Over the weekend I spoke at the World Future Society on a panel entitled “Youth Can Change the World”. I talked about how every young person can make an impact but that we need to change how we think about education in order to open up that possibility for more people.
The most difficult part of this process was getting this down to about 12 minutes in length. In the brainstorming phase I wrote over 8,500 words and organizing and cutting ideas was a big challenge, but I am pleased with the final result.
I enjoyed writing and giving the speech and hope to do more in the coming months and years. I will be iteratively adding and improving both the content and the slides of the presentation.
Here are my slides and the transcript of the speech. The video recording of the speech is now posted here.
Youth Changing the World By Making Education More Entrepreneurial
I’m here to tell you that every young person can change the world, and that our future depends on a collective attempt to do so.
Over the course of the last few years I’ve been deeply interested in the meaning of success in the 21st century at both an individual and societal level, focusing primarily on the role the educational system plays now and the role it should play in the future. I will describe a few changes the 21st century demands, a few of the failures of the current system and finally I’ll tell you a little bit about the startup organization I’m founding to implement these ideas about how to lower the barrier to entry for young people who want to make a difference in the world.
We are at a critical juncture for humanity. The world is facing some tremendous challenges: Radical Climate Change, looming water crisis, global pandemics, and billions desperately trying to rise out of poverty putting increasing strain on our depleting resources. These are big existential threats.
But this is also an extraordinary time because in this hyper-connected, technologically advanced world we also have more opportunity and more power to create the kind of future we want than ever before. Thinking about these problems is daunting, but if we are to find solutions it will come from unleashing the ingenuity of the next generation of young leaders.
We’ve got a generation of young people itching to get more involved and make a difference. A year ago, the Obama campaign harnessed that energy beautifully. We continue to get excited when we hear an inspirational speech or a call to action, and we exhibit unparalleled optimism about changing the world, but that enthusiasm begins to fade when we are forced to return to a school system that is outdated, constraining and depressing. There are so many dire problems to work on that there is no place for apathy yet many are trapped by it. Apathy is the result of an irrelevant educational system closing us out from the things we really care about.
Many young people are longing for something more meaningful in their education and work, and giving us a chance to engage with the big issues of our time could be the difference between resigning to dispassionate ‘pay the bills’ work and an insatiable entrepreneurial drive to improve humanity.
Why doesn’t our education system nurture the innovative spirit and leadership traits necessary for changemaking in the 21st century? Because it is a legacy of the industrial era that was designed to stamp these traits out.
The educational system was designed to train factory workers. And changes since have been incremental and on top of the same fundamentally outdated system. We are still all force fed the same handful of subjects that have been taught for years. And to succeed in the system requires obeying authority and coloring within the lines. Now, the system basically churns out intellectual factory workers, who are expected to be the cogs of large organizations, producing the same product for their lifetime in the work world. Today’s young people are great at analyzing narrow disciplines and writing 5 paragraph essays, yet we know little about ourselves and how to use our strengths to make an impact.
And so instead of having a large crop of these leaders needed for succeeding in the 21st century, we have students who hate school and think that’s what learning is. So they disengage and begin living weekend to weekend.
Succeeding in the 21st century requires flipping a number of educational practices on their head.
Instead of filling our heads with knowledge for 15 years, we should want to do something first, of tangible value to real world, and then learn the skills necessary to do it. Learning skills on an as needed basis fosters deeper understanding and greater motivation because it furthers a goal you care about. This also answers the ubiquitous question heard from students, “Why am I learning this?”
Instead of trying to optimize for the perfect balance of curriculum focus instead on what excites you and gets you really pumped up. The person who focuses on the pursuits that motivate and energize them will almost always be more successful than the person who tries to optimize for the best composition of knowledge, before even beginning to take action.
Focusing only on what excites you might make it seem like learning basic fundamentals would be avoided. Quite the contrary, as long as it furthers the bottom line: impact. As the great philosopher Frederich Nietzsche said, “He who has a strong enough why can bear almost any how.”
Instead of jumping into a standardized one size fits all education. You should cycle between divergent and convergent stages. In the divergent stage you’re being endlessly playful, trying to figure out what interests you. You do things like watch a few TED Talks, read a good book, watch a short documentary, prototype projects, talk with professionals in the field and share experiences with peers also on the journey of self discovery. By cycling between stages of exploration and focus you are certain to find topics that excite you and beckon you to dive deeper.
John Seely Brown former head of Xerox Parc has a quote I love that supports this approach, “Very often just going deeply into one or two topics that you really care about lets you appreciate the awe of the world … and once you learn to honor the mysteries of the world… you can expect always to need to keep probing. And so that sets the stage for lifelong inquiry.”
And if there is one thing a young person should achieve, it should be a passion for lifelong learning. Because any amount of learning you do in school pales in comparison to learning you’ll do throughout your life.
After you have found your passion act on it. The people who become most successful aren’t brilliant savants leagues ahead of their peers at 5 years old. Their secret lies in showing leadership and initiative at an early age, which opens up more opportunities and puts them on an accelerated path.
Everyone has a desire to matter, so when young people find their passion it will often be channeled towards making an impact. So by pursuing learning in roughly in this way we will have young people who are motivated lifelong learners who can contribute meaningfully to world.
A concept embodying the type of young person who approaches learning the way I just described is that of life entrepreneurship. It’s the idea that you seek out opportunities where you can make an impact and create a life uniquely suited to your strengths. Life entrepreneurship is much broader than just starting businesses, it’s about consistently taking the initiative to improve your surroundings and advance your goals.
Entrepreneurship is also very flexible. We don’t remember most of what we we’re taught anyway, but you can always take the experience of making things happen with you. And come to any situation knowing you can find the problems and inefficiencies and solve them.
Entrepreneurial ventures also create an incredible amount of innovation and wealth out of almost nothing. At TED this year Juan Enriquez jolted us with an incredible fact: Investment in Startup companies represents .02% of US GDP but it represents 17.8% of US GDP output. And that stat doesn’t even acknowledge burgeoning field of social entrepreneurship.
And now Introducing my startup Force For the Future… Force For the Future will bottle up this process, get more young people on this entrepreneurial path and accelerate the learning curve and impact by providing them with foresight, skills, connections and a support network of peers, mentors and organizations.
Basically this model boils down to unschooling but plus the resources of an institution like Harvard/Stanford.
It’s the idea that you will contribute the most by putting your time and energy into the things you are really passionate about. And aims to strike the optimal balance between being completely off on your own, where it’s easy to get lost and being part of a large system where you’re always told what to do.
Most fields in the 21st century are headed in a direction of decentralization and education is no different. Many of the pieces of 21st century learning landscape already exist, so one of Force For the Future’s primary functions will be acting as a liaison so that so a young person with desire can navigate through this entrepreneurial ecosystem and accelerate the process of turning an idea into a reality.
So much of achieving impact is about being connected with the right people. Force For the Future will connect you with the mentors who can make a big impact with a little time investment. We’ll connect you with the entrepreneurial veterans only a few years older who can dispel the illusion that making a big impact is not a dream but an achievable reality. And we’ll connect you with peers who are at a similar place on the rollercoaster ride that is life entrepreneurship.
If more young people get on a path to solving big problems, not only will we have happier, more fulfilled people, but we’ll have innovators who can lead us out of these economic and environmental crises and totally reinvent the world we live in…
I want to leave you with one final thought.
Margaret Mead once said,” Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
What if it wasn’t just a small few who managed to escape the system and dared to change the world but we provided learning environments that allowed all young people partake in the creation of a world worth living in.
