The Defining Decade: What People In Their Thirties Regret About Their Twenties

Contemporary culture tells us that our twenties aren’t that important. They’re for experimenting, travelling and generally fucking around. But Meg Jay, author of The Defining Decade disagrees. As a clinical psychologist that mainly sees clients in their twenties and thirties, Jay wrote The Defining Decade to give readers an insight into how important the twenties can be.

The world is changing. Most people in their twenties are graduating from university to find that getting a graduate job in their field isn’t easy. Competition is higher than ever, and it seems more like it’s who you know rather that what you know that determines whether your applications will be seriously considered. As a result, many people in their twenties end up doing jobs that they’re overqualified for – jobs in bars, coffee shops or retail. Jay’s clients who end up in these positions often feel unhappy and disappointed. Too many of these types of jobs for too long can impact our future finances and career. Wages usually peak in our forties so we could be wasting valuable time to increase our earning power.

Jay recommends that people in their twenties focus on increasing their identity capital – the collection of skills, relationships, and professional resources that we build over our lives. This may be through taking a pay cut to work in a lowly job in a lucrative industry, in order to get your foot in the door and work our way up. A simple way summarizing it as Robert Kiyosaki, the author of Rich Dad Poor Dad says, is: “Don’t work to earn, work to learn.”

A common problem Jay encounters while speaking to her clients is that they are anxious because they are comparing their situations to other people on social media. They’ll say “All of my friends are getting married and having babies,” when that is statistically very unlikely. The ones that are doing so might even be people they never talk to anyway, but just happen to be friends on Facebook. It’s important to remember that social media is usually a highlight reel, and even so, comparison is not necessary – what’s important is that you are working towards your own goals, not trying to imitate another’s.

There is a huge discrepancy to how people regard dating in their twenties compared to their thirties. People in their twenties tend to partake in the hook-up culture that has become more normalized over the last few decades. They often go into relationships with people that they know for sure that they won’t end up marrying, but they’re okay with it anyway. When people turn thirty, it can switch like a game of musical chairs when the music stops – everyone ends up pairing up with others, even if they may not be entirely compatible. Jay recommends that people in their twenties be more intentional with their dating so that they don’t have to rush or panic when they start to get a little older.

Jay also warns about the dangers of cohabitation with partners. People in their twenties often move in with their partners because of convenience, or to share financial costs. Before too long, they feel like the next stage is marriage, but they might not really be totally compatible for each other. This is what Jay terms “sliding, not deciding”. Jay recommends if partners are to move in together, to have a conversation about how committed they are to each other and where they see their relationship going in the future.

Another gripe that Jay’s clients often talk about is how their relationships with their family aren’t what they hoped or wished for. Maybe they felt neglected, unloved or unsupported. The good news is though, as an adult they can choose a second family through their partner – getting along with your partner’s family can be a large source of well-being and a sense of belonging.

In a study of people in their twenties, they rated that their most important goal in their life was to be a good parent, followed by having a good marriage, and then a good career. So if people know for sure that they want to have children at some point in their lives, they need to know this: Females become half as fertile from their peak in their twenties at age 30, they are only 25% as fertile at age 35, and 12.5% as fertile at age 40. That’s not to say that people in their thirties and forties cannot have children, but the chances of fertility issues or miscarriages are much more common, and it can be devastating. For men, quality of sperm decreases with age too, although it is not quite as drastic.

The biggest takeaway from Jay in The Defining Decade is that we must do the math on our lives. If we are planning on going to law school and becoming a lawyer, and then want to get married and have three kids after, then what age do you have to start law school? The answer most probably is right now!

For a lot of people reading in their late-twenties or early-thirties, the outlook can seem bleak. But it’s much better to know all this now before it really is too late.

Do Children Stop Playing or Carry on When Someone Gets Hurt?

According to Daniel Goleman, the author of Emotional Intelligence, girls are much more likely than boys to stop their games if someone becomes upset or hurt. In boys’ games, the upset boy is expected to move out of the way so the game can continue.

This shows that there is a disparity in the way that boys and girls respond emotionally, even at a young age. Girls are more occupied with minimizing hostility and maximizing co-operation, while boys are more focused on competition, independence and toughness.

I can testify to the boys’ side of this phenomenon: When I split my chin open playing football in school, the game continued on and I resumed once I had gotten successfully patched up by the school nurse. While skateboarding there have been times where people have hurt themselves – if they haven’t moved out of the way they are gently asked to. Obviously there have been times where the injury has been serious enough to stop the game too.

