Raffi Grinberg is an executive at Dialog and the cofounder, with Jonathan Haidt, of The Constructive Dialogue Institute. He previously worked in management consulting at Bain & Company and authored a mathematics textbook published by Princeton University Press. At Boston College, he created and taught a wildly popular course called Adulting 101, which became the basis of this book.
What’s the big idea?
When teens enroll in Driver’s Ed, instructors don’t hand the car keys over and say, “Go crash the car a few times; that’ll teach you to drive.” Instead, they teach driving rules and techniques before sitting students behind the wheel. So why does society fail to prepare adults for grown-up responsibilities in the same way? When it comes to finances, career building, and relationships, there is a lot that people are forced to learn through trial and error. While it’s true that much in life needs to be learned through experience, certain baseline levels of knowledge about Adulting 101 can avoid catastrophic setbacks and accelerate success.
Below, Raffi shares five key insights from his new book, How to Be a Grown Up: The 14 Essential Skills You Didn’t Know You Needed (Until Just Now). Listen to the audio version—read by Raffi himself—in the Next Big Idea App.
1. Start editing your Deepest Wants.
Isn’t it crazy that you are required by law to pay your taxes every year, yet most people were not taught how to do so in school? Our education system is missing so many essential financial skills. I came to this realization after graduating from a good university and starting my job in management consulting. On the first day of training, while surrounded by all these elite students, we were handed some forms asking about our taxes. Every single person went out into the hallway to call their parents for guidance on what to put on the forms. A similar situation occurred when we were asked to fill out our health insurance forms.
In addition to personal finance, there are all kinds of skills that could make your life better but you probably never learned about in school. Some skills lay the foundations for how to have better mental health, better relationships, or how to launch and build a career. The argument some people make about these “adulting” skills is that you can never really learn them in a classroom. You have to learn them through life experience. That’s certainly true for many life skills, but there is a baseline level of knowledge that could be helpful to learn in advance so that you can avoid certain mistakes that might, in theory, ruin your life.
I decided to create and teach a course called Adulting 101 at Boston College. This course was inspired not only by my experience on that first day of my first job but also by being a 20-something-year-old and facing my quarter-life crisis. I didn’t really know what I wanted out of my relationship at the time. I didn’t know what I wanted out of my career or who I wanted to become. I was asking these big life questions that stopped me in my tracks. It felt challenging, but in hindsight, it was a good thing. I used to tell my students, “I want you to have a quarter-life crisis now so that you don’t have a midlife crisis later.”
I think many midlife crises are brought about because people wake up and realize the life they’re living is not one of their own choosing. They just found themselves on a path, and the path took them there. In psychology, adult development theory says that just as children go through developmental stages, so do adults. But unlike children, whose stages are tied to specific ages, adults progress through these stages at various ages. There is one particular transition in this development that I think is key. It’s a transition from the socialized mind to the self-authored mind.
“I think many midlife crises are brought about because people wake up and realize the life they’re living is not one of their own choosing.”
The socialized mind emerges past adolescence when you understand society and its expectations of you. The self-authored mind is when you start deciding to do things because you want to do them. To make that leap, you must realize that many of the things you believe about what you should do for the world or how to be happy are hollow beliefs—meaning these are beliefs that were implanted in your mind by someone else. You can imagine having a Google Doc called “My Deepest Wants.” When you look at the revision history of that document, you notice that some of those beliefs were not actually brought about by your own thoughts, but actually by things other people led you to believe. No matter what these beliefs are, you can examine every single one and determine for yourself if it is something you still truly believe.
Until you go through each of those beliefs and test whether they are hollow, you can never graduate to the self-authored mind. You can never truly live a life that you decided to be living. And, of course, your beliefs and wants change over time. The idea is not that you come up with them when you’re 20-something, and they stay the same forever. But as a starting point, you can try to eliminate or replace hollow beliefs. It’s as if your whole upbringing you’ve had read-only access to this Google Doc. As a 20-something, you finally have edit access.
2. Personally finance your dream life.
Once you’ve started asking yourself what you want, the next question is how to get it? To do that, it’s helpful to learn some foundational skills in personal finance, mental health, and relationships.
I got married when I was relatively young. My wife and I went to New Mexico for our honeymoon. We got to the airport late at night. The car rental desks were about to close, and none would rent us a car because I had no credit card. I was 24 years old. I had already been working at a job for a couple of years, thankfully making a stable income, but I’d never gotten a credit card. Even though I had a debit card and money in my bank account, they would not let me rent a car. The counters were closing. It was the first night of our honeymoon. I did not feel like much of a grown-up. It was embarrassing. Thankfully, at one of the counters, we were finally allowed to rent a car with just a debit card, although we had to put down a hefty deposit.
