It’s April 26th and I’m 18 years old. I’m in the gym. I’m listening to a podcast, as I usually do when I work out. And I heard the podcast guest in my ear say something. I’d heard so many of these 30 to 60-something psychologists, activists, authors, and business leaders say many times before.
“If I had the same mindset now that I did in my teens or 20s, I’d be miserable. I was such an idiot.”
I remember every time I heard those statements expressed with a laugh, it made me feel sad. I was entering college. I didn’t want to be miserable, and then I felt actually pretty irritated. I refused to be miserable.
Much of this refusal of misery had to do with that. Just five months earlier, I had sat hand in hand with my dad as he passed away after a six-year battle with the terminal disease, ALS. Following that experience, I promised myself I would not spend a moment of my life hating it. As I learned that time is never promised.
My irritation intensified as I reflected on the fact that these personal development leaders are rarely talking to young people specifically. This didn’t make any sense to me because I thought, “Aren’t we the ones that need to know this stuff about growth, mindfulness, and emotions the most?”
Over the next decade, I was supposed to determine a field of study or career, potentially find a life partner, decide where to live, handle personal finances and retirement, maybe even start a family and many other decisions that had lifelong impacts. But here I was with thousands of other high school seniors receiving the same piece of advice for most of the adults in our lives.
“You’ve got time. You’ll figure it out. I just don’t think you need to worry about it.”
And although this advice is slightly anxiety-reducing in the moment, we are rarely, if ever, given practical, emotional, and decision-making training, making the anxiety-reducing moments extremely short and fleeting. Because we didn’t know how to navigate these decisions we had to make.
And so with that moment in the gym, I found my mission to change the rhetoric of what your teens and 20s could and should be.
Which brings me to today. And after a bit more study, it turns out teenage Libby had some very valid points, two points in specific down to a neurological level.
How we train our brains now in our 20s truly matters when it comes to setting ourselves up for a less stressful and more fulfilling life. Your brain is a complex system of neurological pathways. You can think of it like a complex system of roads. The more you drive specific routes, the more ingrained those habits and behavioral patterns become. And that is why it’s so important we start specifically choosing which routes we continue to drive down now because it will be much more painful and difficult to rewire your mind 30 years from now when your mental software has become hardware.
And point number two. Teenage love was also on to the fact that the decisions we make in our 20s do matter. But that is why we need proper emotional and mental skills to help guide us in those decisions. Meg J., Ph.D. clinical psychologist, notes in her newly revised book, *The Defining Decade* these statistics that might shake up any young adult a bit, 85% of life’s most defining moments happen before age 35. Not the most important, not the best moments, but life. Definers are often happening before your mid-thirties. Your 20s coincide with your peak childbearing years. More than 50% of us will be living with, dating, or married to our life partner by age 30. Your earning power is generally decided in your first ten years of work, and as you probably know in your childhood, that’s where you will have peak brain development. But your personality and your brain change more in your 20s than any time before or after.
These statistics show us that the decisions you make in your 20s do in fact matter. But to any young adult listening, I do want to note these are statistics. Correlation does not always mean causation, but still, whether we like it or not, we do have some big decisions to make over the next decade.
Let’s dig even deeper. We’re humans, not statistics. As I mentioned, so instead of going to Google, I went to humans to create my own type of study on the matter. I’ve spent my career thus far talking to today’s teens and 20-somethings about what they actually need to feel more prepared for their life. I wrote a book answering their questions. I started a podcast educating them on the topics that their parents or the education system generally weren’t teaching them. I created an online platform reaching millions of them worldwide, and now I stand here today being a physical representation of what is often represented as a statistic.
Where are our teens and 20-somethings struggling most? The common thread did not have to do with being addicted to their phones. It didn’t have to do with being bullied by their peers or being overly stressed about school or work. The common thread was much more conclusive, a feeling of being constantly at war with their minds.
But it’s not the 21st century that is the culprit of this mental mass distress. It’s that historically we have rarely, if ever, put any true emphasis on the development of emotional and decision-making skills.
We need change. Our young adults, our children, our parents, raising our children and young adults need better mental and emotional skills to better create a future for themselves, their families, their communities, and society at large. What is going on inside of each of us creates the reality of what is happening outside of each of us. These emotional skills, these are not what we call soft skills. These are life-changing, life-saving, society-altering skills.
So how do we make this change? Well, it turns out changing the way society functions on a mass scale is a little bit difficult, which, you know, is probably not very shocking. But still, with my work with young people over the years, I have found three core pillars of information that can help young people have a simple foundation of better emotional intelligence, better decision-making skills, and empathetic self-guided growth.
Which brings us to pillar number one. Unlearning. There are many unhelpful social constructs that weigh down today’s youth. Being the grade on your paper determines your intelligence. Or you’re supposed to be nothing but young and dumb right now. Or my personal favorite. This needs to be the best time of your life. So annoying. But the most harmful of all is the way many of us are socially conditioned to determine what a happy and successful life looks like and how to actually achieve it.