Goleman explains that differences between genders like these can lead to a deficiency in how men and women communicate with each other in intimate relationships. By increasing our emotional intelligence, we can more often become conscious of how the other is feeling, and communicate better.

Want to know more about the five domains of emotional intelligence? Click here.

Tony Robbins: 3 Simple Tips For Relationships with Men

An intimate relationship usually results from an attraction between a masculine and feminine energy. Today’s post is for those with feminine energy in the relationship, and how to treat their partner with masculine energy.

Men Need to Feel Appreciated

There’s nothing that can make a man feel more proud and empowered than a partner that makes him her hero. He will feel as if he can run through brick walls for her, fight for her and die for her.

Criticism, on the other hand, weakens connection. The man feels weaker, and even if it feels like you are simply “coaching” him, it can distance him and potentially force him to looking for somewhere where he feels more appreciated.

Men Need to Feel Opened Up To

When you’re open, it invites your man to open up too. Often, the only person a man opens up to is his partner, so closing off this line of connection is detrimental to the relationship.

Feminine energy is flowing, intuitive and beautiful for a man to experience and be in the presence of. The radiance of the feminine adds energy, passion and connection to the relationship. Being in your own element is what he loves about you.

Men Don’t Want to Feel Controlled

One of the most difficult, but effective feminine traits is surrender. Men want to take the role of the courageous protector, and don’t like to be told what to do by their partner. Even though they are in a relationship, they want to feel free to pursue their goals and hobbies, and have ownership and control of their own lives. Being controlling is actually counterintuitive and forces your partner away, even though it may be the last thing you want.

Neglecting these actions could eventually lead to the man becoming insecure, less assertive and feeling weak. The loss of masculine energy creates a loss of passion and intimacy – a depolarization that could lead to the end of the relationship.

Click here for Tony Robbins’ tips for relationships with women.

Tony Robbins: 3 Simple Tips For Relationships with Women

An intimate relationship usually results from an attraction between a masculine and feminine energy. Today’s post is for those with masculine energy in the relationship, and how to treat their partner with feminine energy.

A Woman Needs to Feel Seen

Picture the husband stonewalling his wife while he sits on the couch watching sports while she’s trying to communicate something to him. Or a time when she wears something different to impress her partner and he doesn’t notice. Women do not want to feel invisible, especially to their partners.

Be present with your partner and make them feel seen. Look them in the eyes while you are talking to them, and compliment sincerely about their appearance or any positive behavior.

A Woman Needs to Feel Understood

A classic example of men misunderstanding the feminine energy of their partners is during communication of a problem or life situation. Women generally prefer to tune into their feelings, while men favor thinking. So when a women express their problems, they are just looking for someone to empathize with them, and fully understand them. That’s when they can begin to trust their partner, feel more comfortable and share more.

Instead of trying to solve the problem instantly, as most men will automatically do, it’s better to listen actively your partner first to make sure you are on the same page. Usually your female partner will know how to solve the problem deep down, they just want to work it out aloud with someone.

A Woman Needs to Feel Safe

Women have an evolutionary drive to feel safe more than men do. Naturally, they are weaker and more prone to attack, so when a woman feels safe she can then open up and share passion with her lover.

Safety can come in different forms and it’s your job to find out which forms are important to your partner. Physical safety of being there to protect her in potentially dangerous situations, psychological safety of knowing that you will be reliable and adept in decision-making, or possibly even financial safety and knowing that you have the resources to provide for her and any potential children.

If these actions are neglected over a period of time, it’s likely that female with the feminine energy will have to adopt some more masculine traits. If her man isn’t able to make decisions she will have to make them herself. If he isn’t able to listen to her, she may have to close off and try to solve problems by herself. The resulting depolarization is devastating for the relationship – any passion or attraction escapes quickly when the feminine has to take on the masculine role too.

Click here for Tony Robbins’ tips for relationships with men.

What Derren Brown Taught Me About Learning

Tricks of the Mind is a book by Derren Brown, an eccentric British mentalist/magician/illusionist/TV star. The book had been sitting in my bedroom for the last decade almost completely unread. The only section I had perused shortly after I bought it as a teenager was about how to detect a liar. Evidently, I was less than impressed and put down the book and never picked it back up until now.

