Welcome to this blog on building entrepreneurship skills as a teenager!
Teenagers have tremendous growth potential to become successful entrepreneurs. They are young, enthusiastic, and bold to give it all. They have all the traits that make great leaders. Most importantly they have all the time in the world to learn and grow at a fast pace.
In fact, being a teenager is the perfect age to learn leadership skills. This article highlights some key points to help you become a successful entrepreneur as a teenager.
Issues With Traditional Education Systems
Every young person has a question in their mind: What should I study at University?
The answer is: It doesn’t matter. You might have heard this a lot, but entrepreneurs aren’t trained in schools and universities. They are self-made and self-taught folks who realize the need to move faster than the world does.
There hasn’t been as much business innovation and growth in the whole twentieth century as it has been in the past twenty years alone. What does that tell us? The world is moving faster than ever. Ideas are coming out of everywhere and nowhere.
We are seeing the rise of lots of modern businesses and technologies. Some of the prominent ones include cryptocurrency, metaverse, and artificial intelligence, data science, computing, robots, space travel, and electric transportation. If you look back just two decades, none of these things have any hype at all.
Traditional educational systems are terribly slow as compared to the current pace of new innovations. Cryptocurrency, metaverse, and NFTs have already taken over, and still, there aren’t many universities that teach you how these technologies work and how you can be a part of the next big thing.
To succeed in the modern world, you must be a fast thinker and an early mover. You must quickly figure out what you truly desire and be your own teacher.
Roadmap to Becoming an Entrepreneur
It’s extremely hard for young people to get started on building skills. They don’t have any counseling.
What would be the right skill? What’s next after that? So many questions rush through their minds every day and stop them from taking any action.
So, this is a roadmap of how you can start and make some substantial progress. This roadmap has been carefully crafted after researching various experiences and works for everyone who follows it correctly.
1. Diving Deep Into the Pool of Knowledge
Any business is as big as the vision of its founder and the vision is as expendable as the knowledge of the founder itself. You don’t have to gain knowledge just for the sake of making money or doing business.
Acquire knowledge for the sake of itself. The more knowledge you have, the easier it will be for you to decide what you genuinely care about. It will increase the chances of you encountering your dream skill.
Steve Jobs once said, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So, you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future”. Developing a learning attitude is necessary because you don’t know where some specific knowledge might help you in life.
The road to vast knowledge starts with learning a small skill. So, I would suggest you to ‘learn a skill’ but I won’t tell you which one. That is up to you to decide but even if you don’t know what skill you should learn, there is a lot of figuring out to do.
The best way that I have found to know what excites you is not to take a pad and a pencil and think about it. The best way is to discover, learn and experiment.
Steve Jobs didn’t know why he was taking calligraphy classes in college as it was a useless skill. Connecting the dots backward, that skill became the foundation of developing a graphical user interface and producing cool fonts for Mac.
2. Learn Various Related Skills
As I mentioned earlier, it doesn’t matter if something doesn’t make you quick money. Learn what you think is interesting and valuable. Don’t follow the world for the sake of competition. Learn what you want and eventually, you’ll come up with a massive prospect for the future.
Similarly, learn various related skills. For example, if you are collecting NFTs, you might also want to learn to create your own NFTs, how blockchain works, or how metaverse is linked to NFTs. Acquiring related and intersecting skills will help you broaden your picture and hence laser your focus on something more specific and bigger.
Learn as many skills as you can. They will help you eventually. Elon Musk learned to code in his childhood but acquired a degree in Physics. Little did he know that coding skills will help him create X.com and that a physics degree will mix with his knowledge and passion of tech and coding to lay the foundations of SpaceX and Tesla. The point is a normal physicist wouldn’t get an idea to improve batteries in electric cars unless he is someone who is passionately following climate change (knowledge) and also a tech freak.
3. Crafting the Next Big Idea
So, if you are correctly following the first two steps, you will start to see a change in the way you think. Your perspective of the world will start to broaden and improve. You will be flooded with ideas because now, you have a wide pool of knowledge and various skills.
All the knowledge in your head will keep intersecting and overlapping. You will start to think of ways in which your skills can connect. All this will lead to discovering different, better, and great ideas that you are truly passionate about.
Don’t stop there, keep moving.
4. All-Out Attack!
Elon Musk said in his commencement speech, “So I would encourage you to take risks now and to do something bold. You won’t regret it.”
If you are young, it’s the perfect time to take risks and experiment with your ideas. You don’t have a family to feed or other responsibilities that will eventually stop you from being bold. If you are rushed with ideas, start researching them. Figure out the technicalities. Figure out if the technicalities can be solved. Break down everything to the fundamental levels. For example, if batteries are expensive and heavy, think in terms of how batteries work (gain knowledge and learn another skill) and come up with ways to increase battery timing and cut down costs.
All these discoveries lead to great ideas. Just start taking risks on what you think is important enough.
This is the age to be bold and creative. Don’t be afraid of failures. Learn from the experience. As I said, I have a learning attitude. Do everything with an attitude that is a learning experience and a way to get you closer to the big picture. Don’t take it as it is everything you are ever going to do and if you fail, you’ll stop. No, it’s just a learning experience and the sooner you start, the sooner you can learn and succeed than the rest. In the long term, you will be able to adjust to the next substantial change sooner than the rest!
About The Author
Matt is a stay-at-home dad and business owner who has been able to create his dream life while working at home. With a masters in business, Matt lives in Sweden and is interested in helping others find additional ways to save money. He writes about finding new income streams, and increasing passive income on his blog thewahman.
