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"  We&amp;#039;ve already bookmarked, flagged, and responded to portions of psychologist Dr. Meg Jay&amp;#039;s book, The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter and How to Make The Most of Them Now\u2014last year&amp;#039;s tough-love plea to America&amp;#039;s 50 million twentysomething &amp;quot;kidults&amp;quot; to stop treating their third decade like an extended adolescence. This month, Jay gave a TED talk expounding on her &amp;quot;30 is not the new 20&amp;quot; battle cry likening the direction-challenged group to &amp;quot;airplanes just leaving LAX, bound for somewhere west. Right after takeoff, a slight change in course is the difference between landing in Alaska or Fiji.&amp;quot; According to Jay, twentysomethings have plenty to worry about. Lifting straight from her now-viral TED Talk, we bring you five of her assertions: 1. You should be prepping to have life figured out by 35: &amp;quot;We know that more than half of Americans are married or are living with or dating their future partner by 30. We know that the 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 things get tricky after age 35.&amp;quot;  2. You can&amp;#039;t make up for lost time: &amp;quot;When a lot has been pushed to your 30s, there is enormous thirtysomething pressure to jump-start a career, pick a city, partner up, and have two or three kids in a much shorter period of time\u2026The post-millennial midlife crisis isn&amp;#039;t buying a red sports car. It&amp;#039;s realizing you can&amp;#039;t have that career you now want.&amp;quot; 3. Your friends? They&amp;#039;re holding you back: Jay espouses &amp;quot;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.&amp;quot; 4. Your future family should be a priority: Treating dating like a game of musical chairs? Well, don&amp;#039;t. Jay agrees we should settle down later in life, but says &amp;quot;grabbing whoever you&amp;#039;re living with or sleeping with when everyone on Facebook starts walking down the aisle is not progress. The 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.&amp;quot; 5. You should trade the adventure trail for the straight and narrow highway: So you&amp;#039;ve changed jobs three times, and are now moving to Guatemala to start a coffee company? Many people would call this a commendable quest toward finding your self. Jay, however, would call this an identity crisis, and recommends we twentysomethings instead work on building &amp;quot;identity capital.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;[That&amp;#039;s] something that adds value to who you are,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;Do something that&amp;#039;s an investment in who you might want to be next. So now is the time for that cross-country job, that internship, that startup you want to try. I&amp;#039;m not discounting twentysomething exploration here, but I am discounting exploration that&amp;#039;s not supposed to count, which, by the way, is not exploration. That&amp;#039;s procrastination.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/news/a18724/how-to-be-in-your-twenties/>