Inside Tricks of the Mind are interesting instructions on how to learn some ‘magic tricks’ and the main principles needed to engineer an impressive one. But what really amazed me about this book was the section on memory.

Unsurprisingly, Brown invites us to memorize a list of 20 words in consecutive order. I said the first six words out loud several times before closing book to try and recall them. As I went to write, my mind went blank, and I ended up writing the first five words but in completely the wrong order. A complete fail.

The chapter then went to give instructions on how to remember the list of words. It used a process called linking, whereby you imagine vivid associations between the consecutive words. For example if the word “baby” follows the word “wigwam”, you can imagine a gigantic baby that is inside a Native American abode, tearing it apart as it woke up angrily from a nap. The more outrageous the story, the easier it is to remember.

Within two minutes, I had memorized the list perfectly. I was amazed. By inputting the words into my long-term memory, it became easy to remember the list. In my first attempt, I was attempting to cram my short-term memory and was destined for failure.

I could have been there for a full day with my first method learning the 20 words, but with a more effective method I managed to memorize it in a fraction of the time. I felt empowered and elated.

Within the next hour, I managed to remember a different 20-word list and their corresponding numbers, and a list of nine generic to-do tasks. I managed to memorize a 21-digit number and recite it. It’s 876498474505773498724 by the way. I did each of those with various methods such as the loci method and the pegging method, all within minutes of reading it from the page. I can still remember all of the above lists and numbers now.

I began to ponder: What other things are we trying to learn, but just learning with the wrong method? Where could we seek coaching from an expert, instead of wasting our time and energy trying to learn by ourselves? What long-accepted ways of learning could be transformed by changing the way we do things?

Please comment your thoughts and ideas below!

Can Pain Be an Effective Call to Action?

If you are trapped in the nightmare you will probably be more strongly motivated to awaken than someone who is just caught in the ups and downs of an ordinary dream.

Eckhart Tolle, author of The Power of Now

The quote above rings true. Why do we will ourselves to wake up during a nightmare, while we remain blissfully ignorant during regular or pleasant dreams?

Tony Robbins describes in his book Awaken the Giant Within the following scenario:

I believe that life is like a river, and that most people jump on the river of life without ever really deciding where they want to end up. So, in a short period of time, they get caught up in the current: current events, current fears, current challenges.

When they come to forks in the river, they don’t consciously decide where they want to go, or which is the right direction for them. They merely ‘go with the flow’. They become a part of the mass of people who are directed by the environment instead of by their own values. As a result, they feel out of control.

They remain in this unconscious state until one day the sound of the raging water awakens them, and they discover that they’re five feet from Niagara Falls in a boat with no oars. At this point, they say, ‘Oh shoot!’. 

Tony Robbins, Awaken the Giant Within

This scenario is similar to the nightmare scenario is that we only really awaken when we realize that catastrophe is looming. We can no longer ignore the pain we are experiencing and are forced into action.

One of the biggest human motivators is the avoidance of pain, even more than pursuing pleasure. It’s been shown in experiments that humans refuse to gamble on a coin toss until the ratio of the reward is twice as much as their initial stake they could lose. This is explained by Daniel Kahneman’s Nobel Prize-winning theory of loss aversion – people hate losing more than they enjoy winning.

So how do we avoid noticing that life is going sour before it’s too late? One way is to increase our reference points in our lives. This is the same as raising our standards, or turning up a metaphorical thermostat. This applies to our finances, health, relationships, and any other area of our life. If we have higher standards, we will feel ‘pain’ even when other people may not, which we can use as motivation to get where we deem is acceptable.

Therefore, pursuing a goal means you must be willing to sacrifice. To get something “better” you will have to give up something – be it energy, time, even sense of current identity. Having a higher level of reference will mean that you have to be ready to meet the challenge of living life at a higher level – taking more responsibility and using up more effort.

You Are Not Your Mind

In Eckhart Tolle’s book The Power of Now, Tolle describes the time in his life in which he had an epiphany which you could describe as a spiritual awakening:

“I cannot live with myself any longer.” This was the thought that kept repeating itself in my mind. Then I suddenly became aware of what a peculiar thought it was. “Am I one or two? If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me: The ‘I’ and the ‘self’ that ‘I’ cannot live with.” “Maybe,” I thought, “only one of them is real.”

