Young People, We Have a Choice

And we should choose to change the world.

Last night, I was catching up with a friend from study abroad over Instagram. The story that I wrote about music as a therapeutic outlet apparently touched her. But it wasn’t the music part that resonated.

It was my story as a student.

I haven’t written so much about my journey as a university student partially out of hesitation. My time at university was filled with a lot of good and, of course, a lot of bad. But we’ll get to that in a moment.

She was saying that she’s been perplexed on what to do post-grad, and is struggling between choosing her passions versus something that is “safer”. The part of my piece that reminded her of this is below.

“I haven’t viewed myself as an artist until this past year. It feels weird because now I refer to myself as an artist regularly, but in the environment I was in before Barcelona I felt like I had to choose. You see, in American higher education, at my university in particular, it became less about learning and more about career building. Everything I was told to do in college had to have some mythical goal. (I say mythical because it is humans who decide the value of something like a degree, we didn’t succumb to the idea of the degree being an asset until the myth was ubiquitously accepted enough to become a reality. To learn more, read Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Schiller’s Narrative Economics.)

“I wasn’t able to pursue my passions — consume and create art — because instead I had to build my resume. I had to intern for people for free, or kiss ass to the “adults in the room” at networking events, or both. The professional part of college was truly the most soul-sucking endeavor in my life. I felt like an opportunist, because I was. That’s what the machine had conditioned us to be.” — From the Author, May 2020

It makes a lot of sense that she’s struggling with such a conundrum as I had once, too.

I decided to move to Washington, D.C. and study what was essentially political science at American University. Shortly afterwards I changed my major to International Relations.

The reason why I was so passionate about both subjects — politics and foreign policy — at the time was that I thought that I could make an impact in those fields. I’ve always had a passion for American and world history growing up. The root of that passion came from the root of my genes: I’m a descendant of Holocaust survivors.

Both of my great-grandmothers had survived Auschwitz miraculously, one of them escaping via the help of a Polish Christian and the other surviving by sewing uniforms for the Nazis. In America, all of my extended family on my dad’s side is pretty much from my grandfather because it was my grandmother’s side that was killed off in the Holocaust. My great-grandmother, my dad’s mom’s mother, was the one who sewed uniforms for the Nazis. Only her and her sister got in the right line. Everyone else in their family headed for the gas chambers.

Hearing the fucked up shit that the Nazis did to my family from a young age always emboldened me to realize that I could make an impact in politics and foreign policy. That’s why, at the time at least, I became very interested in working in politics and government.

Throughout my time at university, however, I saw how brutal it was to do anything efficiently. For example, when I was VP of Membership Development at our university’s Interfraternity Council, I tried to partner with the university multiple times for different initiatives. It was hard to simply get a meeting with someone in the office. Email after email, it was all talk but no walk. Yes, we want to work with you. We just forget to respond to your emails because we’re too busy. Fuck, so many emails!

This is the message I regularly got, both overtly and subtly, and it made me feel like shit. I felt unimportant, or at the very least, not important enough to be in the presence of the people I paid $30,000+ a year for a “higher education”.

Then there were the networking events and the career fairs and the messaging. The latter was especially the most dangerous. It’s difficult to measure the tangible impact of messaging, but it’s genuinely one of the most dangerous things in the world if used poorly.

The messaging at my university was basically “get an internship or get the fuck out”. More broadly, it was “climb this ladder or you don’t belong here”. For a young person who has a lot of ideas and is optimistic, this is not the place that I wanted to be. It’s ironic to recognize that though as many of my peers saw that I was always happy and thankful.

The messaging was everywhere: on the buses, in the classrooms, on the bulletin boards, and yes, emails. Subject lines giving you the false hope of a bright future. A bright future after you worked for free for two or three years, they promised us. A bright future after you slept for four hours four years straight, they told us.

I didn’t feel like I was learning, I felt like I was being told what to do. It was mechanized dogma.

