Everything Will Be Okay

CHAPTER 1

What Are We Doing Here?

The hardest part of any workout is the first step out the door—but if you make it to the gym, you’re always glad you did.

It’s the same with opening a book of advice.

So, congratulations! You made it to page 1.

I promise this will be worth your time (and you won’t have to break a sweat!).

Ever since the spring of 2015 when I wrote And the Good News Is… Lessons and Advice from the Bright Side, the mentoring chapter is the one I am most often asked about when talking with young women.

I still get emails about my suggestion to stop wearing UGGs to work (and other tips for professional attire), that young women shouldn’t shuffle around the office, seeming to be barely interested in their work. (Pick up your feet!)

I’m often credited for helping readers break the habit of overusing exclamation points(!!!)—doing so causes unnecessary panic and doesn’t present an “I can handle this” image.

The advice on bigger-picture issues helped my readers, too—such as, not being afraid to move to a new town for work or other opportunities. And that choosing to be loved is not a career-limiting decision (and sometimes you should move for love… but maybe not after one date).

Oh, and this one was memorable, too: Find your strong voice—and then use it wisely.

I’m grateful that my advice has apparently been helpful to quite a few people. That mentoring chapter packed a punch. And it was just a slice of the conversations I’ve had with and stories I’ve heard from so many young women who I’ve tried to help during the first phase of their careers.

Those early years are when you get your first job and love going to work every day. Then suddenly you grow out of that first position and can’t wait to get on to your next role.

That’s also when you’re trying to decide what direction to go in and whether you even want to be in a particular industry or follow a certain profession. You may start questioning your choices from college—what you majored in may have been interesting but it may not have been a good choice for helping you reach your financial goals (yes, Dad, I know—I should have taken more business courses!).

Those early career days are when you start asking yourself, When should I leave a job? How do I move on without burning a bridge? How can the next move get me closer to achieving long-term goals?

You might notice that young men your age seem to get promoted sooner than young women—you think that’s unfair but are unsure how to deal with it (trust me—taking up smoking cigars, going out for beers, or buying expensive golf clubs to try to fit in with them is not the answer).

The first few years can be exciting and fun, while also being confusing and difficult. Hey, they call it work for a reason.

And soon enough, you’re making the transition from your first job to your second or third job. That’s when—hopefully—everything starts falling into place. But that’s also when the decisions you make begin to carry a lot more weight. The stakes are raised.

In your mid to late twenties, you gain more responsibility and you work much longer hours. It’s also when you’re trying to be taken more seriously and you may have to fight to be in the room for important meetings. You’re not the boss yet—but you’re also not a junior staffer anymore. You’re expected to get results and earn your keep. The pressure builds.

And all of this is going on while you’re trying to have an enjoyable personal life as well. You might be getting pressure from family or friends for working too much. You’re wondering when you’re going to meet a stable, responsible, goal-oriented, and attractive life partner who makes you laugh like crazy. You want to get a dog (but don’t do it yet!). You want it all—and quickly. But you realize it is not happening as you imagined it would.

Your thoughts race. I’m even typing faster now.

How do I know what you’re thinking?

Because not so long ago, I was you. I went through all of this. I made mistakes along the way—many, in fact. I wish I had this book when I was first starting out.

That said, everything turned out well. (I even got the dog.)

And here’s what I want you to know. You’re not alone in thinking or feeling the way you do. There are millions of young women in your age group that are trying to figure it out. Sometimes knowing that you aren’t the only one with these worries can help. No—you’re not crazy.

And I’m here to tell you there are ways to push through this period and come out happier and more fulfilled on the other side. There is no magic formula—if it were that simple, everyone would know what to do. But there are some basic—and important—things every young woman facing these decisions should know.

So why learn the hard way? As the book’s subtitle says, I’m a former young woman myself. I’ve already made the mistakes. I’ve been through it.

Let me tell you what I learned:

I’ve always found career decision making fascinating, and I have an open door for young professionals who come to me for advice. (Guys come see me, too! A lot of this advice applies to everyone.) I try to help them feel better when they’re leaving my office than when they entered. It almost always works.

But over the last couple of years, I’ve noticed something that’s really started to bother me: the quarter-life crisis (that’s age twenty-five or so) that I wrote about in 2015 is following young women well into their thirties and beyond.

This is how it usually goes: You’ve moved up from your first job, but you’re not quite at the level you think you should be in terms of stature or compensation. You feel like you’ve done everything right. Your reviews from your supervisors are solid. You’ve brought a few good projects over the finish line. You don’t wear UGGs to meetings or file your nails in the lunchroom. You’re ready for your next step, but there’s no position available that fits the moment.

You’re facing an achievement gap—jobs you’d like to have require five to seven years of experience and you only have four. As a result, your résumé gets shuffled to the bottom of the pile. Your CV has the boss’s coffee rings on it. It’s sitting on her desk under three years of J.McLaughlin catalogues.

Meantime, you thought you’d have a house or family by now. Finding a life partner and having children feels very far off or even unreachable. Instead of feeling like you have momentum, you feel stuck. The most interesting thing in your life is a new Netflix series about some nut who lives with tigers. Nothing is turning out the way that you imagined it would. Dashed dreams fuel anxiety. Deep breaths and restful nights are harder to come by. While you try to maintain a positive attitude, you feel the pressure of time. Ticktock, ticktock.

