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When I was in my 20s, I saw my very first psychotherapy client. I was a Ph.D. student in clinical psychology at Berkeley. She was a 26-year-old woman named Alex. Now Alex walked into her first session wearing jeans and a big slouchy top, and she dropped onto the couch in my office and kicked off her flats and told me she was there to talk about guy problems. Now when I heard this, I was so relieved. My classmate got an arsonist for her first client. (Laughter) And I got a twentysomething who wanted to talk about boys. This I thought I could handle.

But I didn't handle it. With the funny stories that Alex would bring to session, it was easy for me just to nod my head while we kicked the can down the road. "Thirty's the new 20," Alex would say, and as far as I could tell, she was right. Work happened later, marriage happened later, kids happened later, even death happened later. Twentysomethings like Alex and I had nothing but time.

But before long, my supervisor pushed me to push Alex about her love life. I pushed back.

I said, "Sure, she's dating down, she's sleeping with a knucklehead, but it's not like she's going to marry the guy."

And then my supervisor said, "Not yet, but she might marry the next one. Besides, the best time to work on Alex's marriage is before she has one."

That's what psychologists call an "Aha!" moment. That was the moment I realized, 30 is not the new 20. Yes, people settle down later than they used to, but that didn't make Alex's 20s a developmental downtime. That made Alex's 20s a developmental sweet spot, and we were sitting there blowing it. That was when I realized that this sort of benign neglect was a real problem, and it had real consequences, not just for Alex and her love life but for the careers and the families and the futures of twentysomethings everywhere.

There are 50 million twentysomethings in the United States right now. We're talking about 15 percent of the population, or 100 percent if you consider that no one's getting through adulthood without going through their 20s first.

Raise your hand if you're in your 20s. I really want to see some twentysomethings here. Oh, yay! Y'all's awesome. If you work with twentysomethings, you love a twentysomething,you're losing sleep over twentysomethings, I want to see — Okay. Awesome, twentysomethings really matter.

So I specialize in twentysomethings because I believe that every single one of those 50 million twentysomethings deserves to know what psychologists, sociologists, neurologists and fertility specialists already know: that claiming your 20s is one of the simplest, yet most transformative, things you can do for work, for love, for your happiness, maybe even for the world.

This is not my opinion. These are the facts. We know that 80 percent of life's most defining moments take place by age 35. That means that eight out of 10 of the decisions and experiences and "Aha!" moments that make your life what it is will have happened by your mid-30s. People who are over 40, don't panic. This crowd is going to be fine, I think. We know that the first 10 years of a career has an exponential impact on how much money you're going to earn. 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. So your 20s are the time to educate yourself about your body and your options.

So when we think about child development, we all know that the first five years are a critical period for language and attachment in the brain. It's a time when your ordinary, day-to-day life has an inordinate impact on who you will become. But what we hear less about is that there's such a thing as adult development, and our 20s are that critical period of adult development.

But this isn't what twentysomethings are hearing. Newspapers talk about the changing timetable of adulthood. Researchers call the 20s an extended adolescence. Journalists coin silly nicknames for twentysomethings like "twixters" and "kidults." It's true. As a culture, we have trivialized what is actually the defining decade of adulthood.

Leonard Bernstein said that to achieve great things, you need a plan and not quite enough time. Isn't that true? So what do you think happens when you pat a twentysomething on the head and you say, "You have 10 extra years to start your life"? Nothing happens. You have robbed that person of his urgency and ambition, and absolutely nothing happens.

And then every day, smart, interesting twentysomethings like you or like your sons and daughters come into my office and say things like this: "I know my boyfriend's no good for me, but this relationship doesn't count. I'm just killing time." Or they say, "Everybody says as long as I get started on a career by the time I'm 30, I'll be fine."

But then it starts to sound like this: "My 20s are almost over, and I have nothing to show for myself. I had a better résumé the day after I graduated from college."

And then it starts to sound like this: "Dating in my 20s was like musical chairs. Everybody was running around and having fun, but then sometime around 30 it was like the music turned off and everybody started sitting down. I didn't want to be the only one left standing up, so sometimes I think I married my husband because he was the closest chair to me at 30."

Where are the twentysomethings here? Do not do that.

