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

But while the urban tribe helps us survive, it does not help us thrive. The urban tribe may bring us soup when we are sick, but it is the people we hardly know - those who never make it into our tribe - who will swiftly and dramatically change our lives for the better.

— Meg Jay

Despite its revolutionary promises, Facebook can turn our everyday lives into that wedding we have all heard about: the one where the bride chooses her prettiest friends, not her best friends, to be bridesmaids. It can feel like a popularity contest where being Liked is what matters, being the best is the only respectable option, how our partners look is more important than how they act, the race to get married is on, and we have to be clever all the time. It can be just another place, not to be, but to seem.

— Meg Jay

Distinctiveness is a fundamental part of identity. We develop a clearer sense of ourselves by firming up the boundaries between ourselves and others. I am who I am because of how I am different from those around me. There is a point to my life because it cannot be carried out in exactly the same way by any other person. Differences is part of what makes us who we are. It gives our lives meaning.

— Meg Jay

Doing something later is not automatically the same as doing something better

— Meg Jay

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

If the first step in establishing a professional identity is claiming our interests and talents, then the next step is claiming a story about our interests and talents, a narrative we can take with us to interviews and coffee dates (...) a story that balances complexity and cohesion is frankly, diagnostic.

— Meg Jay

In one way or another, almost every twenty something client I have wonders, 'Will things work out for me?' The uncertainty behind that question is what makes twenty something life so difficult, but it is also what makes twenty something action so possible and so necessary. It's unsettling to not know the future and, in a way, even more daunting to consider that what we are doing with our twenty something lives might be determining it.

— Meg Jay

I think part of making any decision in your twenties is realizing there is no twenty-four flavor table. It's a myth.

— Meg Jay

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

— Meg Jay