The Art of Adulting

Learning to navigate adulthood with The Grand community

This piece was originally published on The Grand’s blog.

In 2019, over two million college students graduated into the real world. For 20 and 30-somethings, we were those bright-eyed and bushy tailed humans not so long ago, ready to take on the world. Yet, setting off into the world post college can feel like a rude awakening in many ways. We graduate from a structured life filled with syllabuses and clear expectations of our next goal (passing a class, interning for work experience, getting a job, graduating, etc.) into a world defined by ambiguity. At commencement ceremonies, we hear a message to the tune of “the world is our oyster.” We feel empowered to get out there and get started with the rest of our lives. It’s all a dream at first, albeit a slightly stressful dream involving finding a new apartment, starting a new job, making new friends at work, actually making money to spend; but, as life settles down into a day to day routine, we’re faced with decisions about our future that we feel ill-equipped to make.

At one point or another on our journey, we find ourselves with more questions than answers. If we’re lucky, we lean on supportive family and friends who share best practices for how they navigated the traditional adult milestones (allocating our paychecks to save for retirement, filing taxes, finding a life partner, saving to buy a first-home house, etc.) in one-off conversations, or we take to Reddit to see what advice strangers have to offer. While helpful in the moment, much of our learning is fragmented and our perspective is limited to the people and resources we have access to in that point of time.

Recently, I had the pleasure of partnering with The Grand to lead a session exploring how to get comfortable navigating the ambiguity of adulthood and creating our own paths. The Grand was founded with the mission to provide a community for navigating life’s big questions alongside other interesting humans. It offers us all a space to learn more deeply about how others before us have steered their own journeys.

A group of us, ranging from recent grads to 30-somethings, came together to share the challenges we each face and the lessons we’ve picked up along the way. The topics before us were vast and boundless varying from:

• How to approach traditional adulthood milestones, to
• How our goals and values evolve as we become “adults”, to
• How to continuously evolve our portfolio of life skills, to
• How to manage relationships, to
• How to stoke our risk tolerance in the face of responsibilities as we get older.

As our conversation evolved throughout our time together, it became evident that many of us have stumbled upon the keys to unlocking some paths, yet struggle to make sense of how to manage other elements of adulthood.

Below are the key learnings from our conversation broken out by overarching philosophies we hold dear and strategies we’ve picked up along the way. While we covered a lot of ground in 90 minutes, in many ways, we barely scratched the surface. These learnings illustrate the power of sharing our experiences and learning from others on our search for how to navigate the complexities of adulthood.

Adulting philosophies

• Go your own pace down your own path: Your ultimate destination is personal and the right decision for you around a big life decision might not be what others expect. Be intentional about embracing your own unique experience — what might work for one person might be the opposite of what someone else needs. More on this sentiment below
• Progress, not perfection: When tackling big adulting tasks, simplify the process by taking it one step at a time. Figure out your comfort level before diving into more complex projects
• Seek out diverse perspectives: When challenged with identifying which life milestones are important to you or how to achieve a particular milestone, talk to others who have been there or choose another alternative life path

Tactics for identifying what life experiences you want to pursue

• Make a list of 50 things you want to achieve in your lifetime using the Law of Attraction life planner and create time bound goals
• Define your fears instead of your goals (TEDTalk): Manage your self-analysis by writing your biggest fears down on paper and identify which aspects of your fears you can control and execute on
• Create different versions of your life that you’d be excited to live using the design thinking book, Design Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life
• Build a life resume: Identify which life skills you’ve mastered and want to build, identify the people you have relationships with and want to cultivate relationships with — see an example here

Navigating the day to day: building habits and routine

• Start every day with 3 goals: Find balance by setting your intention to check off 3 goals first thing in the morning so you’re free to explore lower priority projects as the day goes on
• Experiment with what it takes for you to establish a habit: Minimize the barriers that get in the way of you pursuing new habits; The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business shares the science behind how we can rewire our habits and transform our lives
• Assess your life on a weekly cadence by asking yourself 5 questions:

Where did I spend my time over the last 7 days?

What interactions/activities energized me? Which ones drained me?

What will I do more of next week?

What are 3–5 things I’m hyper-focused on accomplishing this upcoming week?

Managing personal finances

• Prioritize where to spend your money: Identify your top 2–3 life priorities by defining what it means for you to “live well” (traveling vs nice apartment vs going out for dinner often, etc.) then decide which expenses you’re willing to cut back on

Optimize for experiences that you can only do at certain points of your life (e.g., highly active adventures in your 20–30s vs relaxing vacations in your 50–60s)

• Live below your means by ignoring raises: As you make more money, continue to live your same standard of living and put the additional income into your savings

It’s easy to increase your standard for living, but nearly impossible to decrease your standard of living

• How much do I need to make vs how much do I want to make? Challenge yourself to think about the minimum salary you would need to make in order for you to pursue work that you’re most passionate and live happily rather than focusing on maximizing your salary for the sake of making more money
• Saving 2x your income by your mid-30s is a general rule of thumb, but is not a goal everyone needs to aspire to depending on their life goals

MarketWatch’s How to save twice your salary (or more) includes savings strategies like taking advantage of 401(k) employer matches, rejecting “normal” expenses, automating the process

Inc.’s Millennials: if ‘2 times your salary saved by 35’ sounds crazy, you’re right dives into which expenses to consider cutting back on

• Think about future you’s risk tolerance before making big financial decisions: When considering investing a large sum of your money (e.g., buying a condo), reflect on what you want your future life to look like — passive income stream vs savings for future financial flexibility, etc.

Maintaining and deepening friendships

• Practice empathy and being a good friend by proactively reaching out to friends who you haven’t spoken to in a while. Periodically scroll through your messaging apps to see who you’re out of touch with

Anticipate how friends may be feeling during challenging times and routinely check in on them or surprise them with a care package (e.g., frontline worker friends during COVID-19)

• Cultivate the friendships you hope will stand the test of time: In retirement, your whole world will be the friends who you’ve stayed in touch with over the course of your life. Don’t forget to nurture these relationships even when things get busy in your daily lives

If you walk away from this piece remembering one thing, I hope it’s this: For each of the seemingly infinite questions you may have about adulting, there are an equal number of paths you can walk in pursuit of a fulfilling life. The benefit of learning from others’ adulting strategies is to inform and enrich your roadmap, not to dictate or provide a step by step guide for how you should go about building your life.

During our Grand session, this sentiment was underscored by two of our attendees who made completely different decisions about whether they should invest in a condo in their twenties. One decided to purchase a condo for future passive income as a rental property, the other opted not to commit to a condo for future savings flexibility. Fast forward a few years: both of them are thrilled with the decision they’d made as it’s set them up to make the transition from working for companies to pursuing their career as entrepreneurs — one drawing on the passive income from her rental property and the other drawing from the money he’s saved up over time. These two experiences bring to light that two seemingly different financial decisions (investing in a condo vs building up a savings fund) can enable two people to pursue similar life goals (financial flexibility to become an entrepreneur and build a company).

The Grand session was one in a lifelong series of conversations we’ll have over the course of our lives in service of designing our own unique path through adulthood. When you find yourself feeling anxious about a big life decision or the desire to procrastinate building your portfolio of life skills, I challenge you to take a small step forward by seeking a new perspective outside of your day-to-day community to help illuminate another path that you may have never thought to explore.