The Defining Decade

If you want to go straight for the value, scroll down to WORK LIFE. If you want to read through the context of the book, please continue.

Table of contents

Intro

The Defining Decade was written by Meg Jay, a US based clinical psychologist and professor at University of Virginia. Her career revolves around helping 20 year olds navigate their youth and making life-defining changes. She’s also been on NPR, Wall Street Journal, NYT, BBC, Harvard Business Review. This is the most important book I read this decade and I can not praise enough how important it is to get the nuggets of wisdom from this (quite literally) life-defining book.

Why care

Ok, it’s a great book, but why should you care? It’s simple:


Our adult lives are made up of 3 things: Who we are, where we live and what we do for a living. This book tackles all of them, and I genuinely believe there’s a mountain of wisdom for any 20-year-old reading this book, or anyone with a 20-year-old in their life, or any parent of a 20-something. 


The book comes as a response to our narrative that 30s is the new 20s. It might be true that we have a higher life expectancy, but that doesn’t mean we can waste our 20s, or that they don’t matter.


Our 20s are real. So real in fact that 85% of our life-defining experiences (our literal lives for the rest of the decade we’ll live) happen before the age of 35. Most of who we are, most of the changes and the drastic changes we want to make about us, or our personalities come in our 20s. We don’t ever get it back.


That’s why this book is such an important read and I genuinely urge everyone to try it: Sure we’ll get to our 30s SOMEHOW and sure whatever we’re doing we’ll get us through our 20s, but we can’t hope our way to the kind of life we want in our 30’s. We can’t hope our way to the life we want; we have to forge it. 


And to forge it we have to start with our:

Work life

In our 20’s we might feel as if we have unlimited options and unlimited potential, which our parents never had. The people around us might cheer on that we can do anything, but we can’t really do everything. 


As 20 year olds, we’re often paralysed by choice, feeling like we have hundreds of things to choose from. That paralysis can result in something that the author calls “the Starbucks phase”, a phase in life where we’re underemployed, or working part-time at something that’s not really good for us, in the hopes of keeping our options open, but that only closes most of our options.

It’s fine to try things and to “be in the search for oneself”, but what isn’t fine is the result of being underemployed for too long. If we stay for too long in this state of “disengaged confusion”, taking too long to get your foot in the work you want, might result in less motivation, feeling “different”, depression and even a smaller wage growth, even after we’ve stopped being underemployed.


In order to get away from this vicious cycle, we need help, in the form of weak ties and the favours we ask from the contacts we have little contact with. They are the ones that build our careers the most, by opening doors for us (it’s not our GPA’s and neither our diplomas, it's that rando you met at that one conference where they had good cookies). 


Strong ties on the other hand are those people that are close to us, that have the same patterns, understanding and assumptions about the world and the same views and contacts as us. We can’t really grow by digging deeper into a fountain we’ve gotten all of our water out of.


Our professional growth doesn’t come from identity crisis either. It’s great to question who we are and to take time to rediscover ourselves, but too much rediscovery will lead to underemployement. Instead, Meg Jay recommends we look at identity capital (not, this is not about human trafficking, I promise).


Identity capital is our collection of personal assets, the repertoire of individual resources that we assemble over time. We build identity capital by having the experiences, the contacts and the resources that create a compelling narrative for our careers (and for our lives).


We need to work on our identity capital and on creating our own narrative (and directing it) because otherwise will hop along with a friend, or a partner and realise a decade from now, we ended up somewhere we despise (trust me, I’ve seen first hand in my family how that ends up, and it’s not pretty).


Our goal in our 20s is not to “get it”, not to arrive at whatever our end-goal is, but rather to build the identity capital to get us there. Most of us won’t “peak” professional until our 30’s or 40’s. Our 20’s is merely the time to get going towards that career, with a narrative that makes sense. But we don’t have all of the time in the world, because when you’re 30 you “have” a career, you don’t “start” a career.

HIGHLY SUGGESTED ACTIONS for our work life

love life

Our adult life doesn’t end with our career, but our love life is much more uncertain, since we can’t control another human. Although it might be scarier to think that our love life is our responsibility and in our control, we also have to consider that who we choose as our partner is much more relevant than our work lives.


You can choose to cut out a bad job from your resume, but you can’t choose to cut out a bad relationship. Our work stays with us most of the day, but our spouse takes over our lives in all aspects (from work, lifestyle, family, health, leisure even to entertainment). 


It’s the most important choice that’ll have the highest level of impact on our lives. To go further on your love life than than this book, I highly suggest reading: “How not to die alone" - by Logan Ury. If I’ll get around to writing a review, I’ll leave a link to my summary here.


The premise of not making conscious choices in our love life isn’t like playing musical chairs (we all have fun until we have to settle down ASAP and pick someone). It’s much more subtle and much harder to deal with.


The first problem we have to deal with as 20-somethings is the sliding effect. In our 20’s, with our current culture, the immediate thought is not “How will my life be 30 years from now” but rather what will I be doing (and sleeping with) tomorrow.


We choose partners “just for fun” and stay in relationships that are merely “practice for the real thing”. The only problem is that we’re practicing the wrong thing. And all of that practice can slide really quickly from sleeping over to sleeping over often, to living together.


That wouldn’t be as much of a dilemma if it weren’t for the next problem: The Lock-in effect. Once we’ve started making seemingly insignificant investments, it’s much harder, much more “costly” to switch. 

