How to Be a Grown Up: The 14 Essential Skills You Didn’t Know You Needed (Until Just Now)

What Color Is Your Parachute? meets I Will Teach You To Be Rich for twentysomethings. Raffi Grinberg, who created and taught the ever-oversubscribed college course "Adulting 101," offers a practical guide to adult life's greatest mysteries that were never taught in school, including how to launch your career, find your purpose (for right now), invest your money, and much more.

Though twenty- and thirty-somethings are better educated than ever before, essentially none of the topics critical to being a full-fledged adult—such as how to get a new job, create a budget, file your taxes, face rejection, and navigate family dynamics—are covered in lower or higher education. Fortunately, here is a book that does just that.

From entrepreneur Raffi Grinberg, who lived and learned the hard way throughout his twenties, here is a crash course in everything you need to know to be a grown up. Based on his wildly popular "Adulting 101" course at Boston College, Grinberg firmly steers you through the basics of being a grown up using interactive chapters, bite-size nuggets of wisdom, humor, and stories from his twenties, including nearly going broke, having bad credit, disappointing his parents, and much more. As Raffi tells his students, "I want you to have a quarter-life crisis now so that you won't have a mid-life crisis later."

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Release date

Audiobook: March 25, 2025