Meg Jay Quotes

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

people who have some control over their emotions report greater life satisfaction, optimism, purpose, and better relationships with others.

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.

All the thinking I did was really debilitating and unproductive. 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.

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.

By 2019, 85 percent of Instagram influencers were between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five, which means that what most twentysomethings see on their phones all day are other twentysomethings living their best lives — in bathing suits — with some making a lot of money along the way. Meanwhile, child celebrities and everyday kids spend their youth acting twenty, while mature adults and the Real Housewives dress, and are sculpted, to look twenty-nine. The young look older and the old look younger, collapsing the adult life span into one long twentysomething ride.

I wasn't scared of losing my past. i was scared of losing my future.

Sometimes the best way to help people is to slow them down long enough to examine their own thinking.

"For the most part, "naturals" are myths. People who are especially good at something may have some innate inclination or some particular talent, but they have also spent about ten thousands hours practicins or doing that thing."

Traveling in a third-world country is the closest thing there is to being married and raising kids. You have glorious hikes and perfect days on the beach. You go on adventures you would never try, or enjoy, alone. But you also can't get away from each other. Everything is unfamiliar. Money is tight or you get robbed. Someone gets sick or sunburned. You get bored. It is harder than you expected, but you are glad you didn't just sit home.

I feel like I’m in the middle of the ocean. Like I could swim in any direction but I can’t see land so I don’t know which way to go.

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 goals you are setting for yourself today.

Neuroticism, or the tendency to be anxious, stressed, critical, and moody, is far more predictive of relationship unhappiness and dissolution than is personality dissimilarity. While personality similarity can help the years run smoothly, any two people will be different in some way or another. How a person responds to these differences can be more important than the differences themselves. To a person who runs high in Neuroticism, differences are seen in a negative light. Anxiety and judgments about these differences then lead to criticism and contempt, two leading relationship killers.

Gage’s social recovery, and countless subsequent studies of the brain, tell us that the brain changes in response to the environment. This is especially true in the twentysomething years as the brain caps off its second — and final — growth spurt.

Don’t compare yourself to other people; compare yourself to who you were yesterday. — Jordan Peterson, psychologist