Since my mid-twenties I have felt a calling to write this book. At the time, I didn’t have the words to articulate the thoughts in my head, but as I close out my twenties, I’ve found those words and have been able to put them into the pages of this book. My hope is that those thoughts that I share in this book will validate the struggle we all feel throughout this decade, and create a conversation about something most silently persevere through.

If you read any of the great philosophers across history, religious texts, or reflections from modern day authors, what you’ll quickly realize is that self-understanding is a journey that is never complete. Every day, we wake up and persevere towards a goal that we’ll never fully grasp. Some will wake up closer to that goal than others, and in a way, that’s what our twenties is all about.

I have started to fall back on Genesis Chapter 3, verse 15, to better understand this for myself:

I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.

When Adam and Eve had bitten from the apple of knowledge and been deceived by the serpent, God spoke these words to them and the serpent – a promise of what is to come. And whether you’re a believer or not, there is something tucked away in this single line that encapsulates this entire book, as well as our lives.

The word “enmity” is defined as a deep, rooted hatred for someone or something. It means to struggle, wrestle, and fight with something – to go to war. God is telling the serpent in this moment, that humans will have this war with the serpent, who represents sins and evil in the world. His promise is a promise to struggle with good and evil and our ability to live a life worth living, and if you read the second part of that verse, you’ll read that we’ll not come out unscathed. There will be a toll we pay for having this fight.

In a single sentence of The Bible, what I hope to convey throughout this book has been foreshadowed. Now, I’m not a great philosopher. I certainly am not a resounding success of our generation, with my name in a Forbes 30 Under 30 list outlining the monumental impact that my contributions have made to the world. No, rather I am just your everyday guy, who has come to the realization that for the first time in many of our lives, the first years of our twenties is the first time we are forced to confront the reality that we have no clue who we are. And in so many ways, it’s not our fault that we struggle. It’s a core part of who we are as humans.

Context. Nuance. Semantics.

In the story of our lives, these three things rest at the heart of every story and the characters they build. Although the story archetype might be the same, for instance a “rags to riches” story, the story itself is unique. It’s why we don’t look at Dolly Parton, Oprah Winfrey, and J.K. Rowling, and see the same person or believe that they hold any common ground with one another, beyond them being a successful woman who grew up poor. Each were born into a different decade than the next. Dolly was born into a small town outside of Knoxville, Tennessee, in the heart of Appalachia and only four months after the return of our troops from World War II. Meanwhile, Oprah was born eight year later in a township south of Tennessee in a small town of rural Mississippi. Her birth year marked the beginning of the American Civil Rights Movement, something that stretched for nearly two decades, as people like Martin Luther King Jr. led the fight for racial equality for every American citizen. Meanwhile, J.K. Rowling was born eleven years later into a township outside of Bristol in the United Kingdom. Her upbringing was marked by the sixties and the Cold War on her front doorstep.

Each of these women are simply not the same. The context, nuance, and semantics of it all, is what makes it theirs. It’s the seven-year period leading up to the publishing of the first Harry Potter novel that makes J.K. Rowling’s story hers – it’s the poverty, loss of a child, her divorce, and death of her mother, that builds to the final characterization of who she is as an author. It’s those moments that tell the story of who she was and who she became. And it’s for those reasons, that we don’t dare compare her story to that of Oprah’s or Dolly’s.

It's also for this reason that James Bond, Dracula, and Jaws are not the same story. Each represent a story of how the hero fights to overcome the monster, but James Bond, Van Helsing, and Martin Brody are not the same people. Each come with their own strengths and weaknesses, their own backgrounds that make them who they are, and build to the character we come to love in their stories. It’s the context, nuance, and semantics of their stories that make them individually interesting, and altogether different than the other stories that tell a tale of a hero overcoming a monster. It’s those three things that make us come back again and again for another James Bond movie, that uses the same character but tells a different story of their triumph.

Over and over, we see this played out in front of us and it’s no different for each of us who make our way through our twenties. Our lives are marked in such a way that they are uniquely our own. A compilation of experiences that string together a complex web of cause and effect, that ultimately builds into our identity and the story we tell ourselves, and our twenties is the beginning of this narrative.

Across each of the pillars is an interconnected set of priorities that we must nurture and understand. Even with the best of intentions, these priorities are in conflict with the habits we’ve created and one of the biggest challenges we’ll face in our twenties, is discovering the habits we keep, and realizing the good (or bad) impacts they have on our lives.

Career is the pillar that feeds the rest. Like our stomach, if we don’t feed it enough, the other parts of our body suffer. If we feed it too much, it hurts, and the other parts of our body suffer. If we feed it the wrong things, it hurts, and the other parts of our body suffer. But, if we feed it the right things, in the right amounts, it will be the engine that keeps everything else in motion.

