Book Notes: The Defining Decade by Meg Jay
I was asked by my friend to read this book. She’s 22 years old and is going through an Eat, Pray, Love phase of her life while I’m on the other side of the hill grappling with thoughts of purpose, value and legacy.
30 is not the new 20. Our 20s is a crucial period in which we need to press hard and make things happen instead of putting off our responsibilities. We need to build some perspective relatively earlier than what today’s twentysomethings assume.
Putting in the Time for Growth
Meg talks about how we often just ‘wait’ for something better to come along. Instead we should do something that has opportunities for growth— something that creates capital that might pay off in the future. This could mean doing grunt work through an internship at a big MNC that might pay off in the long term instead of working at a coffee shop which gives you short-term gains such as a good work atmosphere and friends to hang out with.
Action, Action, Action
The key takeaway from this book has been how action is everything. You can always over-analyze an action before doing it, but the best way forward is to do it. ‘Action trumps all’ is an idea emphasized in another book I was reading in parallel to this one — ‘The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck’ by Mark Manson.
“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.”
— Page 28
Meeting New People
Meg emphasizes the benefits of putting yourself out there to meet more and more new people. It’s also better to turn to other successful people for help and advice. This gives the helper an opportunity to create value in someone else’s life and pay it forward — It gives them a “helper’s high”.
“… 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”
— Page 31“Information and opportunity spread further and faster through weak ties than through close friends because weak ties have fewer overlapping contacts. Weak ties are like bridges you cannot see all the way across, so there is no telling where they might lead.
— Page 32
Building Identity & Story
We often define who we want to be by claiming things we don’t want to do or don’t want to be — i.e. we define our negative-identity. “The easiest way to call black is to call it the opposite of white”. So instead of making excuses and belittle ourselves in comparison to supposedly successful people, we should take conscious action to set goals and march towards it and build our lives.
“‘Shoulds’ can masquerade as high standards or lofty goals, but they are not the same. Goals direct us from the inside, but ‘shoulds’ are paralyzing judgments from the outside.”
— Page 51“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.”
— Page 58“Distinctiveness is a fundamental part of identity. We develop a clearer sense of ourselves by firming up the boundaries between ourselves and others.”
— Page 57“In the twenty-first century, careers and lives don’t roll off an assembly line. We have to put together the pieces ourselves… [you] would probably need to start with some common parts.”
— Page 60. Having an uncommon life is often made of common parts.“College is done and resumes are fledgling, so the personal narrative is one of the few things currently under our control. As a twentysomething, life is still more about potential than proof. Those who can tell a good story about who they are and what they want leap over those who can’t.”
— Page 61
On Love & Relationships
“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.”
— Page 68“Like with work, good relationships don’t just appear when we’re ready. It may take a few thoughtful tries before we know what love and commitment really are.”
— Page 73
Picking Family
“Other things may change us, but we start and end with family.”
— Anthony Brandt — Page 74“When you partner with someone, you have a second chance at family.”
— Page 77
Through the lens of western culture it’s easy to look down upon how marriage was thought of in the past — that it was not just about two people coming together but also about bridging families. This view is still adopted by many Asian cultures today and, surprisingly, Meg seems to agree with this.
“There is something scary about picking your family. It’s not romantic. It means you aren’t just waiting for your soulmate to arrive. It means you know you are making decisions that will affect the rest of your life.”
— Page 77.“Western culture is generally individualistic, prizing independence and self-fulfillment in almost all areas. We emphasize rights over duties and choice over obligation.”
— Page 78
Cohabitation Before Marriage
According to Meg, cohabitation before engagement is a complete no-no. I have still yet to have a fully formed opinion on this. However, it’s definitely food for thought.
“…couples who “live together first” are actually less satisfied with their marriages and more likely to divorce than couples who do not. This is what sociologists call the ‘Cohabitation effect’.”
— Page 80“It is couples who live together before an engagement who are more likely to experience poorer communication, lower levels of commitment to the relationship, and greater marital instability down the road.”
