The ultimate guide to survive your 20s

When writing this article, I tried to put myself in the mindset of my 20-year-old self.

After a summer in Asia, I returned to Amsterdam to begin my biomedical science degree. During that trip, in a random hostel in Bali, I met a guy I had known for only two days before he flew back home to Geneva—and who has now been my partner for nine years and counting.

So, a whole new decade began with a romance with this blue-eyed, tanned, blonde dude and continued in movie-like vibes for the next seven years of a long-distance relationship*.

My 20s looked kind of promising.

And I think that's the problem—we expect our 20s to be like a never-ending movie scene filled with hot dates, amazing friends, and out-of-this-world adventures while everything falls into place effortlessly, just as we imagined.

But I assure you, nothing else about my 20s looked like a movie (except that one time when Marc and I broke up on Christmas Eve at exactly the same time my stepdad and mum got engaged in a neighbouring room—this also felt like a movie but probably not the kind we're talking about here).

So, beyond the romance, what else was on my mind in my 20s?

To name just a few things:

Feeling overwhelmed by everything I could and should be working on.
Struggling with mental health.
Discovering what I wanted to do with my life.
Making friends while dealing with loneliness.
Building habits and being consistent.
Learning how to look after myself.

I could easily share personal insights on all of those things (and more), which would probably give you a temporary motivation boost and make you feel understood.

But chances are that these insights and tips, although comforting, wouldn't necessarily translate into something practical you could apply in your own situation.

So, instead, I would like to share a roadmap you can follow to plan your own journey for surviving (and maybe even thriving) in your 20s.

It's a blueprint I wish I had a decade ago.

I hope that it will help you:

Reduce overwhelm by breaking down your 20s into manageable phases, where you focus on one or two things at a time rather than juggle everything at once.
Prioritise areas that require your attention first.
Make real progress quickly by methodically testing different solutions to your biggest challenges.

Before we get into it, let me just say that although it might seem like I have it all figured out, I really don't.

I went through this process myself just a few days ago because I felt overwhelmed and needed some clarity.

What follows is a process that helps me in these situations, but don't be fooled by thinking this is a one-and-done kind of thing. It's a process of trial and error that will likely continue well beyond your 20s. It's a tool you could hopefully fall back on when needed, just like I do.

Ok, I think this was enough of an intro. Let's get into it.

Step 1: Choose your focus

First, it's helpful to choose your focus for the next eight to twelve weeks.

It will help you gain clarity on what to prioritise, feel less overwhelmed, and actually make visible progress. Otherwise, you risk being split in all directions, following a diluted approach, and soon burning out because you're juggling way too much at once.

When choosing your focus, I think it's helpful to start high level and gradually narrow down, so I encourage you to first reflect broadly on the four main areas of life (feel free to add/remove areas as you see fit):

Career
Relationships & Social Life
Health & Well-being
Education & Personal Growth

... and evaluate them across three dimensions:

Satisfaction: On a scale from 1-10, how satisfied are you with each area?
Urgency: Is there a crisis area that needs immediate action?
Impact: If improved, which area would create ripples across other areas and have the biggest positive impact on your life?

To do this, you can either:

1) Do it by hand:

Rate each area (1–10) for satisfaction, urgency, and impact.
Add up the urgency and impact scores for each area.
Your main focus should be the area with the highest combined urgency and impact score and the lowest satisfaction score.

2) Take my free quiz, which will:

Give you a personalised report showing you which area needs your attention the most.
Give you practical tips and next steps to progress in that area.

You can find the quiz here.

Here's an illustration of an example results page, so that you know what you'd get out of it:

Whichever route you decide to take, by the end of this exercise, you should have chosen one area to focus on for the next few weeks.

Step 2: Define the biggest issues

Defining the area of focus is not enough, though - you haven't narrowed it down sufficiently and are still at risk of boiling the ocean.

To illustrate my point, imagine a company struggling to make a profit.

It has three main product lines: dietary supplements, foods, and drinks.

If the company doesn’t first determine which product line is causing the most problems and instead tries to fix all three at once, it will waste time and resources on things that work perfectly fine instead of taking action on what would actually make a difference.

For example, it might find that dietary supplements and foods generate a healthy profit, but drinks are dragging the company down.

With this knowledge, it is logical for this company to laser-focus on the one thing that will truly move the needle (e.g., finding out why drinks bring low profits) and ignore the well-performing areas.

And exactly the same is the case with the life area you have selected as your priority.

For example, if health is your next priority, there are many things you could focus on — nutrition, working out regularly, fatigue, gut health and more.

But if you’re always tired, for example, and your fatigue affects your ability to focus in class, meet friends, or work on side projects, starting a new fitness routine may not be the best choice. Clearly, there’s something more pressing that could have a bigger impact on your day-to-day life.

The point:

You should focus on the things that have the biggest impact on you right now and the potential to improve your days and create positive changes in other areas of your life.

To do this, start by listing all the issues related to the priority area you chose in the previous step. Then, pick one or two that are seriously affecting your daily life and focus on addressing those first.

