Anne’s Reviews > The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter—And How to Make the Most of Them Now > Status Update

"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."

"I thought if I didn’t participate in adulthood, time would stop. But it didn’t. It just kept going. People around me kept going. Now I see I need to get going—and keep going."

"They need memento vivi —or ways to remember they are going to live. They need something to remind them that life is going to continue on past their twenties, and that it might even be great."

"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 succeeding—and from surviving some failures."

A great reminder.

"As we age, we feel less like leaves and more like trees. We have roots that ground us and sturdy trunks that may sway, but don’t break, in the wind."

"[...] older adults—and even twentysomethings who work at it—can be rooted in the confidence that problems can be solved, or at least survived."

"The post-twentysomething brain is still plastic, of course, but the opportunity is that never again in our lifetime will the brain offer up countless new connections and see what we make of them. Never again will we be so quick to learn new things. Never again will it be so easy to become the people we hope to be. The risk is that we may not act now."

Whoa that sense of urgency.

"The more you use your brain, the more brain you will have to use. —George A. Dorsey, anthropologist"

I guess this is my reminder to start using it now. Heh.

"Differences keep life fresh."

Similarities will bring two people together. Differences (in strengths and weaknesses) will make the couple last.

Woah this is fun! I love the econ facts.

"“The slower you go, the faster you get there.” Sometimes the best way to help people is to slow them down long enough to examine their own thinking. Everyone has gaps in their reasoning. If you stop and shine a light on these mental ellipses, you find assumptions that drive behavior without our being aware of them."