August 25, 2014
Dear Danny,
Here’s the attention grabber:
The world has become hard to understand.
What you needed to do growing up in the past, to be successful in your life, has changed. It has changed so much since I was a teenager that getting prepared for life has become probably the greatest crisis that young people face today.
The rules have changed. If you do not know the rules you may end up being very unhappy in your life.
OK. Let’s start from the end.
Picture your life like a pyramid. At the top of the pyramid is your picture of your future life. For some young people – probably not most – the picture is clear. You think you know what you want to do. You have chosen a vocation. For example, you want to be a doctor, a trial lawyer, or a missionary in Africa. You want to be a singer, an artist, or a famous writer. You want to build a company or lead a big organization. You want to be a General in the military.
For most kids the picture is not so clear and they imagine more general goals. They hope they’ll be doing what they want to do. They may want to have a family. If they have a family, they want to be able to give certain things to their family: a home, safety, opportunities, fun, and the skills to be good citizens.
Most young people understand that what they really want is to be able to choose for them. They want the right of choice. This sits at the top of the pyramid. You want to do the choosing. Not someone else. You don’t want someone making the choices for you. You want to be in full control of your life. (By the way, your Country, The United States of America, is one of the few places where you are actually encouraged to pursue this right.)
OK. I get that. I know what you want. Then the big question is how do you get yourself into a position where you get to choose?
In the simplest way I can put it, the answer is this: you will need to give something to someone – knowledge – and in exchange that someone will give you the right to choose.
Who is the someone? It may be a person. But, in most cases it probably will be some kind of a formal organization, such as a business, a school, a hospital, a government, a performing arts group, or thousands of other businesses and entities that exist to perform certain functions for society – functions that people need or want.
If you give them something of value they will give you something back. Usually they will give you money. You trade your skills for their money. You don’t get a job. You make a trade. You do not have a right to a job. They do not have a right to your services.
Money starts you on the road to what you want. (Money alone is not the key to happiness. But it is a necessary requirement.)
Now things start to get challenging. What can you give these people led organizations that has value?
Let’s stop. Why should a teenager need to think about this very adult question?
This is the answer: because teens are going to make choices that may seriously affect their ability to have the right of choice fifteen years later. So it isn’t going to do much good to tell you these secrets when you are twenty-five years old. You need to know the secret now. And that isn’t fair. But, this is the world you live in.
So, let’s go back to the question. What must you have, that you can trade with someone that has concrete value? It used to be that it was enough if you just presented yourself, that is, if you were a good person, were willing to work very hard, be honest, be nice to other people, and were relatively smart. This simply is not true any longer. Those values are all critical and we have discussed them in previous letters; but they are not enough.
Now you actually need to bring knowledge about specific subjects into the trade. Or, you need to have learned how to think and how to solve problems, which oftentimes is even more important than specific knowledge because the world is constantly changing.
Most kids don’t know what they want to do when they are teens. In these cases, the kid needs to pursue more general education and take on educational goals that teach a person how to think and how to figure out problems.
Fifty years ago you could end your formal education in high school and still bring value to an organization. Today, this is not true. High school alone doesn’t prepare you to bring enough value to future employers. Twenty-five years ago it was already clear that you needed to at least go to college. But even that is becoming too general. Now the notion is that you actually need to have learned something in college, not just shown up.
The simple reality seems to be that your generation must be a people committed to continuous learning. The tools exist. The Internet, which has always existed for you, makes it very easy to get smart. This means that other kids who want what you want are able to make themselves smarter and smarter, smart enough to take your opportunity/job from you. Your only defense is to make yourself smarter and smarter, throughout your life.
The good news is that I am telling you the secret. I am telling you that you need to make yourself smart. I am telling you that you need to develop real skills that are desired by other people. Hopefully, you can also build skills that meet these requirements in a subject about which you are passionate.
You might start to build these skills at a traditional college or university. You might build your skills at a performing arts center or under the guidance of a revered teacher. You might integrate on-line learning with traditional classroom teaching, or learn altogether on-line. I think that on line instruction is going to be of critical importance. You might go to a professional school and learn to be a nurse. You might develop special skills in an apprentice type structure; skills that are always needed to fix and repair household functions, but which untrained people can no longer do. You might learn how to write computer software or how to develop electronics equipment.
The secret is that if you commit to continuous education, if you are regularly upgrading your skills, making yourself smarter, taking every opportunity to learn, making sure that your knowledge and skills bring direct value to someone who is going to be willing to pay for them; you will then have a great opportunity to win the right to choose, to win the right to manage your life, to win the right to grow your value and hence your compensation. Without those skills, unfortunately, you will lose.
So, do you want the right of choice? Do you really want it? Are you prepared to do what you must to win the right of choice?
The secret is that there is no option but to be committed to continuous learning. It wasn’t always like that. It is now.
So:
- Stay in school
- Learn when in school
- Make achievement in school a personal need
- Make yourself curious
- Search out tools for learning new things
- Never think you know enough
- Never get complacent
- Graduate
- Get certified
