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The age from twenty to thirty is the most productive time. How to live these most important ten years as efficiently as possible, so that later you do not regret wasted youth?
Young people who were born in the 1990s and 2000s seem to many to be carefree and frivolous. Their life is full of bright emotions, adventures and unlimited possibilities. But many of them do not feel happy.
The reason is simple: public opinion has generated a lot of myths about what to do in your 20s and 30s, how to live in these important years. The result is that many “enjoy youth”, and at the age of 30-40 they begin to shed tears and regret that the most productive time was spent incomprehensibly what. What to do?
1. Always remember: this is the main time
Why? It turns out that 80% of the fateful events in our lives occur precisely before the age of 35. Two-thirds of income growth occurs in the first ten years of a career.
By the age of 30, most people get married and start a family.
And most importantly, at this time our personality changes the most. That is why it is so important now to look at your life and see the perspective, understand what actions will benefit you in the future, and decide who you really are.
2. Try to understand what you like and what you want
The time from twenty to thirty is a critical period of growing up. In this segment, it is easiest to lay the foundations of the life that we want to live.
Unfortunately, many do not understand this and make the main mistake: they think that this is the time when “you can take a walk”, and “thirty is the new twenty”. But when these thirty are on the threshold, they understand that the work does not bring pleasure and joy, there are no special achievements, and it is generally incomprehensible what ten years of life took.
To prevent this, try to figure out now what you really like to do and what can bring you pleasure, joy and income.
3. Build Identity Capital
The life of a person in 20-30 years is like a plane flying high in the sky in a zone of turbulence, but if you learn how to control it (even a little), you can get further and faster. It is important to accumulate “identity capital” – a set of personal assets, a stock of individual resources that we accumulate over time.
It is our investment in ourselves, what we do well enough or long enough to become a part of us. Some aspects of identity capital show up on our resumes, such as education, work experience, test scores. Others are more personal, such as the way we speak, our ancestry, the way we solve problems, and the way we look.
Identity capital is how we create ourselves: step by step, little by little
Its most important element is the currency that we bring to the adult market, and with it, figuratively speaking, we “buy” jobs, relationships, and everything we strive for.
4. Realize your true potential
At the age of 20–30, we often make the same mistakes: some dream of small things, not realizing that the choice we make during this period determines our whole future life, while others, on the contrary, make grandiose plans based not on real life. experience, but on fantasies of limitless possibilities.
Every person has an inner need to reach their potential, but many do not really understand what this means. It is important to determine how your abilities and limitations fit into the world around you – this is how you can realize your true potential.
5. Remember the power of weak ties
Each of us has close people: those who help when we feel bad, give advice and bring fruit when we are sick. But they cannot change our lives. This is not paradoxical, but the fact that people unfamiliar to us are able to quickly and radically change our lives for the better.
Ten years before the advent of Facebook, Stanford University sociologist and professor Mark Granovetter conducted the first study of social networks and interviewed residents of suburban Boston who had recently changed jobs. It turned out that it was not close friends and family members who were most valuable in terms of her search, although presumably they should have provided the most significant assistance in this.
On the contrary, in three-quarters of the cases, a new job was found thanks to information received from people with whom the survey participants saw rarely or from time to time. Influenced by these findings, Mark Granovetter wrote The Power of Weak Ties, a groundbreaking study that demonstrates the unique value and role of strangers in our lives.
About the Author: Meg Jay is a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Virginia and the author of The Important Years.