Save a select few individuals in the world, work is something we all must do. We build our careers. Some of us become professionals, others find work to fill the days, and some find the unpaid labor of running a household. Each of equal importance, and each that come with their own strings attached. The point is, we find work and do it. We fall to pieces as humans when work is not a part of the equation. This is why you see the philanthropist billionaire trying to find a way to do something with the wealth they’ve accumulated. Work is not about the money they’re making, but the contribution they’re giving to the world. We crave work as humans and this is what building a career is about.

And we’ll have many careers throughout our lifetime. Some that we’ll never see coming or know to expect. It will come as a sudden layoff or a new calling that pulls us in a different direction. Either way, change is inevitable. In our twenties, we will be the catalyst of a lot of that change. Through effort and energy, we’ll create momentum in a direction that we want to go in. For that reason, I’ve broken this chapter into three sections: Hygienic Choices, Motivational Choices, and the Choice of Action.

The first two are choices that help guide our direction, and the last is taking the steps in that direction. There isn’t one that will come before another, rather they’re all interdependent upon one another, because sometimes we need to take a step in the wrong direction to learn that we need to sprint in another. Which is a lesson that we must learn for each of the 5-Pillars.

Family is the perfect structure in our lives. It holds us up with more strength than other pillars are capable of but still remains flexible and gives in ways that other pillars are incapable of. In many ways, it’s like the bones of our bodies. When I was getting my undergraduate degree, I took a class in advanced material science. During one of the lectures, we were discussing the composition of bone and how it’s the most perfect composite material ever created. At its best, a composite material is something that contains two or more different materials, that when put together act in a way that is different than either would on their own. The challenge with many composite materials, is that there is an abrupt transition from one material to another, that causes a “weakness” in the composite that has been created.

Within the compositional structure of bone, there is the perfect transition between materials. On the outside, we have a hard and rigid composition. Something that provides all of the strength and stability that we need to support ourselves throughout our days. At their core is marrow, a gooey substance that is porous and could never bear a load on its own. What it does offer, is a ductility that allows bones to flex and return to its original state, without breaking. The combination of the two together offers an unmatched structure for humans to rely on, and even when our bones break, they can heal themselves.

Much like our families, they can take the weight of life from our shoulders and help bear that burden for us when it gets to be too much. They can flex in ways that we would never expect, and even when we hurt that structure, it can regenerate and heal itself so that it can be there to support us again.

It doesn’t mean our immediate family will be perfect for our lives. Some people are blessed with parents that embody what it means to have unconditional love – unfortunately, that’s not everyone else’s experience. We all find ourselves falling on a spectrum when it comes to our immediate family, and how supportive they are. But family isn’t about the nuclear family that we so often think of. Like Dom Toretto in the Fast and Furious, family can simply be those around you who show that unconditional love and support that gives you a safety net to fall back upon.

Within this chapter, I’ll talk about my own struggles with my family. I’ll also talk about how this dynamic shifts throughout our twenties, and how we go from total dependency in the decades that had come before, to a place where sometimes they become the ones who are dependent upon us. Nestled within these changes, is the development of a family of our own. Either through close friends or marriage, we add to the short list of people that we love and trust with the hardest parts of our lives.

Friends are relief from everything else. Much like taking a deep breath, friends offer a reprieve from life. They add perspective and are a sounding board for times that we don’t have all the answers…or just need to vent about how we’re feeling. They fill our days with good times and help us weather the bad times.

You might be thinking that friends and family are very similar. Both give us something to fall back upon, but where the nuance comes, is the seasonal nature of friendships. Unlike family, which has a permanence to its roots, friends will inherently come and go. I think this is one of the uncomfortable truths of friendship – they are seasonal by the nature of what they are. Unlike family, we can opt out of our friendships with people, or they can opt out with us. It could be our decision or theirs. It could end as a result of the circumstance of life. We’ll never know that end date when it starts, and we can influence how long it takes for the seasons to change – even prolonging them to never change.

It shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone, that friendships come and go. I couldn’t tell you how many friends I’ve made, that I don’t know the names of now. I can also tell you about the prominent friends I’ve lost and the sorrow (or anger) I feel for those losses. I can also tell you about the friendships that seem immovable, bordering on what I would consider family. My friend Kate would fall into that category. We’ve ebbed and flowed over time, finding ourselves going long periods of time without seeing one another, but have always known that the other person is there if it were ever to count.

I’ll talk more about each type of friend in the subsequent chapter, but at the core of what I hope to convey, is that friendships in our twenties will be a cause of a lot of pain and simultaneously be one of the only things that brings us joy. The goal of our twenties and friendships is not to try and contain the volatility, but to learn to ride the waves of it.

Love is something you come to appreciate in your twenties, even though our understanding of it is so small. I can recall the “love” I thought I felt throughout my teenage years. It was volatile and fleeting. It could come and go at the faintest shifts in the wind, wreaking havoc on my life and my sanity. What I’ve come to find out, is that Love isn’t anything like this; it’s deep and constant. Love is found in the good and the bad moments – moments when you find yourself knowing that life would somehow be easier if it were just you and no one else involved. But in those moments, you can’t help but realize that there isn’t any other option than to live in convenance with that person. That beneath it all, are roots that you won’t pull up, because they’re tapped into the joys of life itself.

