The first time I read The Defining Decade, I was 20 years old.
Like many people in their twenties, I picked it up hoping someone could explain adulthood to me. I was looking for answers, or at the very least, reassurance that the uncertainty I felt was normal. At that age, life feels incredibly urgent. Every decision seems like it has the power to determine the rest of your future, and every milestone feels like something you should already be achieving.
The second time I read the book, I was 28 and nearing the end of my twenties.
The book itself hadn’t changed, but I felt like I had.
The things that stood out to me were different. The questions I found myself asking were different. Instead of wondering who I might become, I was reflecting on who I had already become. I had started a business, experienced both success and failure, built relationships that mattered, and watched plans change in ways I never could have predicted when I was twenty.
Now, at 30, I find myself thinking less about the book and more about the decade that surrounded it.
As someone who studies generations and by default, life stages, for a living, that realization feels a little ironic.
Over the last several years, I’ve spent thousands of hours interviewing people about their experiences at work and in life. I’ve spoken with employees entering the workforce, managers navigating mid-career transitions, executives approaching retirement, and professionals who have reinvented themselves entirely in their forties, fifties, and sixties. More recently, my work has shifted beyond generations and into life stages because the two are so deeply connected.
I can explain how priorities often change from one decade to the next. I can talk about why people in different stages of life value different things. I can tell you what our research says about career development, motivation, communication, and workplace expectations.
Yet somewhere along the way, I realized something that felt a little ironic. I had spent years helping organizations understand the needs, motivations, and challenges associated with different stages of life, but I hadn’t spent much time thinking about what makes each stage valuable in the first place.
The more people I interviewed, the more I noticed a pattern. People could almost always tell me what they appreciated about a previous stage of life. They could explain what their twenties taught them, what they learned in their forties, or how their priorities shifted in retirement. What was much rarer was hearing someone talk about the value of the stage they were currently living through.
The Purpose of Uncertainty
One of the themes that consistently emerges in our research is uncertainty.
When leaders talk about employees in their twenties, uncertainty is often framed as a weakness. We assume people are indecisive, lacking direction, or still trying to figure things out. What I’ve come to believe, however, is that uncertainty serves a purpose.
The Launch Stage—the period of life when many people are establishing careers, exploring interests, building relationships, and making major life decisions—isn’t designed to provide certainty. It’s designed to provide experiences.
The people in this stage are often testing assumptions they grew up with. They are discovering what motivates them, what kind of work energizes them, what environments bring out their best, and what they value enough to build a life around. That process rarely looks linear from the inside.
In fact, one of the most interesting observations from studying life stages is that many of the experiences we later describe as pivotal felt confusing while we were living through them. Career changes, unexpected opportunities, difficult conversations, failed ideas, new relationships, and moments of self-doubt often become defining experiences only in hindsight.
Perhaps that’s why I’ve become less interested in the idea of “finding yourself” and more interested in the concept of growth. The phrase finding yourself suggests there is a finished version of who we are waiting somewhere to be discovered. Our research—and frankly, the stories people share with us every day—suggest something different.
People are continually evolving. Their priorities change. Their perspectives change. Their definitions of success change. The person someone becomes at thirty is rarely the same person they were at twenty, just as the person they become at fifty will likely be different again.
The more people I interview, the less convinced I am that there is a decade where everything suddenly clicks into place. We love creating narratives around age. Your twenties are for figuring things out. Your thirties are for building. Your forties are for confidence. Your fifties are for wisdom. However, real life rarely follows those timelines.
I’ve met people who found clarity at twenty-two and people who found it at sixty-two. I’ve met professionals who started entirely new careers long after others thought they should. I’ve met leaders who became more confident with age and others who became more curious.
As I’m sure you can imagine, the story is never as neat as we want it to be.
What If Every Decade Is for Learning?
A few months ago, my husband told me about one of his financial advising clients, and the story has stayed with me. The client has a tradition of choosing an entirely new skill to learn every decade. One decade it might be a language. Another decade it might be a musical instrument, a sport, or something completely outside her comfort zone. What stayed with me wasn’t the tradition itself. It was the way she viewed age. At 90, she’s experienced many decades of learning new skills, looking at life through that continuous learning lens.
Most people talk about getting older in terms of what they are gaining or losing. This client seemed genuinely excited about what each new decade might teach her. Rather than looking backward, she approached every stage of life with curiosity about what was still ahead.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized how unusual that mindset has become.
For a society that spends so much time talking about generations, we have a surprisingly complicated relationship with age. We celebrate youth (while at the same time, we rebel against it in the workplace), admire experience, and simultaneously fear getting older. Ageism shows up everywhere—from workplaces to media to the conversations we have with ourselves.
Sometimes it is subtle. Sometimes it is obvious. But it often leaves us treating age as something to resist rather than something to appreciate. The irony is that the people I admire most rarely seem concerned with whether they’re in the “right” decade of life.
They’re too busy learning, growing, and becoming.
Every Stage Gives Us Something Different
The more I think about it, the more convinced I become that every stage of life offers something the previous one couldn’t.
The uncertainty of your twenties creates room for exploration. The confidence that often comes later is built on experiences you couldn’t have accumulated any other way. The perspective that comes with age isn’t something you can borrow from someone else; it has to be earned through time, mistakes, successes, disappointments, and growth.
Every decade gives us something different, which is precisely why comparing them misses the point.
There was beauty in the uncertainty of my twenties because uncertainty created room for possibility. There was beauty in not having all the answers because it forced me to ask better questions. There was beauty in the mistakes because they became the foundation for experiences I couldn’t have gained any other way.
Looking back, I don’t think my twenties were valuable because they were productive or successful alone. I think they were valuable because they were formative…and they were the first decade that truly belonged to me.
And now, after spending years studying generations and life stages, I finally understand something I wish I had appreciated sooner: every decade feels significant when you’re looking back at it, but very few people realize how meaningful it is while they’re living it.
What This Means for Leaders
As leaders, it can be easy to judge a stage we’ve already lived through. We forget what it felt like to be new, uncertain, ambitious, overwhelmed, or eager to prove ourselves. We forget that many of the lessons we now take for granted were learned through experience rather than instruction.
Perhaps that’s why understanding life stages matters so much. Not because it helps us categorize people, but because it helps us develop empathy for experiences we may no longer remember—or haven’t experienced yet.
After spending years studying generations and life stages, I find myself returning to a much simpler idea: every generation has something to teach us, and every stage of life has something to offer.
Every decade feels significant when you’re looking back at it, but very few people realize how meaningful it is while they’re living it.
Maybe that’s the challenge—not just for individuals, but for leaders as well. To recognize the value of a stage before it becomes a memory.
— Kamber Parker Bowden, Founder & CEO, Generational Performance Solutions
