What is up? I'm Grace Beverly and welcome back to Working Hard, the podcast

shape guide book on how to improve your own life and achieve what you actually dreamed of doing,

because life's too short for boring podcasts and bad advice. What is up and welcome back to Working Hard. I hope you're doing well. Today's

solo episode is all about your 20s. So the decade I feel that everyone loves to romanticise,

but also panic about at the exact same time. We are very much told that these are the best years of

your life and that this is the decade where you're supposed to find your passion, find your people,

figure yourself out, build your career, start investing, go to therapy, travel the world and

somehow also enjoy being young and carefree. So today I wanted to break that all down. We're going to

talk about what actually matters in your 20s, what the research says about how this decade shapes the rest of your life, and how to make the most out of it without losing your mind trying to do everything perfectly. Before we get into it, guys, I was having a look at the stats this week. I know 26% of people who listen to this podcast every single week are actually following it on the podcast app that they listen to it on. I get it. Some of us have commitment issues, but if you do hit that follow button, it means that the episode will land in your feed every Monday and you won't have to scroll past 14 other podcasts to find something that you want to listen to on your Hot Girl Walk. And it also helps us reach many more people and book even bigger guests and be able to spend even more time on research for these

types of episodes. So I'd be super grateful if you could follow us.

So let me start with the most obvious point. Your 20s are very weird. You're technically an adult,

but then you also might be Googling how many times that you can reheat rice before it actually kills you. You know, you're told to build a five-year plan, but also told to live in the moment. You're watching some friends get engaged, get married and have kids while you're still deleting Hinge every three weeks. And in the middle of that, you're quietly wondering whether you're doing it all wrong, whether you're in the wrong career, the wrong relationship, whether you should be travelling the world. But here is what I want to say from the very start. Your 20s are not about perfection. And they are also not about getting things right. They are about foundation. The habits you build, the people you meet, the decisions you make, they all compound. You absolutely do not have to have it all figured out. In fact, I would get the idea of aiming to have everything figured out out of your brain in your 20s. It is not about that. And if you're focusing on that, you're going to miss so many other things. And according to the experts who have actually spent their lives studying this stuff, you do just need to start building something that supports the version of you that you're becoming and the version of you that you want to become. So that's what we're going to be focusing on in this episode. I do not want anyone to think that your 20s have to look any way at all because they absolutely do not. That being said, there are things that you can focus on and things that you can concentrate on that aren't end goal-based things that can go a very,

very long way to making sure that you build the foundations for the rest of your life in your 20s.

And there's a lot of expert-based literature on this to help us use these years as foundational

years. And that is what they are. I think it's so easy to look around at social media and constantly

think, oh, I need to do this. I need to do this, I need to do this. By this age,

I need to have achieved this, I need to have achieved this, I need to have achieved this. And that just misses so much of the point. And I think if you spend your 20s trying to have everything figured out, what you're actually going to end up doing is trying to get to a finish line as fast as possible when you don't even know if that finish line is where you want to be.

So let's look at what the experts actually say. is trying to get to a finish line as fast as possible when you don't even know if that finish

line is where you want to be. So let's look at what the experts actually say about all of this.

Psychologist Dr Meg Jay, who is author of The Defining Decade, found that over 80% of life's most

defining moments happen before the age of 35. And I feel like that's kind of terrifying. I feel like no wonder we put so much

pressure on our 20s and a study from the University of Virginia showed that people who took intentional

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