7 Things You Need to Do to Be a Functional Adult
It’s time to make your damn bed.
Kelly Williams Brown is the New York Times best-selling author of Adulting: How to Become a Grown-Up in 468 Easy(ish) Steps, which addresses everything from finding a non-awful apartment to negotiating for a raise at work. Her second book, Gracious: A Practical Primer on the Subtle Art of Charm, Tact & Unsinkable Strength, came out on April 4. Spoiler alert: Manners are not dead, and we can and should have them.
Her work has appeared on or in The New York Times, the TODAY Show, Cosmopolitan, Vogue, Esquire, The Boston Globe, Fast Company and many more, and has been translated into nine languages. The Washington Post called her “a Millennial advice-guru,” and her TEDx Talk, “I'm a Millennial, and I am a Monster” was a TED.comeditor’s pick of the week. She’s also spoken at NASA, universities across the country and was invited to the White House to facilitate a conversation about student loans with President Obama in partnership with Tumblr.
She has also worked as a long-form features writer, a humor columnist for The Daily Beast, a cocktail waitress on Bourbon Street, and for several years covered rural Mississippi for a daily newspaper, which has left her with a lifetime supply of ridiculous anecdotes to tell at cocktail parties.
It’s time to make your damn bed.