When we returned home, I got a credit card. However, I had grown up believing that credit cards are bad because debt is bad. While debt is generally not ideal, in the financial system we live in, credit cards are essential for many things, such as renting a car or obtaining a mortgage. To secure a mortgage, you need to demonstrate good credit by having a high credit score. A credit score informs a bank or other lender about how likely a person is to repay the loan. A high credit score indicates that you are likely to repay your loan.
“A credit card is kind of like the best financial thing stapled to the worst financial thing.”
The determination of credit scores can be quite complicated. We will not delve into all the details now, but the most common metric is the FICO score. Essentially, it’s a score that evaluates your past payment history, analyzing how often you make late payments, take out and repay loans, and the amount of credit available to you. All these factors contribute to one score. Depending on whether your credit score is good or bad, you’ll be offered a different interest rate on the mortgage. Often, this can lead to differences of hundreds of thousands of dollars, stemming from having a good versus a bad credit score.
The best way to start building credit is to get a credit card while you’re young and use it. However, debt is still bad, and credit card debt is one of the worst kinds of debt. The interest rate on credit debt is exceptionally high. Credit card companies are full of tricks, so you have to be careful. However, if you get a credit card and pay off the entire balance every month, you start building credit over time. A credit card is kind of like the best financial thing stapled to the worst financial thing.
3. Invest for your future.
People don’t tell you two key facts about life. First, if you do not save money throughout your career, you will not have enough money to afford retirement. Yes, there is social security. It’s relatively small, not enough for many people to live on. Fact number two is good news: You don’t need to save as much as you think because of investing. If the money you save every year as you can continue earning throughout your career gets invested into assets, it appreciates, meaning it earns money from itself. Over time, you can have a lot more than you started with.
Investing can be incredibly complicated, but basically, it just means money that earns you more money over time. If you put money in a bank account, you’ve invested. The interest is money that is earning you more money. However, the other most common investment people talk about is investing in the stock market. That can mean a lot of things. When I refer to it, I typically mean investing in an index fund, which is kind of like a big basket of all the different stocks. The amazing thing about index funds is that they essentially mimic the overall economy. As the economy grows, these index funds tend to grow, too. They average about 10 percent growth per year.
“You don’t need to save as much as you think because of investing.”
It is obviously not a guarantee. There are all kinds of ups and downs. I created a chart showing the range of your possible returns. I try to demonstrate that over a long period of time (30 to 40 years) it is relatively less risky to invest in something like an index fund, and the total amount of appreciation can multiply your money by 40 times. This all culminates in a seven-point investment plan, detailed in the book.
4. Disagree with a better objective in mind.
Many people tend to shy away from disagreements because it can be unpleasant when people’s emotions flare up. I used to work with a social psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, who came up with a theory about how the mind is divided into a rider and an elephant. The rider is the rational part sitting on top of the irrational, intuitive, impulsive elephant. We tend to think that our rider is making judgments on things like morality, right and wrong. But in reality, our elephant is often making those judgements and then our rider reasons a way to justify its conclusions.
If you say something someone disagrees with, their emotions flare up, and then they using their reasoning to justify a conclusion they’ve already reached, then what is the point of a disagreement? Don’t they lead to bad outcomes? I don’t think so, because a lot of people approach disagreements the wrong way. People often try to prove they are right and smarter, and those goals are often fruitless. What if your goal from a disagreement became learning something new, like what the other person thinks? You may not walk away being convinced or having found common ground, but that’s fine. You will walk away having understood their point of view.
To learn from a disagreement, you have to lower the other person’s defenses; calm the elephant of that intuitive emotional response. That’s typically best accomplished in four steps:
- First, show that you have shared intent. “I would love to try to understand what you think and why you think it.” That suddenly puts you both on the same team. You both have the shared mission of understanding.
- Second, acknowledge their point of view. Say, “I understand where this comes from.” Hopefully it’s genuine.
- Third, repeat it back to them. Show them that you understand it by articulating their perspective.
- Fourth, share your own viewpoint. Say, “It was helpful to understand yours. Let me share mine and see what you think.”
5. Put what you learn into action.
All these skills can sound abstract, and though examples are helpful, actually putting these ideas into practice and doing what you are learning is key to mastery.
My course, Adulting 101, was famously applied. When we talked about romantic relationships, the assignment was to go out on a date. When we learned about credit cards, the assignment was to get a credit card and set up auto pay. Every chapter in my book ends with a practical assignment because putting what you are learning into action is a critical part of adulting.
To listen to the audio version read by author Raffi Grinberg, download the Next Big Idea App today:
