Right when I finished this book I thought it was incredible. I thought it had all the answers and that I was so behind on life!! But then I realized, okay, this book may need to define its audience a little more and not completely freak out every early 20 something year old.

I read this because my ~26 year old friend evangelistically told me that this book changed his life.
For context, I'm 25 years old and I work in tech, and wanted to make a lot of money and acquire power/influence when I came out of college. I've since gained some perspective on what success is, and what makes me happy.

The reason I'm rating this 3 stars is that the author does indeed provide practical tips and warnings about those in their 20s, but does not acknowledge the socioeconomic bias in her findings and completely complies with the very normative view of what career and social success is. It's easy to consume the ideas in this book if you go in with the right paradigms: success = money and power, failure = service job, social success = nuclear family and not being divorced. Below are my thoughts on the inherent biases in this book, but also to be fair, the useful takeaways I had.

The inherent biases:
-The author bases her findings and persuasions off the stories of her clients. These clients, unacknowledged by the author, are all twenty-somethings who don't have high paying jobs (some are unemployed, for a while!) but somehow can afford frequent therapy sessions. Which tells me that the economic status of ALL of her clients is likely upper middle class. Which is just not reflective of MOST of the twenty-somethings in America. The author seems to assume that you would only work as a bartender or barista by choice/lack of ambition, and not because, say...you need to pay the bills or pay back loans, or the hundreds of other economic burdens that most twenty-something Americans have.

Why does this bias matter? Because if I'm a random twenty-something reading this book to explore a new world view about success, I might be convinced that the only reason people aren't jumping high speed into their future high paying careers is because...they haven't put a plan together/aren't decisive.

-Services jobs are failure jobs. The author does present a few facts that show that "underemployment" (aka, working a job that you are over qualified for) leads to greater unhappiness than unemployment does, which were interesting. However, the persistent thought I had was "perhaps this is because American society completely shits on people working service/blue collar jobs, and devalues them?" All of the jobs that the author focused on seemed to require a college education. I'm curious what advice the author had for people...who didn't have the money for a college education?


The useful takeaways:
-I shouldn't underestimate the effort/timing that goes into having a baby!
-Twenty somethings react more emotionally to events (especially at work) and take things personally. That applies to me and it was cool to see this represented scientifically, with some practical steps to not be such a baby.
-Be decisive and make a plan. Enjoying your 20s doesn't equal being undecisive and uncommitted to the people and opportunities around you.