2️⃣ How to Make the Most of Your Twenties

One of the most impactful books I read in the year I turned 20 was aptly The Defining Decade by Meg Jay. It is a book about why your twenties matter and how to make the most of it.

It covers the three main areas of life that are particularly significant to those in their twenties—work, love, and the brain and body.

Here are the main points from the book with some commentary.

Work

1. Build up your identity capital

Identity capital is “the repertoire of individual resources that we assemble over time”. It covers our character, our likes and dislikes, the investments we make in ourselves, the work we do, the things we have achieved, the networks we have made etc. Essentially, it is how we build ourselves over time. Our identity capital is the currency we use in the adult marketplace to metaphorically purchase jobs and relationships, so building it up while we can will serve us well.

2. Make weak ties

Weak ties are the distant relationships that we have with people eg that friend’s friend who knows this person who works in the same industry as you. These are the benefits of having weak ties:

Since they are not people you would usually hang out with, they expose you to unfamiliar ways of thinking which you can compare and contrast with your own.
Due to their unfamiliarity, we are forced to be more thorough in our speech which requires organisation and reflection. This in turn can promote thoughtful growth and change.
The Benjamin Franklin effect states that while attitudes influence behaviour, behaviour can also shape attitudes. Weak ties are more likely to offer help, and the more they help, the more they like us.

3. Recall the unthought known and eliminate jams

We often think we do not know what we want to do in life, but in reality, we do in a way. We have gained experience and insight about ourselves during all the previous years of life that we have lived. The unthought known is therefore “the things we know about ourselves but forget somehow… the dreams we have lost sight of.”

Another concept is the Jam Experiment where we often find it difficult to make decisions when we are presented with too many options. We may think that there are so many paths we can take in life, however, not all are viable.

So if you are deciding on what to do with your life, trawl through your unthought knowns and eliminate some jams.

4. Exploration is the key to creating your ideal life

Our life is a blank canvas for us to create. It is up to us to explore various things to find out our interests, talents, and values, then creating a story out of it. Sometimes it feels like saying “yes” to one concrete thing is saying no to many others, but it is quite the opposite - if you do not say yes, you never know what could have been.

Love

Dating for me in my twenties was like this musical-chairs thing. Everybody was running around and having fun. Then I hit thirty and it was like the music stopped and everybody started sitting down. I didn’t want to be the only one left without a chair… What I really wish I’d done is thought more about marriage sooner. Like when I was in my twenties. - A client’s quote from The Defining Decade

1. Build your relationship on solid and aligned foundations

Choosing the right partner is essentially picking your family, so it is important to have serious, practical conversations early in the relationship before you both get emotionally attached. This saves you from the heartache that occurs when halfway through the relationship, you discover you both have different perspectives. Things to consider are whether or not you share the same values (be it life or spiritual), priorities, the ideal future life, perspectives on children and family etc.

2. Beware of the cohabitation effect

This is a bit controversial as cohabitation is very common and depends on the couple’s stance on religion, but regardless, the author explains that couples who cohabitate are less satisfied with their marriages as standards for live-in partners are lower than for a spouse, and when marriage eventually happens, expectations are not met. It also talks about the expensive switching costs of trying to get out of a relationship after having unknowingly slid into cohabitation out of convenience.

3. Find a partner who is compatible with you

Compatibility is a big part of what constitutes a happy marriage. The Big 5 is a personality framework that measures openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. The more similar your Big Five is to your partner, the more similar your personalities are, and ultimately, the smoother things may be. This is because personality tells you about how you and your partner will go about life together e.g. how you would both respond to good news, bad news, and unexpected news.

However, knowing each other’s differences is also important as it allows you to be more empathetic towards each other. This goes a long way towards bridging differences and building harmony.

The Brain and Body

1. Be mindful of the content you consume

The frontal lobe is involved with higher-level thinking and decision-making. In our twenties, it is still a work in progress which means that whatever content we consume has the potential to influence it. By putting ourselves in situations which challenge and stretch us, we can learn more and change our brains for the better, ultimately making us more prepared for adulthood.

Another thing to note is that forward-thinking does not come with age - it comes with practice and experience. The post-twentysomething brain is still plastic, but the opportunity is that never again in our lifetime will the brain offer up countless new connections and see what we make of them. So your twenties is “your opportunity to learn to be forward-thinking before life’s defining moments are in the rear view mirror”.

2. Learn how to deal with situations calmly

We experience many unfamiliar situations in our twenties. For most, we experience transitioning from the sheltered school life into the big working world for the first time. With all these experiences, we should learn to handle situations, especially conflict, calmly and reappraise them from a different perspective. Think them through first before acting rashly. Also, there is a quote by William James that goes: “The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook”, so do not let every small detail bother you.

3. Real confidence comes from both success and failure

Dale Carnegie says, “Inaction breeds fear and doubt… action breeds confidence and courage”. In reality, real confidence stems from actual, lived moments of success and failure. In other words, confidence is trusting yourself to get the job done and that trust only comes from having gotten the job done many times before, both well and poorly. Failure (and learning from it) is important as a long run of easy successes creates fragile confidence that is easily shattered in the face of failure.

Before we think we cannot do it, we need to change our mindset from a fixed to growth mindset. A fixed mindset is where we do not think outside the box whereas a growth mindset is the opposite. Having a growth mindset allows us to make the most of opportunities, thereby attracting even more. With this mindset, problems become opportunities.

4. Look after your body

Our body is at our prime in our twenties, but it is important not to take it for granted. We should be mindful of the food we consume, exercising our body, and the lifestyle we lead.

The author also goes a step ahead by talking about fertility, encouraging both men and women to think about family planning as the twenties are the peak years for this. Additionally, postponing childbearing into the mid- to late-thirties can find you in the situation of being pulled in two directions by your children and parents - not twentysomethings and octogenarians but rather toddlers and octogenarians - two entirely dependent groups of loved ones at precisely the moment your career needs you the most.

5. Educate yourself on personal finance

When we are in our twenties, it may seem like a long time till we will buy a house, buy a car, get married, have kids, retire etc, but when they do eventually happen, it catches us off-guard. The truth is all those require money, so it is in our best interest to learn how to manage our personal finance wisely, create a plan, and prepare for our future.

I understand that most of these advice follow a very stereotypical life path i.e. build up yourself and your career, get married, have kids, buy a house etc all while you are in your twenties. In this day and age where we are encouraged to not feel pressured to live by a timeline, some of this advice might be particularly triggering or anxiety-inducing for some. Even if we so wish to follow that path, we can never know what the future may hold.

So regardless of whether you are feeling inspired or anxious after reading all that, just remember we all lead different lives. However I believe the best thing we can do in our twenties is to expose ourselves to various ways of thinking and advice so that ultimately, we have an arsenal of knowledge that we can pick and choose from.

If you are in your twenties like me, I wish you all the best and may we all live out a life of happiness and fulfilment.

And hey, even if by the time we hit thirty, we still find ourselves lost in life and/ or have yet to find that special someone, it is not the end of the world. Life is a journey, not a race, and we would have learnt our own lessons and made our own memories along the way.