As a psychologist, what strikes me isn’t the ambition itself, it’s the anxiety that increasingly seems to accompany it.
By the age of 28, today’s young adults can apparently be running media companies, building million-dollar start-ups or becoming the next social media sensation. Somehow we’ve come to believe that if you haven’t made it by 30, you’re already behind.
The appointment of 28-year-old Luca Lavigne as chief executive of Mamamia has sparked plenty of discussion. Some have applauded the promotion of young talent. Others have questioned the role of family connections. In that regard, when it’s your mother’s name on the branding of a privately owned company, who cares?
I’m less interested in whether a 28-year-old can run a company. Clearly they can. Every generation produces exceptional young leaders. What fascinates me is how quickly we’ve accepted the idea that this is what your twenties are supposed to look like.
Part of the answer lies in the way attention works. Investors are always looking for the next disruptor. Journalists can’t resist an unusual success story. Algorithms reward whatever stops us scrolling. Put those forces together, and a 28-year-old chief executive becomes far more interesting than a perfectly competent 48-year-old one.
Once upon a time, your twenties were for trying things on. Careers. Relationships. Cities. Sometimes all three at once. You were expected to change your mind, and in fact, it would have been strange if you didn’t.
Developmental psychologist Jeffrey Arnett described this stage as “emerging adulthood” – a period marked by exploration, instability and experimentation before the responsibilities of settled adult life take hold. It’s a time for working out not just what you want to do, but who you want to become.
“Gen Z adults aren’t usually distressed because they’re failing. They’re distressed because they think they’re behind.”
Yet, we seem to have lost our patience with growing up, and social media has only accelerated the trend. Every day brings another founder who sold a business before 30, another twenty-something executive running a company, another influencer turning a personal brand into a fortune. These stories are compelling precisely because they are rare. The problem is that constant exposure makes the exceptional start to feel ordinary.
Humans have always looked sideways to work out how they’re going. We compare ourselves with the people around us, it’s just what social creatures do. The trouble is that “around us” no longer means the neighbour who got promoted or the friend from university who bought a house. It now means the most successful 27-year-old on the internet, wherever they happen to live.
When that’s your reference point, ordinary progress can feel like failure.
As a psychologist, what strikes me isn’t the ambition itself; it’s the anxiety that increasingly seems to accompany it. Gen Z adults aren’t usually distressed because they’re failing. They’re distressed because they think they’re behind. Someone else has already made partner, launched a business or seems to have life neatly sorted out. Or so it appears.
Of course, intellectually they know that they’re comparing themselves with outliers detached from reality. But emotionally, that distinction often disappears.
The irony is that while we’ve accelerated our expectations of professional success, many of the milestones of adulthood have moved in the opposite direction. Australians are buying homes later than previous generations, marrying later, having children later and relying on parental support for longer as housing costs and economic realities reshape the path to independence.
It’s a confusing time to be in your twenties. You’re expected to build a career, cultivate a personal brand and demonstrate leadership potential before thirty. Yet, it’s become perfectly ordinary to be renting, living with your parents or still wondering what kind of life you actually want. Apparently, adulthood now has two different timetables.
Young professionals are increasingly expected to arrive ready-made, and employers want graduates with experience that previous generations acquired on the job. LinkedIn profiles are polished before careers have properly begun and, in many industries, AI is only adding to the pressure by making entry-level work even easier to automate.
None of these developments is unreasonable in isolation because employers want capable people and young professionals want to stand out in an increasingly competitive market. But I do wonder if we have become impatient with apprenticeship.
Not apprenticeships in the traditional sense, but the long apprenticeship that every profession demands. The years spent observing experienced colleagues, making mistakes, recovering from them and gradually developing judgment. Leadership has always been learned this way, as has judgment and wisdom.
These qualities are difficult to accelerate because they are built through experience rather than instruction.
We may have started treating development as though it were a productivity problem to solve – celebrating speed and optimising pathways. Yet, the qualities we most admire in leaders – judgment, humility, emotional maturity and perspective – rarely emerge from an uninterrupted run of early success. More often they are forged through difficult conversations, failed projects, disappointing decisions and the humility that comes from discovering you don’t know as much as you thought you did.
Every generation produces remarkable young leaders. And Luca Lavigne may well prove to be one of them. But remarkable people are, by definition, rare. The rest of Gen Z shouldn’t conclude they’ve somehow missed their chance because they weren’t running the company before thirty.
Talent often appears early, but experience and judgment almost never do.
