I came across the TED talk 30 is not the new 20 and found it so much though-provoking that I continued to read on the book The defining decade (Amazon) written by the author, Meg Jay. Below are reviews of some beautiful points I found from the book with quote in italic. In addition, I will also present my thoughts developed on top of the ideas discussed in the book. As a disclaimer, the interpretation are personal and may not necessarily derive on the book.

• Identity capital
• Weak ties
• The unthought known
• My life should look better on Facebook
• The customized life
• An upmarket conversation
• Picking your family
• The cohabitation effect
• On dating down
• Being in Like
• Forward thinking
• Calm yourself
• Outside in

Identity capital

• Identity capital is our collection of personal assets. […]. Some identity capital goes on a resume such as degrees, jobs, test scores, and clubs. Other identity capital is more personal. I fell in love with the book as soon as I browsed the first few pages and came across this message. It serves as a beautiful reminder of how misled we often are.

  • We often focus on the paper-ready capital. At school, it’s the grade in the transcript. At work, it is the job title or the name of the company. On Facebook, it is the popularity in terms of “likes” and “hearts”. (Not sure if that also count as capital - but at least it is measurable).

  • On the other hand, we have many more subtle capital that we can’t precisely quantify. For example, appreciation, tolerance, and objectivity are not easily quantified. But we can take a concrete example of our different reactions when commuting in metro. Feeling thankful that the train doesn’t delay is a sign of appreciation. Remaining calm even when the train leaves the minute you reach the platform - simply because it can’t wait for everyone - otherwise it would never move. Maintaining a neutral view that the whole traffic system doesn’t necessarily targeting at you as the only victim. Those reactions (even in the mind only) are the manifestation of the personal capital that we should focus on.

  • At the end of the day, the personal capital may serve us more than the resume capital. For example, a spectacular resume leading to highflying job with lucrative income can be a measurable capital. Yet coupled with poor personal spending habit (or other personal capital), the well earn money are to be soon bursted and insidiously trouble life in different ways.

• Growth in early years of career has strong impact on the rest of the trajectory.

Weak ties

• Weak ties give us access to something fresh. They know things and people that we didn’t know. […]. Weak ties have fewer overlapping contacts.

• Weak ties […] force us to communicate from a place of difference, to use what is called elaborated speech. […]. In this way, weak ties promote, and sometimes even force, thoughtful growth and change. This is because we share lesser assumption with the weak ties.

• The single best thing we can do to make our own luck in our twenties is to say yes to our weak ties or give them a reason to say yes to us.

The unthought known

• Contrary to having too few options, we also feel less committed if facing too many choices.

  • Recently I watched an interview about modern technology with elderly people by Gary Turk, with the title Elderly Advice On Modern Life. One message relates with me so strongly. It said: “If you made a plan then you had to stick to it because there is no way of letting the know you weren’t gonna be there.”

    Check out the interview here Elderly Advice On Modern Life.

    If you don’t know yet, Gary Turk, the author of the above video also made another viral video discussing the impact of addiction to technology: Lookup.

• Not making choices isn’t safe. The consequence are just further away in time.

  • This can well explain why it is hard to change some habit or starting to do something new. Assuming you’re contemplating to learn something new, for example playing Harmonica. The decision to take is simply: “to learn Harmonica”. Because it involves some investment of time and effort, we need to weight the potential reward with the effort required. In the end if the outcome doesn’t meet our expectation, we blame ourselves for taking the wrong decision. With that we may resort to the option of not committing to an action of doing something.

  • On the contrary, I recently realise that not taking the action is actually a decision. But it is simply the silent and unconscious option because taking the action on the other hand requires energy and focus.

  • Seeing that “not taking the action is actually a decision” puts the responsibility on us when we forgo the important things in life and get by with many excuses. For example, my lame excuse “I don’t have time for excercise”. When I don’t to the gym, it is actually a decision - a decision made by me.

My life should look better on Facebook

• It is unfair to compare of the spotlights of others to your behind-the-scene.

• I think, it is also a way to minimize energy, we mindlessly browse Facebook feed to get the least energy in choosing an information source. We hope to bump into some relevant information or just to stay “updated”.

