When I was20, I had my very first psychotherapy client. At that time, I was a volunteer in the psychological consultation room of our school.She was a 21-year-old girl named Alex. Alex walked into the room and told me she was there to talk about guy problems. when I heard this, I was so relieved. I got a twentysomething who wanted to talk about boys. This I thought I could handle.But I didn't handle it. With the funny stories that Alex would bring, it was easy for me just to nod my head while we kicked the can down the road. \new 20,\Alex would say, and as far as I could tell, she was right. Work happened later, marriage happened later, kids happened later, even death happened later. Twentysomethings like Alex and I had nothing but time.But before long, my supervisor pushed me to push Alex about her life. I pushed back.I said, \marry the guy.\might marry the next one. \20. Yes, people settle down later than they used to, but that didn't make Alex's 20s a developmental downtime. That made Alex's 20s a developmental sweet spot, and we were sitting there blowing it. That was when I realized that this sort of neglect was a real problem, and it had real consequences, not just for Alex and her love life but for the careers and the families and the futures of twentysomethings everywhere.
We're talking about 15 percent of the population, or 100 percent if you consider that no one's getting through adulthood without going through their 20s first.I focus on twentysomethings because I believe that every single one of those twentysomethings deserves to know that claiming your 20s is one of the simplest, yet most transformativethings you can do for work, for love, for your happiness, maybe even for the world.This is not my opinion. These are the facts. We know that 80 percent of life's most defining moments take place by age 35. That means that eight out of 10 of the decisions and experiences and \
your life what it is will have happened by your mid-30s.We know that the first 10 years of a career has an exponential impact on how much money you're going to earn. We know that the brain caps off its second and last growth spurt in your 20s as it rewires itself for adulthood, which means whatever it is you want to change about yourself, now is the time to change it. Your 20s are the time to educate yourself about your body and your options.It's a time when your ordinary, day-to-day life has an inordinate impact on who you will become. Leonard Bernstein said that to achieve great things, you need a plan and not quite enough time. So what do you think happens when you pat a twentysomething on the head and you say, \have 10 extra years to start your life\Nothing happens. You have robbed that person of his urgency and ambition, and absolutely nothing happens.
And then every day, smart, interesting twentysomethings like yousay things like this: \know my boyfriend's no good for me, but this relationship doesn't count. I'm just killing time.\I'll be fine.\to show for myself. I had a better résumé the day after I graduated from college.\starts to sound like this: \around and having fun, but then sometime around 30 it was like the music turned off and everybody started sitting down. I didn't want to be the only one left standing up, so sometimes I think I married my husband because he was the closest chair to me at 30.\now that sounds a little flip, but make no mistake, the stakes are very high.
When a lot has been pushed to your 30s, there is enormous thirtysomething pressure to jump-start a career, pick a city, partner up, and have one or two kids in a much shorter period of time.The midlife crisis isn't buying a car. It's realizing you can't have that career you now want. It's realizing you can't have that child you now want, or you can't give your child a
sibling. Too many thirtysomethings and fortysomethings look at themselvesand say about their 20s, \
I want to change what twentysomethings are doing and thinking.So there are three things that every twentysomething, male or female, deserves to hear.First,forget about having an identity crisis and get some identity capital. By get identity capital, I mean do something that adds value to who you are. Do something that's an investment in who you might want to be next. I didn't know the future of your career, and no one knows the future, but I do know this: Identity capital begets identity capital. So now is the time for that cross-country job, that internship, that startup you want to try. I'm not discounting twentysomething exploration here, but I am discounting exploration that's not supposed to count, which, by the way, is not exploration. That's procrastination.Second, best friends are great for giving rides to the airport, but twentysomethings who huddle together with like-minded peers limit who they know, what they know, how they think, how they speak, and where they work. That new piece of capital, that new person to date almost always comes from outside the inner circle. New things come from what are called our weak ties, our friends of friends of friends. So yes, half of twentysomethings are under-employed. But half aren't, and weak ties are how you get yourself into that group. Last but not least, you can't pick your family, but you can pick your friends. Now this was true for growing up, but as a twentysomething, soon you would pick your family when you partnered with someone and created a family of you own. the time to start picking your family is now. Now you may be thinking that 30 is actually a better time to settle down than 20, or even 25, and I agree with you. But grabbing whoever you're living with or dating with when everyone starts walking down the aisle is not progress. The best time to work on your marriage is before you have one, and that means being as intentional with love as you are with work. Picking your family is about consciously choosing who and
what you want rather than just making it work or killing time with whoever happens to be choosing you.
Twentysomethings are like airplanes just leaving LAX, a slight change in course is the difference between landing in Alaska or Fiji. Likewise, at 21 or 25 or even 29, one good conversation, one good break have an enormous effect across years and even generations to come.So here's an idea worth spreading to every twentysomething you know. Thirty is not the new 20, so claim your adulthood, get some identity capital, use your weak ties, pick your family. Don't be defined by what you didn't know or didn't do. You're deciding your life right now. Thank you.