What does it mean to be an adult? In the twentieth century, psychologists came up with five markers of adulthood: finish your education, get a job, leave home, marry, and have children. Since then, every generation has been held to those same markers. Yet so much has changed about the world and living in it since that sequence was formulated. All of those markers are choices, and they’re all valid, but any one person’s choices along those lines do not make them more or less an adult.
A former Stanford dean of freshmen and undergraduate advising and author of the perennial bestseller How to Raise an Adult and of the lauded memoir Real American, Julie Lythcott-Haims has encountered hundreds of twentysomethings (and thirtysomethings, too), who, faced with those markers, feel they’re just playing the part of “adult,” while struggling with anxiety, stress, and general unease. In Your Turn, Julie offers compassion, personal experience, and practical strategies for living a more authentic adulthood, as well as inspiration through interviews with dozens of voices from the rich diversity of the human population who have successfully launched their adult lives.
Being an adult, it turns out, is not about any particular checklist; it is, instead, a process, one you can get progressively better at over time―becoming more comfortable with uncertainty and gaining the knowhow to keep going. Once you begin to practice it, being an adult becomes the most complicated yet also the most abundantly rewarding and natural thing. And Julie Lythcott-Haims is here to help readers take their turn.
I had a chance to interview her to learn more.
Young people have become so hesitant to become adults that a verb form was coined called “adulting”. Could you explain this phenomenon?
Millennials started it. They looked around and saw ways of being in the world that were unfamiliar, unappealing, challenging, even scary. I felt for them. If an entire generation is hesitant to enter a natural stage of life, I think it’s more of a critique of our society than it is about them.
What is the “lockstep plan” and why does it have such an allure?
The lockstep plan is the idea that a certain small set of options in schooling, in work, and even in love will lead to a successful life. There can be good reasons to follow it. If, for example, you’ve had a traumatic childhood, the “lockstep plan” becomes an “if/then” that predicts the opportunity to get up and out and offers certainty and safety. But there are so many more ways to live a meaningful life than people realize, which is why adhering to a lockstep plan may prevent a person from embarking on the life they’d really like to live if they realized more options were possible.
What can you say about being ok with failing as one grows and learns to be in the world? How do we make this ok instead of a deterrent to taking a risk for a possible huge payoff?
I’m very inspired by the designers I know out here in Silicon Valley who say you need to “fail your way forward” which means put together your bold idea, try it, learn from what went wrong, and do it all again and again and so on. So you see, it’s not that failure is the goal in and of itself. It’s that being willing to screw up and learn from it is an essential step in the process of getting to the best outcomes.
How do young people find their voice in the deafening noise of “expert” opinions in the world?
Well first, let’s acknowledge that there are true experts who have a lot of wisdom and experience, and then there are our family and friends who may bring some bias and judgment along with whatever wisdom and experience they possess. I try to help young people realize that this is YOUR life, nobody else’s. That each of us has an inner voice that will tell us what we’re good at, what we love, where we feel really seen and supported, and what we would do with our lives if it was just up to us. I encourage young people to get better at hearing their own voice by first acknowledging what other people say they “ought to” or “should” do and then by asking themselves ‘well what would I do if they’d love me no matter what?’ Then the truly hard piece is to develop the courage to honor what that voice is telling you.
When kids are young they are always barraged with the words “Stranger Danger” - When does it become ok to drop this concept, and what are the benefits of doing so?
“Straner Danger” is a well-intended concept, but unfortunately it’s wreaked havoc on childhood and has ill-prepared young people for the real world. That’s because life is full of strangers and therefore kids need to know how and when to interact with them rather than completely avoid them. So, when they’re little we should be teaching them never to go anywhere with a stranger no matter what, but we should also be teaching them how to interact kindly with the strangers we meet in life. It’s never too soon to learn that humans who encounter one another are kind to one another.
What is fending, and why is this concept so fundamental?
Fending is pretty much knowing that when you wake up in the morning it’s on you to take care of your body, belongings, business, and bills. Even if you have significant special needs, you still want to do what you are able to do rather than have someone else just handle everything for you. It’s work, yeah, but it feels good psychologically, too.
There is a sense of enormous pressure on young people to be perfect. What advice do you have for them around this?
The pressure to be perfect comes from frightened adults who think there’s only one way to succeed in life. They are well-intended, I suppose, but misguided nevertheless. I tell them the people you most admire likely are not perfect. I tell them real success is not perfection but doing work you personally find meaningful while behaving wonderfully toward others. I tell them perfectionism leads to anxiety because you fear that you’re only great if the last thing you did was great.
What are five hacks that can change fixed mindsets to growth mindsets?
My hacks for developing a Growth Mindset (which is a concept coined by Carol Dweck, who inspires me greatly) are
1. Change “I am perfect” to “I am trying to get better at this.”
2. Change “I am smart” to “When I work hard at things, it pays off.”
3. Change “This is hard” to “I do hard things.”
4. Change “I can’t” to “I can take the first step, and see what happens.”
5. Change “I suck” to “I haven’t learned how to do this yet.”
You mention that young people should practice showing up as themselves with others to create authentic connections. Can you share what that might look like?
Well, there’s the performative self and the authentic self. The performative self wears a mask or puts up a façade in order to be what we think others want, or to protect ourselves from something we fear. The authentic self is the self who can speak up about who we really are, what we value, what matters to us, etc. When we open up authentically to others, and make space for them to do the same, we develop trust and a sense that we are not alone, all of which feels quite good.
Can you explain your take on building character and what young people can liken this to in their lives?
Your character determines how people feel in your presence and what they’ll say about you when you’re not around. If you’re the type of person who is kind, patient, and helpful, people will feel safe and good around you and will want to be your friend. If you’re mean, judgmental, or controlling, people may hang out with you but it will be because they’re afraid of you or of what you might do if you don’t hang out with them, not because they actually like being with you. The great thing about character is that it’s entirely up to you. You can work on it. You can better yourself. I am hard at work on improving my character even though I’m in my 50s!
About the Author:
Julie Lythcott-Haims believes in humans and is deeply interested in what gets in our way. Her work encompasses writing, speaking, teaching, mentoring, and activism.
She is the New York Times bestselling author of How to Raise an Adult which gave rise to a popular TED Talk. Her second book is the critically-acclaimed and award-winning prose poetry memoir Real American, which illustrates her experience as a Black and biracial person in white spaces. Her third book, Your Turn: How to Be an Adult, has been called a “groundbreakingly frank” guide to adulthood.
Julie holds degrees from Stanford, Harvard Law, and California College of the Arts. She currently serves on the boards of Common Sense Media, Black Women’s Health Imperative, Narrative Magazine, and on the Board of Trustees at California College of the Arts. She serves on the advisory boards of LeanIn.Org, Parents magazine, and Baldwin For the Arts.
She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her partner of over thirty years, their itinerant young adults, and her mother.
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