Hello lovelies ♥
After two weeks of ridiculous amounts of work and exam
preparation (it turns out a 40+ hour job, a degree and some semblance of a
social life are not easy to balance at the same time), I am finally posting… drumroll
please … my first book review!
The book is called The
Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter and How to Make the Most of Them Now,
written by clinical psychologist Meg Jay. It’s a great book and I recommend it warmly,
mostly because it sparked a lot of ideas for me. I’m going to share the six
most important ones with you.
The main lesson I took away from the book is to be
deliberate, in the way you spend your time and in who you spend it with. More
specifically, the following suggestions seem particularly useful to me:
Career (1): Build up
identity capital
Identity capital is anything that you do long enough or well
enough that it becomes a part of you. That can be a university degree but it
also includes job experience, your appearance to some degree, your accent and
the way you express yourself, soft skills etc. Jay says the twenties is when
you should invest heavily in yourself, which I’ve always aimed to do – it’s
just that I’m not always sure what kind of identity capital I should be
building up. In fact, quite often, you’ll find me sitting at my desk surrounded
by a Romanian-Russian vocabulary notebook, a book on introductory business
studies and codeacademy.com open in my browser, having a small meltdown. Lately
though, what’s been working for me is to look up people who are where I want to
be, find out what got them there and what they were doing at my age, and use
that information to set my own goals and decide what to spend time on.
Career (2): Use your
weak ties
For the longest time I thought networking was bullshit.
Surely if you were good at something you wouldn’t need to know the right
people. You would just get noticed. And how superficial and shallow would
someone have to be to enjoy spending hours at a dinner party making small talk
with “important” people? The more time I spent in the adult world, the more I
realized that networking leads to some great encounters and even friendships,
as long as you go into it with the objective of meeting interesting,
like-minded people rather than sucking up to people you might one day be able
to benefit from. So, spend time with people outside of your immediate social
environment, ask them stuff, learn from them, don’t be afraid to ask for help,
and give help back wherever you can.
Love: Choose your partner, and choose them right
Every time anyone shows any interest in me beyond just
sexual attraction, I am mostly taken aback and confused. Why would they like
me? Why don’t they like person X when they are OBVIOUSLY
prettier/smarter/better? Why haven’t they texted?! Is it because of that thing
I said about that person that one time when we were talking about the
stuff??
In my ten years of dating and being neurotic and trying to
get people to like me, I never once truly stopped to ask myself if I even liked
them. The sad, honest truth is that I let people choose me and then hope they
find me interesting enough to stick around. The
Defining Decade contains a story of a girl who does just that, too, and it
made me realize two things.
Firstly, Jay is right when she writes that a partner is “your
second chance at family” (God knows I need one of those), and that you need to
pick them instead of letting them pick you.
But secondly, pick them for the right reasons. I always
thought the guy I’m looking for is someone tall and good-looking with a certain
level of education and income potential. But the thing is, I won’t be waking up
every day next to a pair of ocean-blue eyeballs (creepy!) or a bank account
with seven figures in it. I’m going to be spending my life and raising children
with a real, human person who has to share my values and who has to have
interesting things to say and who should teach my children to have a good heart
and be a living example of that. I need someone patient, and calm, and
kind-hearted, someone who knows how to make me laugh and who will be okay with
the fact that I need to be told I’m pretty and smart and loved about as often
as most people brush their teeth and that sometimes (well, once every 28 days
roughly) I burst into tears for no good reason at all.
Personality (1):
Rewrite your story
When we are children and adolescents, we hold certain
beliefs about ourselves. That we are hopelessly shy or “simply bad at” sports
or foreign languages or that we are “unpopular” or “uncool” or whatever. Those
beliefs tend to come from a very limited range of negative experiences and are
unlikely to accurately reflect reality. They are not always helpful in getting
us closer to our goals. So, you have to re-evaluate how you see yourself and rewrite
your story. And the way to do that, I think, is to…
Personality (2): Seek
out challenge
As a typical 20-something, my confidence is not exactly what
I would call solid. In fact I have days
where I just feel like I suck at absolutely everything. If you would say the
same about yourself, you can now stop worrying, because you’re not supposed to
be confident at our age. Confidence isn’t something that you magically have. It
grows from the outside. When you tackle difficult situations successfully, you start
believing in your ability to tackle difficult situations successfully, making
it likelier that you will in the future tackle difficult… you get the point.
And finally…. Do SOMETHING.
Jay writes that “you can’t think your way through life”. No
matter what you think you like, or you feel like you may like, or be suited
for, you have no way of knowing for sure until you actually try. A lot of
things you try in your twenties may be completely wrong for you, but they’ll
help you find what’s right for you.
So go out, and do things.
Love,
Damita
thank you! :)
ReplyDelete