What this Love isn’t, is toxic. It’s not a self-conscious impulse that keeps you connected to the person, even though they are tearing down the walls of your home in ways that will destroy you. We all know this “love” that others claim. It’s similar to that teenage love we experience but worse, because we’ve attributed it to the real thing, when the stakes are much higher, and the consequences are much bigger. When the person we “love” is intertwined into the fabric of our lives and has voice to tear down our other pillars. This false love is often mistaken for the real thing, locking people into a lifetime of pain.

If I’ve learned one thing in my twenties, it’s that the search for real Love is a painstaking process. I won’t be able to touch on all of the mysteries of love, but what I will do throughout this book, is talk about my path to finding my own. I’ll talk about experiencing love for the first time, the loss of love, the role of sex, and the convenance of marriage. There is nothing more powerful in our lives, and we either embrace our powerlessness in the face of this inescapable phenomenon or crumble trying to fight it.

Which brings in the Love we share in friendship and family, two of the other pillars of our lives. This Love is interconnected to the rest of the structure we’ve built.

Self is the pillar that becomes the catch-all for that inner dialogue we have with ourselves, whether we know we’re having it or not. This is the culmination of all of our experiences, played out in our personality and the character we present to the world.

When I started my MBA, we all took a personality assessment that showed us two things: who we are at work, and who we are at home. It was a breakdown of four “energies” that we bring to our daily interactions. Things like our assertiveness, our compassion, our boisterousness, and our analytical thought. My personality type and the personality type of my classmates was not what made a lasting impression upon me. Rather, what has stuck with me to this day, is amount of fluctuation between ourselves in a public setting and who we are at home. There wasn’t a person in the class that didn’t see a large rift between the two results.

Each of us were quantifiably different by ourselves in the comfort of our homes, than we are in our respective work settings. This doesn’t stop at the workplace either, we all morph ourselves to fit the world around us. Showing others the parts of ourselves that we want exposed, and hiding other parts that we’d rather not have seen. Throughout our twenties, when we come to terms that this dynamic “self” that we show the world is trained by countless experiences that have affirmed behaviors and mindsets, we realize that we have succumb ourselves to automatic responses that we never knew were there.

Our modes of being, are involuntary responses to the context around us. When we unpack this in our twenties, it comes with a lot of uneasiness. And it comes in all parts of our lives. Throughout this chapter, I’ll focus on the development of habits that maintain this pillar, as it requires the most amount of maintenance. It’s the brains of the operation, and without the right attention, it’s power will twist us in ways we never imagined were possible. This is why mental and physical health are so crucial – what we say to ourselves and the work we put into maintaining our body will pay dividends by strengthening your resolve across the other pillars.

“Listen to your own truth.” Ram Dass

“Speaking your truth is the most powerful tool we have.” Oprah Winfrey

“Success is nothing more than living your life according to your own truth and your own terms.” Unknown

“No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path.” Buddha

We must “listen”, “speak”, and “live” our own truths. These few quotes are just a sample of the much larger narrative that is around us every day. A narrative that glorifies the individual and shoulders the burden of responsibility on a single person - yourself. And in a secularized society, how can we not see it this way?

We have nothing to gain, if not gained through our own actions. This is the guiding principle in our society today. We must do everything to get everything, and if we do anything less, then we can expect to receive a life that is less than. Across each of the 5-Pillars, is this not the case? Is it not true that we must show up and participate in life? Is it not our responsibility to build a life worth living? To put in the work, such that we can leave something that is better than when we found it? Everything around us is pointing towards the individual as the owner of their salvation. But is that really the case?

If we didn’t exist on this earth, we wouldn’t be conscious to care about our problems – they just wouldn’t exist.

Tucked away in that statement is a line of logic that says: therefore, in our own existence we are the arbiters of our lives. This binary principle neglects the nuance of our existence, and simplifies what is otherwise the most difficult two questions we can ever ask ourselves:

Who am I?

Who’s am I?

The mandate of our twenties is to go out and build a life worth living. We’re told to be selfish, to chase our passions, to explore ourselves, and to surround ourselves with all of the things that we want to have. The outcome of which, is a lasting belief of individuality and self-sufficiency. This notion that we, ourselves, are capable of it all, and in the previous chapter, I broke down why I think this mindset is dangerous for our ability to grow throughout our twenties, by sharing my perspective on authority and our ability to self-govern. What this final chapter is about, is why this mindset of individuality and self-sufficiency is flat out wrong and neglects an objective truth that we all share – a truth that each of us would not be capable of anything, without the radical power of generosity in every aspect of our life. Generosity as we understand it today, is the act of giving through an abundance of kindness. And I ask you, is that not what marks the entirety of our lives?