I am so unbelievably happy at the moment. Last Thursday, I came home after having dinner with my two best friends and started to cry out of joy while hanging up my laundry. Aaaaaand of course, a new significant other is involved in my current emotions.
It was so overwhelming for me to feel so appreciative about how my life is going at the moment. Well, I just hope that you are going through a similar experience or have it right in front of you and you just need to extend a bit more work into it.
But let's head into this week's topic. Unfortunately, respectively fortunately, I have a lot of private commitments I need to fulfill at the moment, which means I was not able to complete Part 3 of my Epic about the annual reflection. But I will finish it within next week!
Let's head into this week's thoughts.
The Education of young Adults
Currently, my cousin is conducting an "internship" with me. It is challenging to put myself into the shoes of a 17 year old teenager who thinks he has a lot of better things to do than to sit next to me in Hamburg.
I mean, it was his decision. He could have gone to school; instead, he could have done the internship somewhere else. Still, it is hard to fight the fact that he could alternatively sit in front of his television, playing Playstation, watching Netflix or listen to music with friends.
Deconstructing Motivation
First things first: We have a great relationship. He respects me, calls me one of his idols. I try to pay it back by spending time with him when I can, listening to him when he faces situations I know from my past and which he might not like to share with his parents. We all get that one, right?
The issue with having an idol is that you don't see what they went through, how much they worked on themselves, and what the journey was really looking like. You just get to the end result. In addition, we are also not really 100% honest about our paths because looking at it from the current point of view, I would bet that most of us are romanticizing our journey.
When I think about what I went through, what I sacrificed to get where I am nowadays... not sure if I recommend it to everyone. If I had known that I would be here one day, sure, I would tell you to "follow your passion" and blablabla. The thing is: You don't.
Taking my example of getting self-employed, founding my first company when I was 23, I made the decision intuitively, thinking that being a founder is part of my DNA or persona. But two years later, earning 2.000€ brutto per month, I felt of such low value, only pushing through because I believed that there was no way back, I had "burned all the boats".
It was not cool, I did not feel good, I had no way forward that soon everything would be turned around. That is not for everybody. And that's OK.
How I might be able to inspire him
Coming back to his internship: Knowing all that, I realized that it is not on me to make this decision for him, giving him advice on following the path of self-employment, entrepreneurship or handcrafting. My job is to show him how important it is to reflect on yourself, meeting people of different backgrounds with different motivations and deconstruct things into pieces which are digestible to him.
Basically, it means that I need to show him how different the world is from what he learns & experiences in school in a small city (Lüneburg) in Germany.
Instead of believing that other people force you to learn something which is neither of interest nor of use to you, he needs to neutrally observe the content and ask himself what the main points are, what (or even if) he takes something away from it and finally break down how this can/could be of use to him on his journey.
Instead of learning an answer to a question by heart, he should learn how to ask the right question to "save" the piece of information into a context of information which gets contextualized into knowledge.
Instead of listening to his teachers forming him into a "drone", trying to tell him that everything can be solved by "rule-based" problem solving, which means using a formula to a known situation, he needs to get into "creative" problem-solving.
"Creative" problem solving means applying different information from experience or other contexts into a new situation or to create a new formula to a known situation. It is kind of the way to find new formulas for future known situations. But in order to apply it, you need to throw yourself into the unknown. To quote Keith Ferrazzi from his amazing book "Never Eat Alone":
"The future is dynamic and not fully in your control. Celebrate that fact instead of fighting it, and life gets a lot more interesting. Keep your eyes open, be humble and generous, and save time and attention for the spontaneous, the quirky, and the left field."
Another thing I want him to understand is that the people he surrounds himself with are his destiny. I don't mean it in a cheezy way, but it is just the fact that choosing the right people around you will move you forward, hold you back, or even bring you down. It is one of the few things where a clear black/white exists:
- Either, they will open doors, inspire you to imitate certain behaviors, back you up when it is necessary, and criticize you when they believe you are leaving "your path".
- or they criticize you, shame you, push you into a circle of toxic behavior, draining you of your energy and trying to downplay your success.
Sure, the line between both sides of the same coin is very narrow. But with more life experience, you will be able to differentiate between both of them better.
Last but not least, I would like to remind him that everything he believes to be true is in the end nothing but a personal or even biased view of reality. There are so many cognitive biases which make us believe
- that the world is how we observe it,
- that people should behave the way we believe to be right,
- that people should hold the same views as we do
But it does not help you at all. I want him to be better than that, be empathic about why people believe certain things, are a certain way and do stupid shit. In the end, this is the only way to prevent going down the same path and connecting with those people.
Summarizing what is missing in school
Although it might be complicated to teach these topics in school, I wholeheartedly believe that these things ought to be taught in school:
- Taking decisions is key in life. And it is mostly not the big decisions that you make at irregular intervals, but the small ones you make everyday which make the difference.
- Controlling the input to your mind is of highest importance to your attention and therefore focus.
- Approaching uncertain and/or unknown things is a beautiful thing if you are confident that you are able to.
- Knowing and reflecting on your natural cognitive biases will open up potential for improvement and comprehension of human behavior.
- The people you let and keep in your life will improve or deteriorate all the points just mentioned
What do you think is missing in the education of young
adults based on your experience? Just respond to this
email :)