• The network effect creates a false sense of caring or attention. To illustrate, we can assume a simplified network of \(n=101\) people and each person is pair-wise connected to the other 100 people, and simplify that each person has a budget of 100 minutes (roughly less than 2 hours) of free time to attend to their friends. Because of the big number of connections, each person feel that they have 100 friends, “wow, I have 100 friends”. But indeed, their attention must be divided into other 100 people, so the attention is only 1 minute per connection. If we (luckily) have the attention from all our friends, then the total amount of attention measured by time is 100 minutes, exactly equal to total commitment of one good friend. In fact, we have exactly 1-person full attention, not anywhere near the 100-person attention. That’s the illusion of network effect. It gives us an illusion that the 100-connection is stronger than its actual average strength of only 1/100-th the good connection.

• Lastly, though social networks claim themselves as connection tool, they are turning into more of show for “passive” show-off (only newbies or poorly-skilled users unfortunately show off actively because they are too obvious too find). Let be honest and count how many times you would like to message an old classmate but stay back and just look at their profile without saying hi. We all are insecure.

The customized life

• The chapter starts with example of a young man customizing his own bicycle. That is part of the trend that everyone want to customize their accessory.

• I also notice that if we look at the a pack wagon in the underground (in Germany, it is U-Bahn), no pair of shoes would find another duplicate. We live in the age where the economy wants to sell us an image of uniqueness (so they can capitalize that maximized demand - when everyone needs a custom-built bike).

• But I am afraid that the emphasis has been “artificially” put on the easier parts of life - the superficial uniqueness that we can easily buy and put on. But we are paradoxically both very similar and very different at the same time.

  • In the more intrinsic part, we’re still essentially the same. We burst out laughing for the same jokes (that’s why Mr. Bean or comedy in general is so popular), and moved to tears for the same sad drama, we are intimidated by the thunderstorms and also by many other fears (of rejection, of illness, etc.). We all want to stay in bed a little longer in the same Sunday morning.

  • If there are more subtle but significant differences (beside the obvious physical appearances), it’s our value systems that dictate our different decisions and behaviour. Continue the example of that same Sunday morning. One may get up to read up a good book. One may go to the football field and have great game with his mates. Other just wake up and cook a good meal to nourish the body. Another thousand of ways to stay unique - but oftentimes we ignore those because they don’t easily let us compare with the lives of others. On the other hand, if you own and ride a custom-built bike - it is way easier to take pride than than owning and riding a custom-built life.

An upmarket conversation

• Happiness has more to do with whom you marry than with what college you attend. […] Marriage is one of our most defining moments because so much is wrapped up in it. […] Half of today’s twenty something have been left in the wake of divorce and all know someone who was.

• Being choosy about the right things when you can still think clearly about claiming your life. […] It may take a few thoughtful tries before we know what love and commitment really are.

Picking your family

• Be careful with what you believe to be in your control. If you don’t believe that family happiness is something you can have, chance are you don’t look for that.

• finally, and suddenly, they can pick their own family-they can create their own families - and these are the families that life will be about. These are the families that will define the decades ahead.

The cohabitation effect

• Sliding or deciding. Most people just slide into whatever situation they’re in but never actually decide their lives. Belly fats aren’t built up in one lazy Sunday afternoon. It is from months and years of sedentary lifestyle went by without notice. In the grander scheme of life, the career you’re taking is actually a decision or just a sliding?

• Moving from dating to sleeping over a lot to cohabitation can be a gradual slope, one not marked by rings or ceremonies or sometimes even a conversation. Couple often bypass talking about why they want to live together and what it will mean.

  • On the other hand, we can reverse the perspective here too. If you face some daunting tasks at first sight, break them down into more manageable steps and work on them one by one. As the saying goes, “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time!”

• Lock-in effect in behavioral economics: set up cost and switching cost decrease the likelihood to search for other options. We tend to underestimate the switching costs when making the investment because at first it seems hypothetical and far into the future. We only pay that cost down the road if things get wrong.

  • To counterbalance this underestimation, be more cautious and responsible of the cost down the road.

On dating down

• The most difficult thing to cure is the patient’s attempt to self-cure […] A self-cure can take on a life of its own.

  • A self-cure in this context may be obvious abuse or quick fixes like sex and drug or smoking. But it can also looks less harmless and subtle like music (violent music or melancholy music).

  • Those solutions often lift the mood but in the end they are extremely hard to break.

• The power of these untold personal stories is that, […], they can loop silently in our mind without anyone, sometimes even ourselves knowing about them. […] in the gaps between what we plan to do and what we actually do or between what happens and what we tell people about what happens.

  • This message is so touching. I highlighted the word silently there because oftentimes we don’t hear/see those stories verbally or vividly make a sound in our thought. Those stories creep in and out when we are doubtful about ourselves and even, more dangerously, when we are vulnerable.

Being in Like

• “What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are, but how you deal with incompatibility.” -Leo Tolstoy.

  • Another well-know quote from Tolstoy: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” That is also called Anna Karenina principle.

• Personality is the part of ourselves that we take everywhere, even to Nicaragua , so it is worth knowing something about.

  • The YouTube channel School of Life has a nice video about the Problem with Travel. Basically, travelling to escape ourselves is an impossible mission because we bring “us” to everywhere we go.

• […] couples decide to split because things changes - someone cheated or had to move - but more often, people split up because things don’t change.

Forward thinking

• Being smart at school is about how well you solve problems that have correct answers and clear time limits. But being a forward-thinking adult is about how you think and act even (and especially) in uncertain situations . […] Adult dilemmas - which jobs to take, where to live, whom to partner with, or when to start a family - don’t have the right answers. […] we move beyond the futile search for black-and-white solutions as we learn to tolerate - and act on - better shades of grays .

  • As the author also nicely puts, the problem set in life doesn’t even have a specific time limits by when a decision must be made. That causes the perfectionists a hard time to come up with a less-than-perfect solution and they may procrastinate forever. (Because there is no deadline!)

  • The same idea that “biggest problems are those without a deadline” is iterated again in the nice talk by the author of Wait But Why Inside the brain of a master procrastinator.

  • Another analogy to tests in school is the well-known saying: “Life is the most difficult exam. Many people fail because they try to copy others. Not realizing that everyone has a different question paper.”

• Because this chapter is also about taking decision under uncertainty, I would like to quote another Facebook comment that I came across in a photo by Human of New York.

  “My grandmother always said that “you make the best decision you can with the information you have at that time.” Regrets happen because the situation changed in ways you couldn’t predict - but they don’t mean your decision wasn’t the right one when you made it.”

Calm yourself

• People are more likely to remember highly emotional events, such as time they were happy or sad or embarrassed. […] Twentysomethings take these difficult moments particularly hard.

• […] may not have control over every situation […] but she could control how she interpreted them and how she reacted to them.

  • This idea is reiterated in the TED talk The skill of self-confidence, check the end of the speech for the part about interpreting the situation.

  • No one likes being the subject of an embarrassing situation or failure. But we can take a shift in perspective that accepts the situation and views failure as a trade between the ruined pride for further growth down the row. This is universally true that no successful person (no matter how you define success) goes through zero difficulty. It is the matter of fact that you fail in one way or another. That’s essential part of growth.

Outside in

• Confidence doesn’t come from inside out. (e.g. stuffing self-doubt, platitudes, …) […]. Whether we are talking about love or work, the confidence that overrides insecurity comes from the experience.

  • It’s like learning any other skill from swimming to playing guitar. You can learn know zillions of techniques from the books but without practice you never make it to work (and get confident).

  • Prof. Randy Pausch in his book The Last Lecture also shares this lesson from his football training with his coach Graham. “There was really only one way to teach kids how to develop it (self-esteem): You give them something they can’t do, they work hard until they find they can do it, and you just keep repeating the process.”

• A more resilient confidence comes from succeeding - and surviving some failures.

  • This idea is also iterated in the TED talk Grit: the power of passion and perseverance. From the TED talk:

    • “Grit is living life like a marathon, not a sprint”.

    • “They are more likely to persevere when they fail because they don't believe that failure is a permanent conditions “.