The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter--And How to Make the Most of Them 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. You are deciding your life right now.

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

In our twenties, positive personality changes come from what researchers call “getting along and getting ahead”.” Feeling better doesn’t come from avoiding adulthood, it comes from investing in adulthood.

A timeline may not be a virtual reality chamber, but it can help our brains see time for what it really is: limited. It can give us a reason to get up in the morning and get going.

It is tempting to stay distracted and keep everything at a distance. 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.

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 considering that who you will be in your thirties and beyond is being built out of the goals you are setting for yourself today.

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. 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 su

goal-setting in the twenties led to greater purpose, mastery, agency, and well-being in the thirties

Most of these changes are about making adult commitments—to bosses, partners, leases, roommates—and these commitments shift how we are in the world and who we are inside.