Okay, now that sounds a little flip, but make no mistake, the stakes are very high. 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.Many of these things are incompatible, and as research is just starting to show, simply harder and more stressful to do all at once in our 30s.

The post-millennial midlife crisis isn't buying a red sports car. It's realizing you can't have that career you now want. It's realizing you can't have that child you now want, or you can't give your child a sibling. Too many thirtysomethings and fortysomethings look at themselves, and at me, sitting across the room, and say about their 20s, "What was I doing? What was I thinking?"

I want to change what twentysomethings are doing and thinking.

Here's a story about how that can go. It's a story about a woman named Emma. At 25, Emma came to my office because she was, in her words, having an identity crisis. She said she thought she might like to work in art or entertainment, but she hadn't decided yet, so she'd spent the last few years waiting tables instead. Because it was cheaper, she lived with a boyfriend who displayed his temper more than his ambition. And as hard as her 20s were, her early life had been even harder. She often cried in our sessions, but then would collect herself by saying, "You can't pick your family, but you can pick your friends."

Well one day, Emma comes in and she hangs her head in her lap, and she sobbed for most of the hour. She'd just bought a new address book, and she'd spent the morning filling in her many contacts, but then she'd been left staring at that empty blank that comes after the words "In case of emergency, please call ... ." She was nearly hysterical when she looked at me and said, "Who's going to be there for me if I get in a car wreck? Who's going to take care of me if I have cancer?"

Now in that moment, it took everything I had not to say, "I will." But what Emma needed wasn't some therapist who really, really cared. Emma needed a better life, and I knew this was her chance. I had learned too much since I first worked with Alex to just sit there while Emma's defining decade went parading by.

So over the next weeks and months, I told Emma three things that every twentysomething, male or female, deserves to hear.

First, I told Emma to forget about having an identity crisis and get some identity capital. By get identity capital, I mean do something that adds value to who you are. Do something that's an investment in who you might want to be next. I didn't know the future of Emma's career, and no one knows the future of work, but I do know this: Identity capital begets identity capital. So now is the time for that cross-country job, that internship, that startup you want to try. I'm not discounting twentysomething exploration here, but I am discounting exploration that's not supposed to count, which, by the way, is not exploration. That's procrastination. I told Emma to explore work and make it count.

Second, I told Emma 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. New things come from what are called our weak ties, our friends of friends of friends.So yes, half of twentysomethings are un- or under-employed. But half aren't, and weak tiesare how you get yourself into that group. Half of new jobs are never posted, so reaching out to your neighbor's boss is how you get that un-posted job. It's not cheating. It's the science of how information spreads.

Last but not least, Emma believed that you can't pick your family, but you can pick your friends. Now this was true for her growing up, but as a twentysomething, soon Emma would pick her family when she partnered with someone and created a family of her own. I told Emma the time to start picking your family is now. Now you may be thinking that 30 is actually a better time to settle down than 20, or even 25, and I agree with you. But grabbing whoever you'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.

So what happened to Emma? Well, we went through that address book, and she found an old roommate's cousin who worked at an art museum in another state. That weak tie helped her get a job there. That job offer gave her the reason to leave that live-in boyfriend. Now, five years later, she's a special events planner for museums. She's married to a man she mindfully chose. She loves her new career, she loves her new family, and she sent me a card that said, "Now the emergency contact blanks don't seem big enough."

Now Emma's story made that sound easy, but that's what I love about working with twentysomethings. They are so easy to help. Twentysomethings are like 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. Likewise, at 21 or 25 or even 29, one good conversation, one good break, one good TED Talk, can have an enormous effect across years and even generations to come.