My dad was a very money-driven man, caring but very money-driven. And as his daughter, I inherited a lot of that money-driven energy. The idea that if I just made enough money, that’s where I would find peace. But for years I watched that same mindset tear him apart. Absolutely destroying his ability to have peace. And I didn’t want that. So I asked myself, okay, if I can’t determine the success of my life based on money or status, power, or net worth, how do I determine that I’m living a successful life? How do I gauge it? And I contemplated that question for a really long time until I found an answer.
Living in alignment. Living in alignment is aligning your core priorities, your actions, and your thoughts with your deepest core values. So when your head hits the pillow at night and you can ask yourself, “Am I living as aligned as I can in this moment?” And you can truthfully answer that question with, “Yes, that is what peace feels like.” Because there’s nothing more to long for with that mindset, the only person that is in charge of your success is you. And that’s a very blissful, fulfilling, and freeing feeling.
I urge you to take audit of what social conditionings and mindsets you have inherited. Question why you think, believe, act, or speak in the way that you do. And from there you can reconstruct your views to be more aligned with you and the future that you want to have for yourself. As we unlearn social conditionings, we free up space to then create an authentic way of being.
Which brings us to pillar number two being. How do we design an authentic way of being for ourselves? What does that mean? In order to align our way of being, we must become healthier and more self-aware individuals. So how do we do this? Most of you, I would imagine, know the common answers to this question. Therapy, journaling, meditation, breathwork, reading, and other growth methods. But what I want to talk to you about is why we do these things. Why put forth the effort? Because if you’ve gone through any sort of intentional growth process, you know, it’s pretty gruesome and it’s pretty hard. So why do we do this?
I want you to think of it like this. For analogy’s sake, let’s say your life goal is to build a house, but you’ve never built a house before. So the only way that you can do this is by building your house in the way everyone around you teaches you to build a house. And after 20 years of living in this house that you built, you come to realize that maybe some of the practices people taught you about building a house probably weren’t the best. And you know this because there’s areas of your house that are starting to warp or crumble or malfunction. We use these growth methods to gain the tools that no one ever taught us. We can then use those tools to rebuild so we can live in a house that doesn’t feel like it’s consistently falling apart.
As we learn how to reconstruct our views in a way that is more aligned for each of us, our foundation becomes sturdier. As our communication skills improve, the leaking in our bathroom stops. As we learn to trust people again, our AC kicks back on. As we learn how to better emotionally regulate.
And pillar number three is doing. Some years ago, I had convinced my mom to jump out of a plane with me in New Zealand. And she had asked me if I had checked the safety record for this company that we were jumping with, and I told her I had. I didn’t. And so as we were sitting in the parking lot, I started looking up reviews and articles, and it turns out a plane of theirs had crashed just a month earlier, but no one died. So I figured that we’d probably be fine. So, like the wonderful daughter I am, I told my mom it was perfectly safe and we went inside. And considering that I’m here today and she’s in the audience, we did live. So that’s good.
But the interesting thing about skydiving is that it doesn’t at all feel how you expect. The world always made it seem so scary and chaotic, but it’s not that scary and it’s not very chaotic. You’re falling too fast for your brain to even recognize what’s happening, and before you know it, you’re just slowly floating and you’re enjoying the view. Skydiving is more serene than anything else. And I’ve come to realize that making bold changes in our life is very much similar to skydiving. The people in our life that have never jumped, have never actually gone skydiving, are generally the ones that are giving it the reputation of it being so scary and chaotic. The same goes for making bold changes. The people that have never actually done it or understand that they even can are usually the people that are making us or contributing to us feeling afraid.
Quitting a job you hate or coming out to your parents. Ending the relationship that you know is not serving you is scary. It is very scary. But if it does feel right and there’s a way to make it work, it will bring you more peace than chaos. It will bring you more peace than chaos. It will allow you to live more aligned. And that is why it will bring you this underlying essence of peace. The courage to jump when you know your being self is urging you to do so. That is the art of pillar number three, doing. Unlearning, being, and doing.
The concepts that I teach are not wildly unique, and yet when I share them with young people, they harvest life-changing results. When I share these simple mental and emotional skills, I get feedback, DMs, and messages like this. “I’m 18 years old and I’m raising me and my little sister in a small apartment. And your videos have helped with so much of the stress. I read your book and I don’t feel so afraid anymore.” Or “I considered making another suicide attempt last night. And your videos saved my life.”
We must stop this generational cycle of underdeveloped mental and emotional skills as it is one of the deepest roots of societal suffering.
To any young person listening. Our 20s don’t need to be so confusing and they don’t need to be miserable. Start being intuitive and intentional as soon as possible. No waiting for a traumatic event or the stereotypical midlife crisis to change and to grow. Take radical responsibility as soon as possible as this is where joy and fulfillment are born. An idea worth spreading to every teen and 20-something. The sooner you grow, the better.