20岁到30岁，是你最不可挥霍的光阴

看了这一期TED演讲，对我触动挺大的，敲下来和大家分享一下~~~ 

视频链接

成人的世界里没有容易二字，每一步都算数！ 

when I was in my 20s,
I saw my very first psychotherapy client.
I was a Ph.D  student in clinical psychology at Berkeley.
She was a 26-year old woman named Alex.
Now Alex walked into her first session

wearing jeans and a big slouchy top,
and she dropped onto the couch in my office
and kiched off her flats
and told me she was there to talk about guy problems.
Now when I heard this, I was so relieved.

My classmate got an arsonist for her first client.
And I got twentysomething who wanted to talk about boys.
This I thought I could handle.
But I didn't handle it.

With the funny stories that Alex would bring to session,
it was easy for me just to nod my head
whild we kiched the can down the road.
"Thirty's the new 20,"Alex would say,
and as far as I could tell, she was right.

Work happened later, marriage happened later,
kid happened later, even death happened later.
Twentysomething like Alex and I had nothing but time.
But before long, my supervisor pushed me
to push Alex about her love life.

I pushed back.
I said,"Sure, she's dating down,"
she's sleeping with a knuchlehead,
but it's not like she's going to marry the guy.
And then my supervisor said,

"Not yet, but she might marry the next one.
Besides, the best time to work on Alex's marriage
is before she has one."
That's what psychologists call an "Aha!" moment.
That was the moment I realized, 30 is not the new 20.
Yes, peaople settle down later than they used to,

but that didn't make Alex's 20s a developmental downtime.
That made Alex's 20s a developmental sweet spot,
and we were sitting there, blowing it.
That was when I realized that this sort of benign neglect
was a real problem, and it had real consequences,

not just for Alex and her love life
but for the careers and the families and the futures
of twentysomethings everywhere.
There are 50 million twentysomethings in th United States right now.
We're talking about 15 percent of the population,

or 100 percent if you consider
that no one's getting through adulthood
without going through their 20s first.
Raise your hand if you're in your 20s.
I really want to see some twentysomeings here.

Oh, yay! You are all awesome.
If you work with twentysomethings,
you love a twentysomething,
you're losing sleep over twentysomethings, I want to see

Okay, Awesome, twentysomethings really matter.
So, I specialize in twentysomethings because I believe
that every single one of those 50 million twentysomethings
deserves to know what psychologists,
sociologists, neurologists and fertility specialists

aready know:
that claiming your 20s is one of the simplest,
yet most transformative, things you can do
for work, for love, for your happiness,
mybe even for the world.
This is not my opinion.
There are the facts.

We konwn that 80 percent of life's most defining moments
take place by age 35.
That means that eight out of 10
of the decisions and experiences and "Aha!" mements
that make your life what it is

will have happened by your mid-30s.
People who are over 40, don;t panic.
This crowd is going to be fine, I think.
We known that first 10 years of a career
has an exponential impact on how
much money you're going to earn.

We know that more than half of Americans
are married or are living with 
or dating their future partner by 30.
We know that brain caps  off
its second and last growth spurt in your 20s
as it rewires itself for adulthood,

which means that whatever it is you 
want to change about yourself,
now is the time to change it.
We know that personality changes more during your 20s
than at any other time in life,

and we know that female fertility peaks at age 28,
and thing get tricky after age 35.
So your 20s are the time to educate yourself
about your body and your options.
So when we think about child development,

we all know that first five years are a critical period
for language and attachment in the brain.
It's a time when your ordinary, day-to-day life
has an inordinate impact on who you will become.
But what we hear less about is that there's such a thing
as adukt development,

and our 20s are that critical period
of adult development.
But this isn't what twentysomethings are hearing.
Newspapers talk about the changing
timetable of adulthood.

Researchers call the 20s an extended adolescence.
Journalists coin silly nichnames for twentysomethings
like "teixters" and "kidults."
It's true!

As a culture, we have trivialized
what is actually the defining decade of adulthood.
Leonard Bernstein said that to achieve great things,
you need a plan and not quite enough time.
Isn't that true?

So what do your think happens
"You have 10 extra years to start your life"?
Nothing happens.
You have robbed that person of his urgency and ambition,
and absolutely nothing happens.

And then every day, smart, interesting twentysomethings
like you or like your sons and daughters
come into my office and things like this:
"I known my boyfriend's no good for me,

but this relationship doesn't count. I'm just killing time."
Or they say, "Everybody says as long as get started
on a career by the time I'm 30, I'll be fine."
But then it starts to sound like this:
"My 20s are almost over, and I have
nothing to show for myself."

I had a better resume the day after
I graduated from college.
And then it starts to sound like this:
"Dating in my 20s was like musical chairs."
Everybody was running around and having fun,
but then sometime around 30 it
was like the music turned off
and everbody started sitting down.

I didn;t want to be the only one left standing up,
so sometimes I think I married my husband
because he was the closest chair to me at 30."
Where are the twentysomethings here?
Do not do that.