The one place I did feel like I learned was, not so ironically, out of the classroom at a tech startup called Full Measure. Founded by Greg Davies (he co-founded a little company called Blackboard) and his colleagues, they gave me the opportunity of a lifetime at the time: a paid internship. It was my first time considering tech startups as a career path. During the interview process, I would meet a man that would change the course of the rest of my life: Ben Hills.

At the time, Ben was 24 and VP of Product and Marketing. His story is legendary at Full Measure when I was working there. He was the guy who worked his way up from intern to, today, VP of Product.

In the first month of my internship, I was telling Ben and our colleagues about this idea I was working on in the podcast space. This was either late August or early September 2018. I told them that I was fed up with podcast apps like Apple as they never gave me good recommendations for podcast episodes.

That summer before the internship I had started bingeing on Guy Raz’s How I Built This and was inspired by all the entrepreneurs who went on the shows. The first two episodes I had ever listened to were the interviews with Joe Gebbia of Airbnb and John Zimmer of Lyft. I couldn’t believe that neither of them had “real” business experience yet they created two technology companies that would quite literally change the world. It was actually Lyft, not Uber, who invented the phenomenon of ride-sharing.

I was so passionate about these podcasts that I would share them with my friends and eventually curate lists of podcast episodes for certain people and they ended up liking my recommendations. I thought of myself as a user of this service because I had not listened to podcasts — or saw the appeal of listening to them — until a friend had recommended one to me.

When Ben was listening to what I had been working on, he had one message and only one message: do it. It doesn’t matter how little experience you have, it doesn’t matter if you don’t code, just do it. That’s the only way you’re ever going to find out.

And so I did.

Fast forward to today, I’m still working on a much pivoted concept that Ben and I had discussed almost two years ago. And I never gave up, nor will I ever.

But this is the thing: I finally found something passionate with my life that I can do, tech entrepreneurship. The power to use technology to democratize media creation is exhilarating. Even writing that sentence gives me the goosebumps.

I did not discover this passion with my fancy degree at my fancy university, I discovered this passion by a combination of a few things.

• Exploration: My will to freely explore new opportunities allowed me to discover what I was truly passionate about. I wasn’t hesitant to start and stop something within a short period of time. If I wasn’t interested in it, then I knew it wasn’t for me.
• Encouragement: If it weren’t for Ben — a successful twenty-something himself — telling me to shoot for the moon, I don’t know if I would’ve ever started.
• Grit & Tenacity: While my point on exploration sounds somewhat in contrast with this, you need to be absolutely tenacious if you want to go big. It’s the fact that I love podcasts and technology so much that, no matter how rough times were, I never gave up on it. Same goes for writing. Even on the days that I don’t feel like writing, I still write on them to maintain my habit.

These three things — exploration, encouragement, and grit and tenacity — I learned from life, not from class. They also have a common root: they’re all related to givers.

If it weren’t for Ben encouraging me to explore and be tenacious with my podcast passion, I don’t know if I ever would have taken the leap of faith that is entrepreneurship. Of course, I ended up having to teach myself to not rely on the validation of others — including Ben. Yet all it takes is one person to tell you that you can do it to actually go out and do it.

At university, or at least the place where I went, it felt quite the opposite. While we had a startup incubator at the university, the ambience didn’t have the same chutzpah that Ben had brought to Full Measure. And outside the incubator, you still had a conventional school of thought all over the school: get a traditional job, preferably in consulting so you can donate to us post-grad. Or if not in consulting, somewhere else where you have to intern the whole Jurassic Age before you get hired as a “real” employee.

I’d like to add that there were some encouraging people of entrepreneurship at my university, particularly Siri Terjesen, who coincidentally went to school with my step-dad. At the end of the day, though, institutions are made up of people. And if the majority of the people succumb to the status quo, then the culture won’t ever change.

Because the institution is intertwined with the status quo, the attitude is to not take risks and go for the safer bet. As in, take that consulting gig over bootstrapping a startup.

Isn’t this the opposite message that we want to tell our kids? Isn’t it the youth who ends up creating much of the change we see in the world? I know what you’re thinking, and it wasn’t just Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs. It was also our founding fathers. They, too, were around my age when they risked their lives to secede from England.