Every day, the calendar reminds you that you’re behind where you want to be or in comparison to your friends and peers (who, by the way, are having similar thoughts no matter what they say). You want to make a change, to be considered someone capable of doing more at the office, someone who would make a wonderful boss, a terrific wife, an amazing mother, and maybe even run for office one day. Or at least run an office one day. But everything feels on hold.

My concern: the temporary crisis threatens to settle into a way of life. And I’m alarmed you are so consumed by your worries that it’s coming across as a lack of confidence and preventing you from living a joyful life. You want to pull the rip cord on your angst, but you’re afraid that if you stop worrying, you won’t achieve your goals. With this pattern, you’ll never break out of the negative cycle.

Here’s some good news: it doesn’t have to be this way. This is a problem that can be solved. There are things you can do to break out of quarter-life-crisis mode.

There has never been a better time to be a young, educated woman in America. Being born in the United States means you’ve already won the lottery of life.

Let me tell you a story about how important and valuable your education is.

Several years ago, a friend of mine married a great guy: handsome, mature, funny—and an actual nuclear physicist! They wanted to try to adopt a child. Soon after the wedding, they signed up with an adoption agency, prayed that a baby would become a part of their lives, and waited for a call.

A few years went by and the phone didn’t ring too much. They started to think it might not happen.

But before they lost hope, they tried one other adoption agency.

Fast-forward a few weeks. I’d called her to ask if she could participate in a mentoring event I was going to co-host in DC. She sounded rushed on the phone.

“I’d love to, but I’m frantically buying plane tickets to Florida. We’ve been chosen to adopt a baby. The mother is in labor, so we have to hurry,” she said.

Hang up. Pack. Run to the airport. Fly. Experience a miracle. Become a mother.

Blessings abounded. The baby girl was healthy and the adoption was going smoothly. Still, the biological parents had ten days to change their minds and keep their child.

But they didn’t. Instead, they suggested the two couples have dinner before they said good-bye. My friend’s parents, who lived in Florida, volunteered to watch over their new granddaughter that evening. As they headed to the dinner, they were nervous. What would they talk about? How would it go? Would it be okay? They weren’t sure they could fully express their gratitude.

Over the meal, my friend’s husband asked the biological father, “What made you choose us?”

The answer: education.

The father said he watched the video my friends had made for the adoption agency a few times. In it, they showed their home, the neighborhood parks, and their favorite place to walk on Saturdays to get fresh fruit, vegetables, and flowers. Lots of the videos from other prospective parents were similar.

But there was something in their video that stood out from the others he’d seen.

Toward the end of it, my friend’s husband said into the camera, “And we will do everything we can to send her to college.”

And that was it.

“I realized that I could never send her to college. And that will make such a difference for her,” he said.

College—think about what that meant to them and what they were willing to do to ensure their daughter could get the education she needed to succeed in life.

Now, I’m not saying everyone needs to go to college; there are lots of different paths for people to take in life—that’s true. And many of today’s collegiate paths lead to some pretty, um, odd places. (Try avoiding a major in Bigfoot studies.) But everyone needs to be educated in order to succeed. And by far, college attendance correlates to increased opportunity and more wealth accumulated over a lifetime.

Consider this—according to Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, someone earning a bachelor’s degree will be worth more than $2.8 million on average over a lifetime. And they’ll earn 31 percent more than people who get an associate degree, and 84 percent more than people graduating from high school with no additional education. This is why so many parents want their children to go to college. (That doesn’t mean it has to be Ivy League—hey, look at me… no Ivy here! Only go to an Ivy League school if you can afford it and want to major in comedy writing. Their sports teams will give you all the material you need. My colleague Greg Gutfeld did this, but they made him the mascot. That’s where he got those sweaters he wears on The Five.)

In the chapters ahead, you’ll find practical advice that you can immediately use to improve your day-to-day work experience. I’ll give you some tips taken from my own time as a young staffer to my time now as an observer of younger people, lurking in windows and storefronts as I do on the occasional windswept evening.

Think of me as your manager and your mentor, representative of the Generation X bosses out there. In time, you’ll be the top dog, but until then, these pointers can immediately help you at work.

We’ll also tackle how to answer some of the biggest questions you have, providing new ways to look at your career and your life. (Trust me—you’re not the first person who wondered if leaving a sushi roll in her cubicle desk drawer for two weeks could be career ending. I assure you it could.)

And we’ll talk about relationships and the important things you can do to build upon love and commitment—and finding someone to share all of it with—because in a few years (or right this minute!) you’ll very much want that. Especially after a couple of Aperol Spritzes and a Ryan Gosling double feature.

I don’t have all the answers, but here’s some good news: you already have the solutions to the problems you’re trying to solve. You already have everything you need. It’s all inside of you, waiting to be tapped. All I’m going to do is help you turn on the spigot. And yeah, that’s a gross metaphor. But who cares? We’ll be going through it together.

You’ve got this.