Well.... shit. This book was one hell of a life changer... I can say with 100% honesty that I am sure glad I got this book.
Meg Jay first opens the book with the fact that she has been a clinical psychologist for a long time. She talks about how her first client was when her (and her client) were both in their 20's. She says in a TED talk
I got a 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 while we kicked 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, kids happened later, even death happened later. Twentysomethings 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 knucklehead, 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."
The premise of her whole book is just that; preparing 20 year olds (whom she calls twentysomethings) for things that haven't happened but will. Things like; marriage, debt, careers, etc.
--BOOK SPOILER--
She says that 20 year olds who say they don't know what they want to do with their life are generally just afraid of commitment. I can attest to that!
--END OF SPOILER--
I've realized after reading Jay's book, that I have a great fear of commitment and that's why I enjoy jumping from job to job so much; the scene is continuously changing. I might've learned this from my mom who also was notorious for the number of men she dated (while at the same time claiming complete religious devotion).
What I find interesting, though, is that I do struggle with commitment, yet in all of the lower end, underemployed jobs I've worked at, I've always held the title of 'veteran' or 'most commited'-- this doesn't make sense!
I think (and Jay alludes to this) many 20 year olds are afraid of committing to a career because of our conception of what a career is which isn't a good one!
If you're between the ages of 20-30 (about), you qualify as a Millennial. Yay!!! Congratu-fuckin-lations!... not really.
We should be better off, right? Us millennials.... but we aren't. Why? We saw our parents slave at their jobs, then regret they didn't spend more time with their family and friends. We also know that having money is important, so, what do we do? We are left with the millennial conundrum.
1. The fireplace and roofing materials have arrived! I've got a tentative timeline to seal and coat the roof before January. After that, we'll tear up the floors and begin building the frame. At that same time we'll need the windows and door.
2. After a rather rough work week, I had a big realization about my career as an interpreter; I don't necessarily like my job. This is an obvious issue. Why don't I like it? I'm not sure... part of me doesn't like the fact that the clients who use my service have more power over where and when I work than I do. Of course, this'll also happen if I create my own business so the question I'm left with is; should I learn how to deal with this now to give me valuable training in customer service for later?
I've also decided that I'm going to change this topic to "Career" seeing as though I won't be in interpreting for very long.
3. I lost my momentum in reading and am now down to about a book a week. I realized that in order for me to really speed read, I need to be in quite a delicate mind set and after reading the book I talked about above, my emotions have been kind of out of control recently.
In any case, I'm now reading a book called "Misbehaving" by Richard Thaler. It's an economics book that talks about the origination of the study of economics called "behavior economics"-- so far so good, but definitely not my kind of read. I don't condemn reading it, but I do suggest that if you decide to pick it up, get ready for some super economics!
4. My Lending Club loans have finally gone through (mostly) and I am now officially on the way to make some money off of lending my money to people! This should be fun :) my excepted return is 5-8%, which, if I lend out all of the $2,500, that's $125-$200!! Not bad! Better than the banks thats for sure. I'll keep updating here as it progresses.
As for my Robinhood account, I'm still up 5%, although down from several days ago, I'm still up. I'll hold onto my shares of Atlasssian for quite a while before considering selling them. As I go along, I'll buy more dividends so that I can build my passive income up.
5. I had a good friend of mine explain to me the different parts of electricity and I can now say I have an amateurs grasp on how it all works. I'll have to consider my next topic of study here soon, although I won't stop with electricity for a couple more weeks I think.
6. I haven't been taking this topic seriously, so I really need to buckle down on it. My speed has obviously been slacking and so has my networking.
What I'm gonna do now to fix that is really focus on this topic. I'll see if that works; bringing a lot of awareness to it. If I find out it doesn't work, I'll try something more structured.
7. I spoke with a close friend who is practically a master at piano playing, about pianos. He gave me some friendly advice. He told me that learning to play an instrument is like learning a language, so, "do what you did when you first learned a language; learn how to speak it first, then learn to read and write". What that means is learn how to play songs without knowing how to read it off sheet music, then learn to read it and write it.
Sounds like good advice to me :) Practice has been going well, although I've been slacking here and there. Why? I think it has to do with my emotional volatility recently. I'm gonna try to hunker down more on it.
New Topic!!!
8. I've decided to start doing a lot of cardio, to help with my health. I'm starting with 30min of cardio, twice a week. The secret to building a good habit, according to the book The Power of Habits by Charles Duhigg is to make it so easy that no one could not do it.
We'll see how it goes!!
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