And unlike everything that university has told you, not everything is about your job. Yes, you, fellow human being, can actually have passions outside the classroom or the workplace. What? My professor never told me that!

Don’t believe me, believe Brian May, guitarist of Queen. Or should I say Dr. Brian May, he’s a PhD in astrophysics.

Ironically it’s the age of the Internet in which there should be more polymaths than the past. But because of our backwards approach in the classroom — making kids like me afraid of instead of embracing risk — we see more students anxious and depressed than before.

When you constantly tell kids — who are more innovative out of innocence — that they shall not be creative, that they shall not pursue their passions, that they shall not change the world, then what the fuck is the point of living life? To binge watch dumb television until we get old? To read stories about people changing the world and not doing it ourselves?

Circling back to politics, this is the exact message that we’re telling our young people. Oh, that accomplished mayor from Indiana and that female senator from California are just not good enough to lead the country.

Not good enough. These are the words that us young people constantly see on job postings.

Do the words “3+ years of experience required” for that $40,000 job in New York ring a bell?

They do for me at least, but not in New York.

Before I worked on some iteration of my startup full-time, I had applied to hundreds of jobs before graduation only to find one offer for a cold calling job across the Potomac in Virginia that paid me $35,000 in salary. Since I was staying at my basement apartment by the university as that was the only place I could afford, I commuted about an hour-and-a-half each way between northwest Washington and Alexandria. I spent so much money on the Metro, and at the time I was developing a bad pot-smoking habit to cope with it all (not recommended). I remember after my first month of working there my net income was sixty dollars. Sixty, fucking, dollars!

All for what, to follow the status quo? To follow the “secure and safe” route of having a “real” job in Corporate America?

My great-grandparents didn’t survive Auschwitz for this. They didn’t survive for me to live a life of routine boredom and depression. They survived for me to change the world and pursue my passions freely.

As my friend once asked me wisely, “do you want to live your life like a sitcom or a blockbuster?”

Yet instead of telling our students to live like Captain America, we’re telling our students to live like George Lopez. Our Prime memberships are supposed to keep us happy while the world is burning. We’ve developed a pessimistic, victimization-dominant culture at our universities. Because we know that we can’t actually make change since we’re not good enough, the most we do is share articles on Facebook about our problems. Nothing more, nothing less.

This is what happens when our society doesn’t empower our young people. We lose our grip on grit and empowerment and slip up for a world of pessimism and victimhood.

Between our universities, job market, and politics, it’s no wonder why us young people feel so powerless. Every time we see another person older than us fuck things up like the environment or the economy, we’re constantly reminded that it is us who will end up paying for their actions. We really are the new Lost Generation.

But let’s get something straight: the 2020’s and beyond are our time. While we may be saddled with a shit ton of debt and cynicism, it really is up to us to make the world a better place. And what better time to do it than a global pandemic?

We’re stuck at our homes and probably will be for a while. Even as society reopens and attempts to return to “normalcy”, it’s our time to recognize how not normal this is.

One of my best friends from college, for example, has an extra ten to fifteen hours a week of free time because he doesn’t have to commute. Before the pandemic, he wasn’t able to freely explore his passions as his days were full of either work, commuting, or decompressing. Now that it’s been more than two months of working remotely, he recently discovered day-trading and is working on an AI on the side. He’s on a path of exploration that he missed from not having that free time. You never know: one of his projects can become something that you use.

And it’s not just the global pandemic that you should do this, it should be for the rest of your lifetime.

If you are young and have free time, for goodness sake, please explore and pursue your passions. We literally depend on it. Between the issues of the day, our time is running out.

You might be the next Mark Zuckerberg, but hopefully female and less awkward. Wouldn’t it be nice to see more female industrialists?

While institutional America turns to Joe Biden, the real America is turning to you.

We have a big choice to make: are we going to let everyone else ruin the world while we watch? Or are we going to be the ones who end up changing it for the better?

We may be anxious and depressed, but we are more capable than you think.