why it’s the people we hardly know, and not our closest friends, who will improve our lives most dramatically.
The question twentysomethings need to ask themselves is what they would do with their lives if they didn’t win the lottery. What might you be able to do well enough to support the life you want? And what might you enjoy enough that you won’t mind working at it in some form or another for years to come?”
Like the easiest way to explain black is to call it the opposite of white, often the first thing we know about ourselves is not what we are—it’s what we aren’t.
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.
Western culture is generally individualistic, prizing independence and self-fulfillment in almost all areas.
sine qua non
an essential condition; a thing that is absolutely necessary.
it’s easy to surround yourself with friends who are just like you. As a group, you may decide everyone else is doing it wrong. Friends can form a culture of criticism where differences are seen as deficiencies.”
Some bosses are not interested in being mentors. Others don’t know how. These very same bosses are often the ones who are tasked with teaching twentysomethings how to navigate the brand-new world of work. It may be a match made in hell, but that’s the way it is.
Twentysomethings who don’t feel anxious and incompetent at work are usually overconfident or underemployed.
Confidence doesn’t come from the inside out. It moves from the outside in. People feel less anxious—and more confident—on the inside when they can point to things they have done well on the outside. Fake confidence comes from stuffing our self-doubt. Empty confidence comes from parental platitudes on our lunch hour.
Real confidence comes from mastery experiences, which are actual, lived moments of success, especially when things seem difficult. Whether we are talking about love or work, the confidence that overrides insecurity comes from experience.
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.
Goals have been called the building blocks of adult personality, and it is worth considering that who you will be in your thirties and beyond is being built out of the goals you are setting for yourself today.
a reasoning error known as the availability heuristic. The availability heuristic is a mental shortcut whereby we decide how likely something is based on how easy it is to bring an example to mind.