“The major stress I experienced after college involved this feeling of, ‘Oh my God, now I’m actually supposed to do something with my life! What the hell do I want to do?’” says Ricardo, a twenty-six-year old from Los Angeles. “I continue to feel scared because of an overwhelming need to come up with some sort of plan for affecting the world. I enjoy my job, make a fair amount of money, and have a lot of friends in the city, but there’s a constant pressure that I should be doing more, doing a better job of living up to the promise of my college education. I feel I should be leading mass social movements, changing the world, or at least using my mind to push forward truth, beauty, and happiness. There’s a sense that a nine-to-five job is a bit of a disappointment. To whom? My parents? College? Myself, I guess. I think the major stress after college for the highly educated is that we feel like we’re suddenly done with the dress rehearsal. Now we’re supposed to use everything we’ve learned and do ‘amazing’ things. It’s often hard to figure out even how to begin.”

What wakes you up? What makes you feel alive? What is it that always grabs your attention? What lights you up at your core? These are some of the questions that you must answer during your twenties if you want to solve the problems that Ricardo is talking about. Sure, sometimes trying to answer these questions can be daunting and even overwhelming, but as Ricardo said, dress rehearsal is over, and if you don’t make an effort to find out what makes you happy, no one else will. But instead of fearing the responsibility that comes with confronting these self-inquiries during your twenties, it’s much more constructive to view this question-and-answer process as an opportunity to figure out what you truly want out of life.

Giving Shape to Your Dreams

You gain an enormous amount of power and personal control over your world when you take your generalized aspirations, desires, and dreams and begin defining them into specific goals you eventually want to accomplish. The first step in this process begins by answering the major questions that arise when trying to figure out what you want to do with your life during your twenties. So set aside some time for yourself, grab your journal, and answer the following questions in as much detail as possible.

• What lights you up at your core?
• What are the things that make you feel alive?
• What is it that always grabs your attention?
• What are the things that you are automatically interested in?
• Why do these things make you feel so good?

After you find answers to these questions, try to get more specific. For example, begin asking questions like:

• What kind of work relates to these things?
• What are some of the things you eventually want to accomplish professionally?
• Where do you want to be professionally and financially in five, ten, twenty years?
• What aspects of your social life do you want to improve?

When you’re done, take a moment to look over what you just wrote down. It’s a good bet that many of the things you listed are external goals. What you are going to do now is turn your focus inward by exploring what type of person you need to become in order to attain these external goals. You can do this by circling the five most important things to you on the list and for each one, answer the following:

• What do you need to develop within yourself to accomplish what you just listed?
• What new knowledge do you need to acquire?
• What new skills do you need to master?
• How are you going to live today in order to create the tomorrow you want?

When you start exploring both what you want and who you need to become to attain your desires, you will begin acknowledging to yourself that there are things that you’re not completely happy or satisfied with. The deeper you get in answering these questions, the more you will begin noticing the difference between where you currently are and where you want to be in the future. This distinction will make you more conscious of the fact that you are dissatisfied with some aspect of your life and it’s this dissatisfaction that eventually starts motivating you to begin taking action.

excerpt from The Turbulent Twenties Survival Guide