Top 100 Meg Jay Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time. – Leonard Bernstein, composer.”

— Meg Jay

2. “Inaction breeds fear and doubt. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy. – Dale Carnegie, writer and lecturer.”

— Meg Jay

3. “The future isn’t written in the stars. There are no guarantees. So claim your adulthood. Be intentional. Get to work. Pick your family. Do the math. Make your own certainty. Don’t be defined by what you didn’t know or didn’t do. You are deciding your life right now.”

— Meg Jay

4. “Feeling better doesn’t come from avoiding adulthood, it comes from investing in adulthood.”

— Meg Jay

5. “Identity capital is our collection of personal assets. It is the repertoire of individual resources that we assemble over time. These are the investments we make in ourselves, the things we do well enough, or long enough, that they become a part of who we are. Some.”

— Meg Jay

6. “The Ben Franklin Effect: If weak ties do favors for us, they start to like us. Then they become even more likely to grant us additional favors in the future. Franklin decided that if he wanted to get someone in his side, he ought to ask for a favor. And he did.”

— Meg Jay

7. “The one thing I have learned is that you can’t think your way through life. The only way to figure out what to do is to do – something.”

— Meg Jay

8. “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you. – Maya Angelou.”

— Meg Jay

9. “We think that by avoiding decisions now, we keep all of our options open for later – but not making choices is a choice all the same.”

— Meg Jay

10. “What I most notice about spending less time on social media is that I finally get to think my own thoughts.”

— Meg Jay

11. “What no one tells twentysomethings like Emma is that finally, and suddenly, they can pick their own families – they can create their own families – and these are the families that life will be about. These are the families that will define the decades ahead.”

— Meg Jay

12. “What I tell my clients about “the cohabitation effect” is this: The effect that living together has on your partnership will likely depend not on whether you live together but how.”

— Meg Jay

13. “The frontal lobe is where we move beyond the futile search for black-and-white solutions as we learn to tolerate – and act on – shades of gray.”

— Meg Jay

14. “We become what we hear and see and do every day.”

— Meg Jay

15. “When we make choices, we open ourselves up to hard work and failure and heartbreak, so sometimes it feels easier not to know, not to choose, and not to do. But it isn’t.”

— Meg Jay

16. “30 is not the new 20, so claim your adulthood, get some identity capital, use your weak ties, pick your family.”

— Meg Jay

17. “Real confidence comes from mastery experiences, which are actual, lived moments of success, especially when things seem difficult. Whether we are talking about love or work, the confidence that overrides insecurity comes from experience. There is no other way.”

— Meg Jay

18. “As a twentysomething, life is still more about potential than proof. Those who can tell a good story about who they are and what they want leap over those who can’t.”

— Meg Jay

19. “I feel like I’m in the middle of the ocean. Like I could swim in any direction but I can’t see land on any side so I don’t know which way to go.”

— Meg Jay

20. “As we age, we feel less like leaves and more like trees. We have roots that ground us and sturdy trunks that may sway, but don’t break, in the wind.”

— Meg Jay

21. “It’s the people we hardly know, and not our closest friends, who will improve our lives most dramatically.”

— Meg Jay

22. “There is a certain terror that goes along with saying “My life is up to me.” It is scary to realize there’s no magic, you can’t just wait around, no one can really rescue you, and you have to do something.”

— Meg Jay

23. “Shoulds can masquerade as high standards or lofty goals, but they are not the same. Goals direct us from the inside, but shoulds are paralyzing judgments from the outside. Goals feel like authentic dreams while shoulds feel like oppressive obligations. Shoulds set up a false dichotomy between either meeting an ideal or being a failure, between perfection or settling. The tyranny of the should even pits us against our own best interests.”

— Meg Jay

24. “Researchers who have looked at how people resolve identity crises have found that lives that are all capital and no crisis – all work and no exploration – feel rigid and conventional.”

— Meg Jay

25. “Goals have been called the building blocks of adult personality, and it is worth considering that who you will be in your thirties and beyond is being built out of goals you are setting for yourself today.”

— Meg Jay

26. “Many twentysomethings assume life will come together quickly after thirty, and maybe it will. But it is still going to be a different life. We imagine that if nothing happens in our twenties then everything is still possible in our thirties. We think that by avoiding decisions now, we keep all of our options open for later – but not making choices is a choice all the same.”

— Meg Jay

27. “Knowing you want to do something isn’t the same as knowing how to do it, and even knowing how to do something isn’t the same as actually doing it well.”