Once we’ve bought furniture, are sharing rent, have a Wi-fi bill and have a dog together, it’s much harder to part ways. So much harder, in fact, that the easiest choice might end up being moving forward, going towards marriage.


Marrying the wrong person sounds scary. And it SHOULD be scary! It’s the most drastic choice you can make in your life. Being scared only means that you really care about what you want to do. If you’re not afraid, you’ll likely not take it as seriously and end up making a superficial choice.


And again, that wouldn’t be as bad if it weren’t for having to share the rest of your life with that person (even if you divorce) since you’ll have to deal with logistics and finances and who takes the dog to the park each second Sunday of the month.  


The problem comes from our predisposition towards a state of “Maybe we will”. It’s a real term researchers gave to the position where people don’t really commit, so they end up having a less-than-great life together (if they keep having a life together). 


It’s true that divorce rates go down after 25 (so it’s better to marry after 25), but afterwards, age doesn’t have statistical relevance in terms of how your marriage will end up. (Semi-academic speak for: After 25, you have just as much of a chance to go boom or bust as everyone else, no matter how much time you wait)


The research included in this book shows that the best way not to end up a "Maybe we will" is to make clear and public commitments. Maybe you don’t necessarily need to attempt the “pre-engagement cohabitation effect” (to get engaged before you move in). Still, we do need to be very clear at each stage about each other’s intentions, needs, constraints keeping us in the relationship and especially the level of commitment. 

HIGHLY SUGGESTED ACTIONS for our love life

the rest of your life

In our 20’s, it feels like whenever something “bad” happens, the whole world is coming to an end. It feels like even seemingly small things require a shit ton of confidence, confidence which we don’t have. And it’s normal not to have it; we haven’t had the chance to build it just yet.


As an adult… adulting we need to earn our confidence, what researchers call self-efficacy. It’s the ability to be effective or produce the desired result. That doesn’t come with affirmations; it comes from encountering a situation and dealing with it again and again and again. 


Just like mastering any skill, there’s the rule of thumb for gaining self-efficacy, the rule of 10.000 hours. That equates to us spending roughly 5 years full-time in the workforce before we have clear evidence for why we have confidence.


But speaking of 5 years, it’s really important to act with urgency in your 20’s. There’s a very finite window of time for change, just as there is a very finite window of time for other things such as kids (such as bungge-jumping into a pool of crocodiles).


We should decide fairly soon in our 20s if we want kids or not, because fertility in women decreases drastically after 30, and the chances of getting pregnant are roughly 1in 50 by the time women are 42. Mother nature doesn’t wait for us to “find ourselves”, so we have to find some urgency in terms of how we live our lives.


Even if you think you’ll have all of the money in the world and that won’t be a problem (the average cost of treatment in order to get a baby is $300.000), even then IVF’s (Invitro Fertilisation) have between a 90 and 95% FAILUARE RATE.


If we’ll have kids later (if we postpone it ‘till our 40’s), it’s just a much higher chance that we won’t be able to have them, or that we won’t be able to enjoy them because our age and our health will have decreased dramatically by then.

It might have been pretty grim to look at it that way, especially when going over Social Media and seeing everyone having the time of their lives. Thing is we never see everyone sorrows, their internal turmoil, over choices, or the fear in their hearts as they zoom through their 20’s.


The 20’s (just like your whole life) is a finite time. The 20s, tho is not our whole life, but you have really plan for it very meticulously, really thinking things through and really asking yourself the questions you have been avoiding. We don’t get to be 24 again. I sure know that.


That’s why it’s important to create a timeline for yourself. If you think you have a clue about the kind of life you want, you’d better get started at putting the puzzle pieces of your life together now.

HIGHLY SUGGESTED ACTIONS for the rest of our life

Outro

One of the most emotional parts of the book is a person talking with the author about the emotions they felt while lying in an MRI, wondering about their health and especially for the future they’ve traded for nothing, beating themselves up about not making choices sooner, thus feeling like they’ve sacrificed years with their kids, years filled with the important things in life.


It’s real that we think of our 20s as a blob of time, days blending in with one another, but that time isn’t frozen, and there definitely is a lot more time to live after it. The 20s aren’t the end, and neither are they the endless opportunity we might think of them as. They are merely a short and limited time we have the opportunity to set our trajectories towards the future we want.


An exceptional story, as John Irving put it, is written by starting with the end sentence in mind. As 20-somethings, we might not have the end sentence, but we definitely can identify what we want in our 30s, 40s and 50s. Getting a happy ending in life starts by taking charge of the reality of our lives. That is how we live in real-time, in our 20’s, in the NOW. That is how we can make the most of it.


Now, for the thing that’s impacted me the most in this book: Many cultures (and even in our internet culture) we’ve made use of the phrase “memento mori”, but we always seem to forget the second part of that phrase. The whole latin saying is “memento mori: memento vivi” - Remember you’re going to die, so you have to live. I’m fearful to admit I’ve squandered a lot of time, way more than I care to admit. I’ve forgoten there’s plenty more life left to live and we aren't in our 20's forver.


There’s no right or wrong answer, there’s no clearly deliniated “good” and “bad” trajectories, there’s only our choices and our consequences. You have the power over it and you are deciding your life right now, because our 20’s is our most defining decade.


I hope this summary will encourage you to take charge of your 20’s and to hopefully also read this book (it’s a lot better than I made it out to be, I had tens of “aha’s”). Please read it and please take charge of your 20’s!