If my son told me he wanted to start a YouTube channel, I would go buy him the cameras, the microphones, and I'd be the first to help him get it all set up. But wow, have times changed. Imagine telling your parents thirty years ago that you are going to start streaming your video gameplay, or that you're going to start filming yourself and your friends doing dumb shit. It wasn't that long ago that your parents would look at you sideways and then tell you to get a job.
The conventional wisdom of thinking was very clear. It was to graduate high school, go to college and get a degree, and then get a corporate job making a 3% pay raise each year while ensuring your 401K and your health insurance were up to date.
Today, more and more kids are bucking traditional wisdom and saying fuck you to the stable life that we all once thought was the right move. They're starting businesses at younger ages, they're taking risks, they're definitely not staying in the conventional lanes that we all thought were right, and I think it's brilliant.
Get Scott’s article every morning
No spam. Just straight-talk career advice, every day.
You see, nobody ever got anywhere by doing what everyone else was doing, yet we love to stand in lines waiting for the opportunity instead of creating our own ride and building our own parks.
Nobody ever got anywhere by doing what everyone else was doing, yet we love to stand in lines waiting for the opportunity instead of creating our own ride and building our own parks.
The problem with conventional wisdom is that by the time something becomes conventional, the opportunity has usually already been discovered, packaged up, and handed to everyone else. You aren't early anymore. You're standing in the same line as everybody else, following the same instructions, hoping somehow you end up with a different result.
That doesn't mean college is bad. It doesn't mean corporate jobs are bad. It doesn't mean stability is bad. There are plenty of people who genuinely want that life, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with it. The problem is when you choose it simply because someone told you that's what successful people are supposed to do.
I think that's the part younger generations are starting to understand better than we did. They're asking, "Why?" Why do I need to wait until I'm forty to start a business? Why do I need someone's permission to make money? Why do I need to sit inside a cubicle for ten years before someone decides I'm qualified enough to lead something? Why can't I just start?
Of course, most of those things won't work. Most YouTube channels will never get a million subscribers. Most businesses will fail. Most side hustles won't turn into seven-figure companies, and most kids filming themselves playing video games won't become MrBeast. But that's not really the point. The point is they are learning how to build, create, sell, market, fail, adapt, and try again while everyone else is waiting for someone to hand them an opportunity.
I'd rather have my son start ten stupid ideas and fail at nine of them than spend twenty years wondering what might have happened if he had tried one. Failure at sixteen, twenty-two, or thirty is cheap. You have time. You can recover. You can learn. You can pivot. The biggest risk might actually be spending your entire life playing it safe and realizing later that safe never guaranteed shit anyway.
So if my son tells me tomorrow that he wants to start a YouTube channel, I'm buying the camera. If he wants to start a business, I'll help him figure it out. If he wants to try something that sounds completely ridiculous compared to the path I grew up believing was correct, I'm probably going to encourage it. The world has changed, and maybe one of the best things we can teach the next generation is to stop waiting in line for somebody else's ride and start figuring out how to build their own park.