So here's an idea worth spreading to every twentysomething you know. It's as simple as what I learned to say to Alex. It's what I now have the privilege of saying to twentysomethings like Emma every single day: Thirty is not the new 20, so claim your adulthood, get some identity capital, use your weak ties, pick your family. Don't be defined by what you didn't know or didn't do. You're deciding your life right now. Thank you.(Applause)

”我想，上帝为人性写下的最本质的两条密码是：残疾与爱情“ —— 史铁生《病隙碎笔》

这本书详细叙述了作者为了写百万字的《平凡的世界》所付出的各种艰辛，这何尝不像是《老人与海》中的“老人”与命运搏斗故事的现实版本呢？！

其间的勤奋斗争和锲而不舍，皆是楷模，他是典型的用”宽度“而非”长度“来诠释生命意义的人。也正是这样，导致了最后健康严重受到损害，43岁就以疾病告终。

十年时间，六部，百万字，的确是作者用生命健康和青春浇灌出来的结晶。重新阅读《平凡的世界》第一段话，让人感觉平实和朴素。

“一九七五年二三月间，一个平平常常的日子，细濛濛的雨丝夹着一星半点的雪花，正纷纷淋淋地向大地飘洒着。时令已快到惊蛰，雪当然再不会存留，往往还没等落地，就已经消失得无踪无影了。黄土高原严寒而漫长的冬天看来就要过去，但那真正温暖的春天还远远地没有到来。"

另外，作者对于”理性与感性的冲突“的思考，也正是我近来十分困惑，或者说用力思考的地方，正好作者提到了”拉斯普京曾写了《告别马拉礁》，揭示的正是这一痛苦而富于激情的命题。“，所以我打算阅读这本书。

2013/05/14 22:54@北京

重新思考的力量

每个人都希望自己第一次都是正确无误或者完美无瑕的，例如第一次对新事物的尝试，对事物的第一印象，面临选择的时候第一个冒出来的主意，第一个男/女朋友……

在我看来，可能有一个原因是第一次听起来就很完美，要是做好了就更无暇啦，另外一个就是要是来第二次的话太折腾费事，或者显得自己不够执著。

最近看了一个Steve Jobs的电视采访视频（他人现在当然已去世近2年，而且这个视频是他为数不多的电视采访之一），别人可能评价他是一个十分固执专制的人，但是视频中他提到如果有人可以当面提供有力的证据/论证来说服他，那么他会在5分钟后改变自己的决定的。所以说，其实改变自己的想法或者决定没有什么不得了的，因为当时你决定的是时候的情况和条件或者已经改变了，或者说你但是就没有意识到很多你没有考虑到的地方。话说回来，一个人怎么能知道他不知道什么呢！尤其是当他非常自以为是的时候。

所以，第二次的思考如同第一次的直觉一样也是非常重要的，如果发生了这样的困惑，还是值得去思考，无论结果是改变还是不改变都是有益的，要么是更加坚持有信心，要么有了一个更适合的情况。

2013/05/08 10:59@北京

Don't be afraid or feel ashame when a different idea breaks up in the mind. Because that is a chance you have some thing whole new!

"Your time is limited, don’t waste it living someone else’s life.
Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living the result of other
people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinion
drowned your own inner voice. And most important, have the
courage to follow your heart and intuition, they somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” – Steve Jobs

1985年4月8日，出生于陕西省渭南市

2003年9月1日，就读于四川省成都市西南交通大学，信息管理与信息系统专业

2007年7月16日，就职于甲骨文软件系统研究开发中心（北京）有限公司，软件开发工程师

2011年8月22日，就职于索尼移动通讯有限公司，软件管理工程师

身高181CM，体重70KG

爱好：运动（羽毛球，乒乓球，篮球，游泳，滑雪）；旅游（登山，旅游）；休闲（台球，露营，电影）；读书（哲学，励志，英语）；摄影；博客；高科技

刚提起要读贾平凹的小说，正好就有朋友送我了这本书。红色的封面，显得非常特别。

五一花了三天，在值班的同时读完了这本小说。总体而言，小说讲的是清风街的时间跨度只有若干年的故事，作者是以第一人称我（书中角色是引生）来叙述的，虽然不是言情类的小说，但是对我而言印象深刻的是引生对于白雪矢志不渝的感情，和白雪择偶不佳给你自己带来的稍带悲惨色彩的生活。虽然小说的篇幅结束了，但是总觉得情节上没有完。不知道作者会不会出个续什么的。（这本小说耗费了一年时间，而且又前后修改了三次才得以面世）

如果你是在陕西农村长大的，那么这本书推荐给你，你会从中更加深刻的体会到农村生活你曾经没有发现的方面……

孤独，自由的一种表现形式！