Okey, now that sounds a little flip, but make no mistake,
the stakes are very high.
When a lot has been pushed to your 30s,
there is enormous thirtysomething pressure
to jump-start a career, picka city, partner up,
and have two or there kids in a 
much shorter period of time.

Many of these things are incomepatible,
and as research is just starting to show
simply harder and more stressful
to do all at once in our 30s.
The post-millennial midlife crisis
isn't buying a red sports car.
It's realizing you cant't have that child you now want.
or you can't give your child a sibling.

Too many thirtysomethings and fortysomethings
look at themselves, and at me, sitting across the room,
and say about their 20s,
"What was I doing? What was I thinking?"
I wants to change what twentysomethings
are doing and thinking.

Here's a story about how that can go.
It's a story about a woman named Emma.
At 25, Emma came to my office
because she was, in her words, having an identity crisis.
She said she thought she might like
to work in art or enterainment,
but she hadn't decided yet,

so she'd spent the last few years waiting tables instead.
Because it was cheaper, she lived with a boyfriend
who displayed his temper more than his ambiton.
And as hard as her 20s were,
her early life had been even harder.
She often cried in our sessions,

but then would collect herself by saying,
"You can't pick your family, but you can pick your friends."
Well one day, Emma comes in
and she hangs her head in her lap,
and her sobbed for most of the hour.
She'd just bought a new address book,

and she's spent the morning filling in her many contachs,
but then she's been left staring at that empty blank
that comes after the words
"In case of emoergency, please call..."

She was nearly hysterical when she looked at and said,
"Who's going to be there for me if I get in a car wreck?
Who's going to take care of me if I have cancer?"
Now in that moment, it took everthing I had
not to say,"I will."

But what Emma needed wasn't some therapist
who really, really care.
Emma needed a better life, and I knew this was her chance.
I had learned too much since I first worked with Alex
to just sit there while Emma's defining decade
went parading by.

So over the next weeks and months,
I told Emme three things
that every twentysomething, male or female,
deserves to hear.
First, I told Emma to forget about having an identity crisis
and get some identity capital.
By "get identity capital,"

I mean do something that adds value to who you are.
Do something that's an investment
in who you might want to be next.
I didn't know the future of Emma's carrer,
and no one knows the future of works,
but I do know this:

Identity capital begets identity capital.
So now is the time for that cross-country job,
that inernship, that startup you want to try.
I'm not discounting twentysomething exploration here,
but I am discounting exploration
that's not supposed to count,
whicht, by the way, is not exploration.
That's procration.

I told Emma to explore work and it count.
Second, I told Emma that the urban tribe is overrated.
Best friends are great for giving rides to the airport,
but twentysomethings who huddle together
with like-minded peers limit who they know,
what they know, how they think,

how they speak, and where they work.
That new piece of capital, that new person to date
almost always comes from outside the inner circle.
New things come from what are called our weak ties,
our friends of friends of friends.
So yes, half of twentysomethings
are un- or under-employed.
But half aren't,

and weak ties are how you get yourself into that group.
Half of new jobs are never posted,
so reaching out to your neighbor's boss
is how you get that unposted job.
It's not cheating. It's the science
of how information spreads.

Last but not least, Emma believed
that you can's pick your family,
but you can pick friends.
Now this was true for her groeing up,
but as a twentysomething, soon
Emma would pick her family

when she partnered with someone
and created a family of her own.
I told Emma the time to start picking your family is now.
Now you may be thinking that 30 is actually
a better time to settle down
than 20, or wven 25,

and I agree with you.
But grabbing whoever you're living with or sleeping with
when everyone on Facebook starts walking down the aisle
is not progress.

That best time to work on your marriage
is before you have one,
and that means being as intentional with love
as you are with work.

Picking your family is about consciously choosing
who and what you want
rather than just making it work or killing time
with whoever happens to be choosing you.
So what happened to Emma?
Well, we went through that address book,
and she found an old roommate's cousin
who worked at an art museum in another state.

That weak tie heloed her get a job there.
that job offer gave her the reason
to leave that live-in boyfriend.
Now, five yeats later, she's a special
events planner for museums.
She's married to a man she mindfully chose.

She loves her new career, she loves her new family,
and she sent me a card that said,
"Now the emergency contact blanks
don't seem big enough."
Now Emma's story made that sound easy,
but that's what I love about working
with twentysomethings.
They are so easy to help.

Twentysomethings are like airplanes just leaving LAX,
bound for somewhere west.
Right after takeoff, a slight change in sourse
is the difference between landing in Alaska or Fiji.
Likewise, at 21 or 25 or even 29,
one good conversation, one good break,

one good TED Talk , can have an enormous effect
across years and even generations to come.
So here's an idea worth speading
to every twentysomething you know.
It's as simple as what I learned to say to Alex.
It's what I now have the privilege

of saying to twentysomething like Emma every single day:
Thirty is not the new 20, so claim your adulthood,
get some identity capital, use your weak ties,
pick your family.
Don't be defined by what you didn't know
or didn't do.
Your're deciding your life right now.

Thank you!