusting yourself to get the job done… and that trust only comes from having gotten the job done many times before.
My Notes
- 80% of life’s defining decisions take place before age 35.
- Your earning power is largely determined in your first 10 years of work.
- More than half of us are married, living with, or dating our future partner by age 30.
- The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the unlived life is not worth examining.
- 1/3 of 20 somethings will move in any given year.
- Being in your 20s is like being the pilot of a small plane that’s just taken off — A small change in trajectory can be the difference between landing in Alaska and landing in Egypt.
- It’s ok to have an identity crisis, but it’s dangerous to spend time in disengaged confusion. If you’re not yet sure who you are, you shouldn’t be afraid of taking on commitments that will help you build skills or “identity capital” for later on.
- In general, you should take the job or opportunity that allows you to build the most identity capital, not the job that pays the most or that has the “coolest” environment.
- The people that are closest to us are often the people that are most similar to us. This similarity in beliefs, socioeconomic class, etc. is one reason the people that help us advance from one level to another in life are often NOT the people we have existing close relationships with.
- The fastest way to something new is through your weak ties — the people you are loosely connected to.
- Not making choices isn’t safe… the consequences are just further away in time, like in your 30s and your 40s.
- Asking yourself what you would do with your life if you won the lottery may not be the best question because it ignores income potential, your existing skills, as well as your natural talents. A better question to ask may be, “What would I do if I didn’t win the lottery that I may be able to do well enough to support the life I want and also enjoy enough to not mind doing it for years to come?”
- Identities and careers cannot just be built around what we think we aren’t or what we don’t want. They also need to include positive affirmations defining who we are and what we do want. It’s not enough to simply be against things, you also need to be for something.
- Marrying after the teen years decreases the likelihood of divorce, but this downward slope only continues until it reaches a point at age 25 where things level off.
- The best time to work on your marriage is before you have one.
- When you decide who to settle down with, you are deciding what your future family will be like.
- A raft may be a good thing to have when you’re crossing a river, but there’s nothing wrong with putting it down once you get to the other side. In the same way, the way we attempt to cure or soothe our own problems may be suitable at one point in our lives but no longer serve us later on.
- Research shows that couples that live together before marriage are more likely to divorce or be dissatisfied with their marriage than couples that do not.
- For most people, their standards for a live-in partner are lower than a potential spouse. This is a potential issue because “sliding-in” to a live-in situation with a partner is significantly easier than “sliding out.”
- One advantage homosexual couples have over heterosexual couples is that homosexual couples don’t have stereotypical gender norms to fall back on to decide who will do which household tasks. They have to explicitly discuss what each partner wants and what they think is fair.
- Research conducted on MRI scans showed that the frontal lobe does not stop developing until sometime between age 20 and age 30. This is one key reason we tend to become more “even keeled” and have better executive functioning as we mature from adolescence into adulthood.
- Research shows that the brains of people in their 20s react more strongly to negative information than the brains of older adults.
- You may believe that you can’t join the world until you become a self-actualized person, but joining the world is actually how you become a self-actualized person.
- Humans are subject to the availability heuristic which involves making assumptions about how easy something is based upon how easy it is to bring up an example of that thing.
- Abstraction can make things feel farther away, and the farther away things are, the less we think about them. By making goals concrete and sketching timelines, you can increase your focus and dedication.
- If you know what you’d like to do in your 30s and beyond, it can make knowing what to do in your 20s easier.
- Similar to how a novelist may write a story starting from the last line and working their way backwards through the plot, you can use the same general line of thinking to create the story of your life.
Conclusion
The Defining Decade is an excellent book for anyone in their late teens or 20s that want to build the foundations for an amazing life. I listened to it on Audible, but it’s also available on Amazon.