Step 3: List potential reasons + create a hypothesis

A hypothesis may be simply defined as a guess. A scientific hypothesis is an intelligent guess — Isaac Asimov.

Next, you'll make intelligent guesses about why this issue is happening—not exactly a scientific process, but one that will help us understand what may be standing between the problem and the solution.

How?

A hypothesis will allow you to explore potential reasons and lead you to new areas you have not considered previously. A hypothesis is like an intelligent starting point that often leads to a more complete understanding or a solution.

To build your hypothesis, you first need to list all potential reasons as to why you might be having the issue you identified in Step 2.

Let's build on our example from the previous section — often feeling tired.

What could be the reasons for feeling tired (side note: this is for illustrative purposes only):

Not eating well
Not sleeping enough
Not moving your body regularly
Rarely engaging in something that truly excites you
Medical conditions
Overthinking
A big life change
And so on.

Once you have a list of potential reasons, assign numerical values from 1 to 10 for two variables to each potential reason: the likelihood of impact on the problem and your level of satisfaction with the current situation.

For example, you might rate nutrition as an 8 for its likelihood of impact on feeling tired because how much and what we eat might affect our energy levels.

Also, let's assume that your current diet is comprised of very few nutrient-dense foods, so you rate your satisfaction with your eating habits as a 4.

After doing this for all the potential reasons you listed, your hypothesis will emerge as the potential reason with the highest likelihood of impact and lowest satisfaction level.

For example, if your eating habits score highest on the likelihood of impact and lowest on satisfaction, it would be reasonable to explore whether improving your eating habits could improve your energy levels before you move on to explore other reasons that might be less likely to affect this particular issue.

Of course, this is a quick assessment, and it might be oversimplistic for complex issues with multiple interrelated causes. However, it can be helpful if you're looking for a way to quickly gauge which potential reasons are likely contributors to your issue so that you can explore them in more detail later.

Disclaimer: This exercise is meant to guide self-reflection rather than replace professional or medical advice. If you suspect your issue is related to a medical condition, please speak to your doctor.

Step 4: Test your hypothesis

Next, we will put our hypothesis — eating better will improve my energy levels — to the test.

To illustrate how to do that, let's say we'll break it down into a project lasting 8-12 weeks.

What this might entail:

If you're completely new to the subject, first, you'll need to figure out what eating better actually means. (Side note: if that's actually what you'd like to do, use reliable resources or consult a nutritionist or a dietician).

You'll also have to find recipes that fit your lifestyle (as a 20-something-year-old, I imagine they all should be easy, quick and affordable).

And finally, you'll need to learn how to incorporate healthier eating into your routine and develop some habits around it.

How might this look like in a span of a week?

For example, the plan could be as simple as follows:

There are three broader action categories, each including different tasks. For instance, under the Education category, you might include:

Read a book on healthier eating
Consult a nutritionist
Find simple, affordable recipes I can follow

Whenever it's time to focus on the Education category, complete one of the tasks you've outlined for yourself.

Throughout the 8-12 timeframe, also make sure to plan milestones you'd like to hit to make sure you complete the project in the given timeframe.

Towards the end of the project, evaluate your results. Has the problem identified in Step 2 improved? If so, that's great.

If not, and you want to keep experimenting until you find a solution, go back to the list of potential reasons from Step 3 and repeat the process with the next best guess as to why you might have a particular problem.

Bonus section

Ok, but what do you do with the other non-priority areas in the meantime?

Let’s stick with the health example.

Say you've chosen to focus on feeling more energised during the day.

Does that mean you should neglect your relationships, studies, or job?

Of course not.

Focusing on health doesn’t mean ignoring other parts of your life; it just means that the bulk of your energy, goal-setting, and active learning are directed toward health. This allows you to make tangible progress without spreading yourself too thin.

For those other areas, try to keep things steady and functional.

In relationships, this might mean spending quality time with close friends and family when your schedule allows instead of trying to deepen every single connection.

For studies, it might mean staying consistent with core tasks but avoiding joining additional sororities.

This approach helps you stay focused and ensures you’re making solid progress in one area while keeping others stable.

Once you’ve gained some momentum or improved a specific health-related area, you can then shift focus to the next area. By approaching your 20s in phases, you can give each area dedicated attention, which, over time, can result in a big improvement across many areas.

Wrapping up

And that's it - if you follow these steps, you will have created your first plan to help you survive your 20s.

By breaking things down this way, identifying the next most pressing issue to work on, and testing different solutions to your issues, you can make tangible progress in all areas of life without feeling overwhelmed, or like you're juggling too much at once.

Ideally, you would repeat this process every time you successfully improve one area and then select the next area of focus.

As a last note, to make this sustainable: of course, you don't always need to be working on something. If you feel like working on the last area has depleted your energy, take some time off, maintain what you've built and get back at it when your enthusiasm for improving another area spikes again.

That's it for this week, hope it was helpful.

*ignore the three breakups in the meantime - they ruin the story lol