The ‘self’ that Tolle was describing was the personification of his mind. The state he was in before he had the epiphany was a state of unconsciousness. He was identifying with his mind – he thought his mind was himself. Unconscious mind identification happens to all of us, and is a major source of our suffering.

It’s freeing to detach from mind identification. The same mind that constantly comes up with negative, self-defeating thoughts or projecting to the future or revisiting past events – you can simply observe. Observation of the mind brings a new level of awareness and consciousness and brings you into the Now.

If you were to have these same thoughts and identify with your mind, you will suffer. You end up attaching too much to your thoughts. You don’t end up using your mind – your mind uses you. Whenever you are able to observe your mind, you are no longer trapped in it.

Success Leaves Clues, but We Shouldn’t Disregard Luck

A quote popularized by Tony Robbins – “Success leaves clues” – can get us very excited about lofty goals. If we were only to follow the playbook of mega-successful entrepreneurs, sportspeople, politicians and artists, we could (and should) achieve the same results. But what most people are poor at understanding is the role of luck in success.

Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize winner and author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, highlights books like Built to Last by Jim Collins and Jerry I. Porras that describe common characteristics of successful companies that are built for growth and long-lasting success. Kahneman argues that the companies that are chosen for their success are statistical anomalies, rather than the consequence of skill. Many companies run exactly the same way would fail due to the role of luck and chance. Therefore, the conclusions made in these types of books could well be useless.

Although it is difficult to get your head around, Kahneman’s point makes sense. A year after their inception, Google were willing to sell their company for $1m, but the deal didn’t go through because the buyer said the price was too high. There are likely a multitude of other ‘lucky’ events in the company’s history that will have helped Google to get where they are today.

But just because a lot of success is down to luck, doesn’t mean that we should no longer try. The real question is: How can we put ourselves in more positions to get lucky? We are much more likely to get signed by a professional football club if we play in front of scouts and spectators than if we played in our back-garden where nobody saw us.

Teleology: Can We Change Easier Than We Think?

The Courage to Be Disliked is by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga is a book on individual psychology, a school of thought made famous by Alfred Adler. Adler was a lesser known contemporary of Sigmund Freud and opposed many of his views. One of the most interesting differences is Freud’s view of etiology compared to Adler’s view of teleology.

Much like most of the general population, Freud believed that events early on in childhood had an effect on how the child would grow into adulthood. We see this all the time in documentaries about people that explained how they grew up and how it made them to be who they were: Michael Jordan grew up with two brothers that used to beat him all the time in basketball, so now Michael Jordan is extremely competitive.

Adler, however, believed that human beings choose specific narratives or goals, and use past events that match up with it: Michael Jordan chose to be competitive at some point in time, and we are just using the fact that he had two brothers to generate a plausible explanation (but in reality it makes no difference).

If you think about it, if Michael Jordan turned out to be uncompetitive, the etiological model would say that he was uncompetitive because his brothers beat him at basketball too much and it made him dislike competition. It’s argued that Freud’s etiological stance is deterministic, and it builds up an identity attachment that can be difficult to overcome in mental illnesses.

Adler’s teleological model explains that human beings can choose to change their narrative or goal whenever they want to, and can start living whatever kind of life that they choose. One of my friends once told me that she had a quiet, timid personality when she grew up in Europe, and when moving to USA she decided that she would be outgoing, charismatic and confident. And then she simply just did it! This is an example that people aren’t just a product of their environment over time, and it is possible to change through an instantaneous, powerful decision.

Of course it seems unbelievable to think that people suffering from negative emotions or illnesses are choosing to do so, and this is probably the reason why Adler’s theory is less accepted than Freud’s theory. It could be that the person chooses to suffer because the idea of suffering is attached to their identity, and they won’t change their narrative through fear of uncertainty. They end up choosing the more familiar option of staying stuck.

In summary, teleology can be a useful way of taking control of our lives, and through choosing a empowering goal we can begin a fulfilling journey instead of carrying on with a self-defeating one.

Do Good Things Come to Those Who Wait or Are We Just Postponing Our Lives?

The way the world is right now, it’s so easy to wait. We kill time, watching each day go, hoping for a new season to arrive, or something arbitrary day to come before we allow ourselves to take a risk that we’ve been thinking about for a while.

We begin to think of the here and now as a preparatory period, yet, as Annie Dillard wrote, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” How would it feel for life to end and all you did was “prepare”?