Author Raffi Grinberg Shares 3 of the 14 Skills You Didn’t Know You Needed Until Just Now (Exclusive)

Congratulations! You may have just finished college, or high school, or moved out of your parents’ house and you are beginning your life as an adult. And you’re beginning to realize that the vast majority of what you learned in high school and college has no practical relevance to your life.

Even worse: There are many things you do need to know about adult life, and none of them were taught to you.

I was in your shoes. Upon graduating college, I was beginning a job that I wasn’t sure I wanted. I still didn’t know what my career should be, and my degree in theoretical math wasn’t going to help. I didn’t know how to get health insurance, I didn’t have a credit card and I wasn’t saving for retirement (I didn’t know that was even a thing). I was in a happy relationship but unsure of when I wanted to get married, let alone have kids. I didn’t really know how to be a good partner. I didn’t know how to maintain a good relationship with my parents now that our parent-child dynamic had changed. And now that I wasn’t chasing grades, I didn’t know what the goal was anymore. I didn’t know how to be happy.

None of these topics are covered in K-12 or college courses. We’re expected to magically know them. One common misconception is, “You can’t teach these things. They must be learned through experience.” I disagree. We don’t hand car keys to a 16-year-old and say, “Go get into a couple accidents, that will teach you how to drive.” We teach Driver’s Ed preemptively. Similarly, we shouldn’t expect adults to have a wreck of a relationship before learning how to love; or to get audited by the IRS before learning to pay their taxes; or to die with regret before learning how to lead a fulfilling life.

So, I created and taught the course Adulting 101 at Boston College (always oversubscribed), and wrote the book How to Be a Grown Up: The 14 Essential Skills You Didn’t Know You Needed Until Just Now.

Here are three of the skills I wish I knew:

Invest for Retirement 

Unfortunately, if you don’t save money for retirement, you likely won’t have enough to live on when the time comes. Fortunately, you don’t need to save as much as you think, because of the magic of investing (investing money = saving money in a way that will earn you more money over time).

Over the long term, like a 30-year career, an index fund like the S&P 500 is likely to earn 9-10% per year on average.

Communicate Assertively

Assertive doesn’t mean aggressive. You have the right to state your opinions and your needs — and others have the right to say no to them.

Assertive communicators often feel the most in-control of their lives, because they are comfortable advocating for themselves and they recognize they cannot control others. By contrast, passive, aggressive and passive-aggressive communicators often believe they can determine other people’s behavior, and either attempt to do so (aggressive) or give up on doing so and feel powerless (passive).

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Network by Being Curious 

Networking just means finding people who have awesome-seeming careers and talking to them. Find out: Is their job actually awesome? How did they get there? Then, you can ask: Who are two other people you think I should talk to?

In order to make the conversation happen in the first place, reach out in a way that makes them want to respond: “In just 15 minutes of your time, I think you can have a big impact on me.” And of course, the shorter the message, the better.

As you get older, you have more freedom but also more responsibility. As a kid, you could drift along, but as an adult, if you aren’t careful, you’ll let your life be determined by things your parents previously said, or your boss’s expectations or your peers’ opinions. You are the one who controls your fate. You are no longer living your life by accident; you are living life on purpose.

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Raffi Grinberg is a business leader, author, and educator based in Washington, D.C. He is the  Executive Director of Dialog and the co-founder of The Constructive Dialogue Institute (with Jonathan Haidt), both multimillion-dollar education organizations that bring people together for conversation. He created and taught the popular Adulting 101 course at Boston College, and is the author of  How to Be a Grown Up: The 14 Essential Skills You Didn’t Know You Needed Until Just Now, available everywhere books are sold.