Your Turn: How To Be an Adult by Julie Lythcott-Haims (Henry Holt)

By Charlie Gofen

Former Stanford freshman dean Julie Lythcott-Haims rose to fame on the well-earned success of her 2015 book How to Raise an Adult, which warned of the perils of overparenting, and then followed up with a powerful memoir, Real American, about grappling with racism in America while growing up Black and biracial.

For her third book, Your Turn, Lythcott-Haims returns to the advice genre—focusing not on how to raise an adult but rather how to be one. Her guidance this time is aimed at twentysomethings, and she offers up many nuggets of wisdom from which they would undoubtedly benefit, but a book of nearly 500 pages probably isn’t the optimal delivery vehicle for doling out advice to young adults today, so I suspect the readership may end up being the same helicopter parent audience of How to Raise an Adult.

Then again, perhaps she is, in her upbeat way, encouraging young adults to display the growth mindset that she promotes by actually picking up a weighty book. (My twentysomething son Eric suggests that any of his peers who successfully tackles a 500-page book on how to be an adult probably has the requisite adulting skills to not need that book, but even the most diligent young adults would benefit from Lythcott-Haims’ guidance on topics ranging from excelling in the workplace to building and maintaining friendships to simply behaving morally.)

Your Turn is about, more than anything else, personal integrity, and Lythcott-Haims delivers her message convincingly. She calls on young adults to live an authentic life and make their own choices rather than always do what their parents want and expect. “Which will you be?” she asks. “The person who knows who you are meant to be and goes for what you want regardless of what others think? Or the person who wakes up at forty or fifty realizing that all of your choices have been made from a place of fear of disappointing others?”

Perhaps your parents want you to be a doctor but your passion is to be an EMT. Perhaps they want you to be a college professor but you find your calling teaching in a K-12 school. (She quotes behavioral science author Daniel Pink that deep engagement in your work is the “oxygen of the soul”). Trust your own voice, she urges, if you want to lead a life of purpose and fulfillment. Changing your relationship with your parents—getting them to think of you as an adult and to treat you as one—is essential to growing up. You may disappoint them at some point by following your own star. That’s okay.

Lythcott-Haims advocates for moral behavior and for compassion toward others and also toward yourself. “Character can make or break you,” she writes, and that includes the little moments and the times that no one is watching. If your behavior falls short of your own values, come clean. “When you can say to the pertinent people, This is what I did, I’m sorry, I’m learning from it, I’m trying to be better, that’s really all anyone can ask of you.” And just as you need to have the capacity to forgive others for their mistakes, you also need to be able to forgive yourself and move forward.

She urges not just self-compassion but self-love—which she describes as meaning that “you feel good about yourself intrinsically … as opposed to feeling good about yourself only when you get extrinsic evidence of your worth, in the form of feedback that others value you or your accomplishments.”

Lythcott-Haims makes an extra effort throughout the book to address anyone who has felt ostracized for being different, including LBGTQ+ individuals, people of all races, ethnicities and religions, and anyone with physical disabilities, mental health challenges, or addictions. Her selection of people that she profiles in Your Turn is impressively diverse and shows her commitment to inclusion.

She urges young adults to nurture friendships. “You may have been told that your twenties are all about work and career and that you can focus on your human relationships later, but if you’ve been told that you were duped.”

Surround yourself with people who energize and support you, she advises, and support them back. “Being a reliable friend is key. Doing what you’ve said you’re going to do and doing it consistently matters. Being trustworthy. Just plain showing up and checking in. Learning how to be a good friend is the right thing to do—your friend benefits, of course—but it also staves off depression and anxiety in you.”

She also encourages everyone to debate and disagree courteously—particularly welcome advice in today’s politically charged environment. “Too often today we label someone we disagree with as `backwards’ or a `libtard.’ We refuse to hear people out. Instead, we shut people down, and sometimes outright `cancel’ them. This is ruining us. It’s fracturing our communities and families, and it hurts inside when we’re on the receiving end. We can be bigger than this.”

Lythcott-Haims’ advice to young adults on how to comport oneself in the workplace is spot-on. Work hard and challenge yourself. Get out of your comfort zone from time to time. At the same time, be willing to do the scut work. “You may not understand that almost every job has parts that aren’t enjoyable,” she writes. “As such, out in the real world you may feel This is really boring. I hate doing this. I need to get another job … instead of Hey that’s part of the learning curve, and also there will be boring parts of any job.”

Find a mentor at work and “cultivate an increasingly strong connection with them.” And play well with others. She quotes psychotherapist and author Lori Gottlieb, who maintains that nothing is more important in the workplace than building relationships. “Do people like you? Can they rely on you? Do you have a good attitude?”

And don’t be a perfectionist. “Focus not on being perfect, but on continually learning and growing.”

Lythcott-Haims shares many her own life experiences and is brutally candid about her own mistakes and failures. To some extent, Your Turn blends the advice genre of her first book with the memoir genre of her second.

Much of her advice is specific and practical. In the category of taking care of yourself, get enough sleep, eat nutritiously, laugh and play, prioritize your emotional health and don’t be afraid to see a therapist. In the category of finance, don’t take on too much debt, have insurance against catastrophes (medical, home, auto), and save money from an early age, especially through pretax 401(k) contributions.

Be kind.

Be careful with social media. “Social media usage can have an outsized impact on those of us who struggle with mental health challenges—if we’re in a good place, social media doesn’t impact our sense of self but if we’re struggling, research shows that positive interactions make us feel better and negative interactions make us feel worse.”

And finally, be grateful. “It’s not just about saying thank you frequently and appreciating what you have. It’s about developing a practice of noticing and expressing what you’re grateful for. … gratitude (like happiness) is not a function of how much you have, but by how much you appreciate what you have.” 

Charlie Gofen is an investment counselor in Chicago who has taught high school and been a newspaper reporter.