She wasn’t an expert, but she’d long been a mentor. She was going to talk to her readers as if they were her former students, who still ask for her advice over coffee. She was going to be open and honest with her own hard-won lessons and the experiences she’d gleaned from others. “I am not smarter than you. I am not wiser than you. I’m just going to tell you what I know,” she says. “It’s meant to be this very close narrative that ultimately feels like a companion walking this journey with the reader.”

I decided to travel to British Columbia to visit some of my closest friends. In the airport I was scrolling through Libby to see available audiobooks and found this book, Your Turn. It looked cheesy. It was cheesy. But hey, books aren’t always about getting the information. Sometimes reading is meditation. She admits this may be a little complicated for today’s young people because of helicopter parenting. Many parents of millennial kids hovered too much, she writes, meaning those children had everything taken care of. In spite of these markers, William Kamkwamba built a wind turbine to generate power to save his Malawian village from famine at age fourteen. Malala Yousafzai dared to attend school in the Swat Valley in northwest Pakistan and actively promoted the right of girls to do so, and when she was fifteen, a member of the Taliban shot her in the head for it, but she survived and continued her activism. Greta Thunberg sailed across the Atlantic Ocean at age sixteen to force indifferent elders to pay attention to the climate crisis. Are these not examples of #adulting? A sixteen-year-old high school student at the Groton School in Massachusetts cited Greta’s example and said he felt like he was wasting his life by being away at school in the woods. I told him not to compare himself to Greta or to anybody else. “Thoreau went off to the woods to learn,” I reminded him. “At some point you will come out of the woods and figure out what you want to make of your life.” Learn how to iron, shirts and pants especially… that or get used to hanging your clothes up right away to avoid wrinklesIf you were fortunate to grow up with parents, grandparents, older siblings, aunts or uncles, even a neighbor that took the time to assign chores or spend time teaching you things… you’re already ahead of the game when it comes to running a household. It’s also not a bad idea to seek out “one-stop shops”, offering both accounting and future planning advice from a fiduciary financial advisor. Actively listeninghelps you understand detailed instructions and reduce the chances of errors on the job. Beyond that, there are at least ten other communication skills for workplace successyou should know. Possessing these skills will help you to become a well-rounded employee and an asset to your company. It feels like this definition of adulthood is wearing thin under the pressures of our times. Adults can survive independently, but should they? Is there really any historical precedent at all for fully independent adults apart from that which benefited a capitalist consumer marketplace? It’s obvious that retailers would rather we each had our own living space and didn’t share our appliances or tools — more space that needs filling means more demand for stuff. And, yes, sharing is a pain sometimes, but maybe it’s because most of us have so little experience with how to do it.

Age comes naturally. Not being an adult. Your Turn eases the painful adulting struggle. Julie Lythcott-Haims is patient, vulnerable, incisive, and encouraging. She once landed our parents’ helicopters. Your Turn now clears a path to adulthood for us. Let’s take it.” You can buy a leave-in toilet bowl cleaner that will keep things fresh for 2,000 flushes. You may also want to invest in a disposable toilet wand, which allows you to flush the brush after every cleaning.And why would you want to pay someone for minor fixes? It’s a waste of money, which is a big no-no in adulting 101. Not everyone experiences helicopter parenting. There are plenty of remarkable people who have had nothing handed to them by parents as she details in her book. She says the stories of resilience from those individuals who grew up confronting tough circumstances alone can be a lesson for those who may have had it easy. I took two main things from this book. The first is that being an adult is about learning how to fend for yourself, and the second is that you must play an active role in shaping your life to be how you want it. The first one is straightforward. You gotta know how to take care of yourself. Finances, health, hygiene, clothing, employment, housing, general logistical and administrative competence. I have found that with each passing year I get better at taking care of these things and developing personal systems for making them happen efficiently. I have increasingly many opinions about, like, skincare products and clothes and credit cards and apartment design, which is a good sign.

In addition to asking your family for your favorite recipes, there are tons of online resources and apps with easy to follow recipes and cooking tips. You can even search by ingredients, prep and cooking time. Juggling work and life away from work can get overwhelming if you don’t have a system for allocating a specific amount of time to projects and tasks. Time-management skillsare a must to optimize productivity, keep your day flowing smoothly and minimize stress. But demographic pressures, labor-market conditions, and social norms have evolved a lot in the past decade, and the concerns of people in their 20s and 30s are not what they were in 2013.There was a lot of pressure, in the years following the 2008 housing crisis, to perform genuflections to the markers of neoliberal success: saving for a first home, dressing for the jobs we wanted, killing it at work before settling down to raise kids with the domestic partners with whom, in those halcyon days, we expected to equally and fairly divide our household labor.