— Page 83“It’s like signing up for a credit card with 0 percent interest for the first year. At the end of the twelve months, when the interest goes up to 23 percent, you feel stuck because your balance is too high to pay off and you didn’t get around to transferring your balance to another low-interest card sooner. In fact, cohabitation can be exactly like that. In behavioral economics, it’s known as consumer lock-in.”
— Page 85
Revising Your Story (Your Past)
“Twentysomething women and men who are dating down — or working down, for that matter — usually have untold, or at least unedited, stories. These stories originated in old conversations and experiences and, so, they change only through new conversations and new experiences.”
— Page 94
Compatibility in Similarity
I am not sure if I agree with this but Meg’s theory is that couples who have similar personalities and character make for better and stronger relationships.
“…the more similar two people are, the more they are able to understand each other.”
— Page 98“More often, similarity is the essence of compatibility.”
— Page 98
On the Brain
“The most forward part of the brain — literally and figuratively — is the frontal lobe, located just behind the forehead. The most recent part of the brain to have evolved in humans, is also the final area of the brain to mature in each individual. Nicknamed the “executive functioning center” and “seat of civilization”, the frontal lobe is where reason and judgement reside.”
— Page 111“…the frontal lobe does not fully mature until sometime between the ages of twenty and thirty.”
— Page 112“Evolutionary theorists believe the brain is designed to pay special attention to what catches us off-guard, so we can be better prepared to meet the world next time. The brain even has a built-in novelty detector, a part that sends chemical signals to stimulate memory when new and different things happen.”
— Page 120“People are more likely to remember highly emotional events.”
— Page 120“… a lesson you’ll never forget… is a jarring — but efficient and often necessary — way to grow.”
— Page 121“Suppressing your feelings keeps your body and brain stressed, and it impairs your memory.”
— Page 123
You are the Reason
Whatever happens in your life is because of you — This is also an idea put forth in another book I’ve been reading mentioned before, ‘The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck’ by Mark Manson. This can easily be misinterpreted. It is true that there are things that happen in your life due to external circumstances, but usually you define what ‘happened’ in your life by how you actually felt (or feel) about it. What happens in your life is basically a function of your emotion towards that happening. And you can choose to feel a different way about that happening — thereby leading to the theory, ‘whatever happens in your life is because of you’.
Parenthood
One of the scariest reminders in this book is regarding fertility. We often delay having children in our marriages. Meg provides more sufficient evidence to make couples realize that their biological clocks cannot be delayed. Having children needs to be planned for earlier in relationships. The current modern perception that parenthood can be delayed needs reconsideration.
Quotes I Like
“The unlived life is not worth examining”
— Sheldon Kopp. As a counterweight to the saying, “the unexamined life is not worth living.” (Page 11)“Popular culture has an almost obsessive focus on the twenties such that these freebie years appear to be all that exist. 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 lifespan into one long twentysomething ride.”
— Page 13“Uncertainty makes people anxious, and distraction is the twenty-first-century opiate of the masses.”
— Page 15“Late bloomers will likely never close the gap between themselves and those who got started earlier.”
— Page 26“The fastest route to something new is one phone call, one email, one box of books, one favor, one thirtieth birthday party”.
— Page 40“If we only wanted to be happy, it would be easy; but we want to be happier than other people, which is almost always difficult, since we think they happier than they are.”
— Charles de Montesquieu, writer/philosopher — Page 47“…an adult life is built not out of eating, praying, and loving but out of person, place, and thing: who we are with, where we live and what we do for a living.”
— Page 54“Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward.”
— Soren Kierkegaard — Page 110“Twentysomethings who don’t feel anxious and incompetent at work are usually overconfident or underemployed.”
— Page 119“The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook.”
— Page 121“…the confidence that overrides insecurity comes from experience.”
— Page 128“To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time.”
— Leonard Bernstein — Page 147
Phrases I like
“reserve of goodwill” — Page 39
“vectorless life” — Page 42
“…she would sanitize her description of a first date” — Page 89 — to withhold some parts of a story
