As a high school junior, I believe I can speak for the majority of my peers when I say that the thought of stepping out as independent adults feels uncertain, unclear and slightly overwhelming. While we sit in our classes analyzing famous authors and memorizing historical events, timetables and equations, we are not exactly being prepared to live in the “real world.”
While many might feel more secure in their decisions to enter adulthood working for a large company, I don’t. The era of going to college and getting a position working for a large organization is in transition. We have evolved into creative thinkers, and following the same track as everyone else doesn’t continue the evolution. It only begets the same results. From my perspective, we have a choice at all times, to stay in the hamster wheel, or to exercise our capacity for divergent thinking and explore “out-of-the-box” possibilities.
I believe that the skills we are going to be needing are those that enable us to pay for our living and choose the paths we feel most passionate about. To me, it is vital to have the decision-making powers, choice and control of what I do in my work, where I do it and how much it fulfills me.
This is best served through entrepreneurship. Creating a life of meaning and security for myself is up to me, no one else. It’s up to each of us to steer the course of our lives and our future in the direction that allows us to feel successful and thrive. This is our responsibility, practicing personal sovereignty.
As someone interested in both finance and business, I advocate developing and mastering our relationship with money and the systems that both generate and withhold it. In a global climate of economic volatility, artificial intelligence and digital innovation, it is up to us to understand that value isn’t created by money itself, but by our perspectives about it and the systems we design to use it.
Being an entrepreneurial thinker is where we get to bridge this understanding of money with the ways we want to experience it. Whether we are launching a startup or becoming a freelance artist, we are choosing a path that requires us to manage our resources and sustain our livelihood.
These are the tools and methods we need to be learning in school, and not just in college, but at a young age. What we don’t learn, we don’t implement. Learning how to choose what feels most exciting and easy for us is something we can learn in grade school.
Discovering how to write a business plan can happen in junior high. Being instructed in supply and demand, the circulation of currency and how to make choices for ourselves with that information are concepts we can learn in high school. We can always develop a mindset that views problems from the inside out.
We’re never too young to learn the fundamentals of how to live, how to work with money, how to create our livelihood and how to be happy, sovereign adults. At the core level, we are all entrepreneurs, agents of our lives.
