Meg Jay Quotes

Тридцать – это новые двадцать.

With all the attention paid to the urban tribe, however, many twentysomethings have limited themselves to huddling together with like-minded peers. Some are in almost constant contact with the same few people. But while the urban tribe helps us survive, it does not help us thrive. The urban tribe may bring us soup when we are sick, but it is the people we hardly know — those who never make it into our tribe — who will swiftly and dramatically change our lives for the better.

The one thing I have learned is that you can't think your way through life. The only way to figure out what to do is to do - something.

The best is the enemy of the good. — Voltaire, writer/philosopher

"Knowing what to overlook is one way older adults are typically wiser than young adults. With age comes what is known as "positivity effect". We become more interested in positive information, and our brains react less strongly to what negative information we do encounter."

Marriage is one of our most defining moments because so much is wrapped up in it. If building a career is like spending twelve hours at the blackjack table — seeing the cards as you make your decisions, playing each hand with current winnings in mind, having a new opportunity to take a chance or play it safe with every card dealt — then choosing a mate is like walking over to the roulette wheel and putting all your chips on red 32.

Inaction breeds fear and doubt. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy. — Dale Carnegie, writer and lecturer

often the first thing we know about ourselves is not what we are — it’s what we aren’t. We mark ourselves as not-this or not-that, the way Ian was quick to say he didn’t want to sit at the same desk all day. But self-definition cannot end there. An identity or a career cannot be built around what you don’t want. We have to shift from a negative identity, or a sense of what I’m not, to a positive one, or a sense of what I am. This takes courage.

What no one tells twentysomethings like Emma is that finally, and suddenly, they can pick their own families - they can create their own families - and these are the families that life will be about. These are the families that will define the decades ahead.

If the first step in establishing a professional identity is claiming our interests and talents, then the next step is claiming a story about our interests and talents, a narrative we can take with us to interviews and coffee dates (...) a story that balances complexity and cohesion is frankly, diagnostic.

Identity capital is our collection of personal assets. It is the repertoire of individual resources that we assemble over time. These are the investments we make in ourselves, the things we do well enough, or long enough, that they become a part of who we are.

The lottery question might get you thinking about what you would do if talent and money didn't matter. But they do. The question twentysomethings need to ask themselves is what they would do with their lives if they didn't win the lottery.

Goals direct us from the inside, but shoulds are paralyzing judgments from the outside. Goals feel like authentic dreams while shoulds feel like oppressive obligations. Shoulds set up a false dichotomy between either meeting an ideal or being a failure, between perfection or settling. The tyranny of the should even pits us against our own best interests.

Researchers who have looked at how people resolve identity crises have found that lives that are all capital and no crisis — all work and no exploration — feel rigid and conventional.

Despite its revolutionary promises, Facebook can turn our everyday lives into that wedding we have all heard about: the one where the bride chooses her prettiest friends, not her best friends, to be bridesmaids. It can feel like a popularity contest where being Liked is what matters, being the best is the only respectable option, how our partners look is more important than how they act, the race to get married is on, and we have to be clever all the time. It can be just another place, not to be, but to seem.