— Meg Jay

28. “For work success to lead to confidence, the job has to be challenging and it must require effort. It has to be done without too much help. And it cannot go well every single day. A long run of easy successes creates a sort of fragile confidence, the kind that is shattered when the first failure comes along. A more resilient confidence comes from succeeding – and from surviving some failures.”

— Meg Jay

29. “Doing something later is not automatically the same as doing something better.”

— Meg Jay

30. “Marriage is one of our most defining moments because so much is wrapped up in it. If building a career is like spending twelve hours at the blackjack table – seeing the cards as you make your decisions, playing each hand with current winnings in mind, having a new opportunity to take a chance or play it safe with every card dealt – then choosing a mate is like walking over to the roulette wheel and putting all your chips on red 32.”

— Meg Jay

31. “Forward thinking doesn’t just come with age. It comes with practice and experience. That’s why some twenty-two-year-olds are incredibly self-possessed, future-oriented people who already know how to face the unknown, while some thirty-four-year-olds still have brains that run the other way.”

— Meg Jay

32. “Older spouses may be more mature, but later marriage has its own challenges. Rather than growing together while their twentysomething selves are still forming, partners who marry older may be more set in their ways. And a series of low-commitment, possibly destructive relationships can create bad habits and erode faith in love. And even though searching may help you find a better partner, the pool of available singles shallows over time, perhaps in more ways than one.”

— Meg Jay

33. “The Big Five refers to five factors that describe how people interact with the world: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism. Just.”

— Meg Jay

34. “One thing I have learned is that many, many people feel isolated with similar problems, unaware that they are not as alone or as different as they think.”

— Meg Jay

35. “The confidence that overrides insecurity comes from experience. There is no other way.”

— Meg Jay

36. “But twentysomethings who hide out in underemployment, especially those who are hiding out because of a lack of confidence, are not serving themselves.”

— Meg Jay

37. “Twentysomethings who use their brains by engaging with good jobs and real relationships are learning the language of adulthood just when their brains are primed to learn it. In the chapters ahead, we will see how they learn to calm themselves down at work and in love, and this brings mastery and success. They.”

— Meg Jay

38. “Unthought knowns are those things we know about ourselves but forget somehow. These are the dreams we have lost sight of or the truths we sense but don’t say out loud. We may be afraid of acknowledging the unthought known to other people because we are afraid of what they might think. Even more often, we fear what the unthought known will then mean for ourselves and our lives.”

— Meg Jay

39. “The lottery question might get you thinking about what you would do if talent and money didn’t matter. But they do. The question twentysomethings need to ask themselves is what they would do with their lives if they didn’t win the lottery.”

— Meg Jay

40. “The best time to work on your marriage is before you have one, so maybe the best time to talk about some of these issues is when they do not yet loom so large.”

— Meg Jay

41. “I wish I’d been more... I don’t know... intentional.”

— Meg Jay

42. “Sometimes dating or married couples decide to split because things change – someone cheated or had to move – but, more often, people split up because things don’t change. It is far more common to hear couples say that, in retrospect, the differences were there all along.”

— Meg Jay

43. “Interviewers want to hear a reasonable story about the past, present, and future.”

— Meg Jay

44. “Twenty somethings who aren’t at least a little scared about their relationships are often the ones who are being the least thoughtful.”

— Meg Jay

45. “While most would agree with Socrates that, “the unexamined life is not worth living,” a lesser-known quote by Sheldon Kopp might be more important here: “The unlived life is not worth examining.”

— Meg Jay

46. “Present bias is prioritizing the rewards and consequences of the here-and-now over the rewards and consequences of the there-and-then.”

— Meg Jay

47. “The Ben Franklin effect shows that, while attitudes influence behavior, behavior can also shape attitudes. If we do a favor for someone, we come to believe we like that person. This liking leads back to another favor, and so on. A close variant of what is called the foot-in-the-door technique, or the strategy of making small requests before larger ones, the Ben Franklin effect tells us that one favor begets more favors and, over time, small favors beget larger ones.”

— Meg Jay

48. “Real confidence comes from mastery experiences, which are actual, lived moments of success, especially when things seem difficult.”

— Meg Jay

49. “Society is structured to distract people from the decisions that have a huge impact on happiness in order to focus attention on the decisions that have a marginal impact on happiness.”

— Meg Jay

50. “Ian pretended that not knowing what to do was the hard part when, somewhere inside, I think he knew that making a choice about something is when the real uncertainty begins. The more terrifying uncertainty is wanting something and not knowing how to get it. It is working toward something even though there is no sure thing. When we make choices, we open ourselves up to hard work and failure and heartbreak, so sometimes it feels easier not to know, not to choose, and not to do.”

— Meg Jay