I’ve been emailing back and forth with a few students who showed up to a talk I did the other day on the practical steps they can take to build social capital and launch an enterprise. Some common themes:
> Lots of the students expressed to me a desire to learn, just not a desire to take tests.
> School generally is seen as an impediment to learning things that actually matter to them (especially true of the 16-18 year-old demographic). “I used to fight against all the testing and required classes, not I just give into it. It’s exhausting,” one student wrote to me.
> Lots like the idea of “business” but have little idea what that means — even the really smart, experienced students. Most of them have never been exposed to “business” outside of a suit-and-tie context. They see suits and ties and accountants on one end of the spectrum and technology and t’s and hoodies on the other end of the spectrum. The reality is different — business is everything that *isn’t* school or government. But can you blame them for not really knowing that? They’ve spent the last 12 years spending 8 hours every day in a place totally removed from the marketplace.
> Despite the increasing amount of schooling and the way it crowds out opportunities for young people to engage in the market, there are still lots of promising young people out there. I met one young man who has a patent for a product that IBM had been trying to get to market for years and has successfully raised over $200K at a $2M+ valuation to grow his company. He’s 16. I met a lot of others who have the potential to do that, but just haven’t taken the leap yet.
The message I left them with — one my friend Isaac has taught me to use — was that it’s better to ask yourself, “Why not do these things?” instead of “Why?”