Tomorrows Best Economy Will Be…

A nyone would go hunting for buried treasure if they were confident enough it was there. If someone told you “1,000 meters below the ground there is $100 million in gold,” most people would devise a plan to get it. Perhaps they would build a team or search for investors. If a person has enough certainty that a fortune is to be had, even the average person could find a way to move mountains.

The secret ingredient is the confidence in that the reward that is waiting. On the one hand digging is not that hard, and buried treasure is easy to imagine. Oversimplified to exemplify a question: With opportunities all around us, why do so few people attempt to achieve?

There are possibly a few components are working together. First, most people are not trained to identify opportunities around them. Even when they have great ideas, they may not even know it. So, they go through life believing life has nothing to offer them. And second, even if they do recognize that eureka moment, they still have very little understanding of how to properly implement a plan toward this new objective. A life’s greatest idea never more than last night’s bar room discussion.

Education systems around the world almost universally teach students to work for others. That is, they will craft you into a member of the workforce; which is fine. The whole world was built by organized labor. But these education systems were conceived in a time when a mass work force was desperately needed.

What has been overlooked is how to organize a reality of your own. Students are crafted into entry level workers and not business starters. Most go through life hoping someone else will allow them to climb a little bit higher. A pay raise or an extra week of vacation are the rewards of years of service. This Is certainly an inefficiency begging to be addressed worldwide.

Now with the advent of so many new technologies students are preparing for uncharted career paths.

T he technological revolution of the last few decades has turned traditional professional business model’s upside down. With new freedoms to communicate and capabilities to produce, single individuals are able to use a variety of apps to complete the former output of entire companies. Costumers may approach single individuals for most professional tasks and receive better response and rate than they could from corporate body.

Let’s imagine the future of work. A society of freelancers that are held together by a series of online forums and new professional norms about working. Workplaces From which workers can come and go from positions quickly or as is optimal. Their success is based just as much on their ability to network as practice their craft. HR recruiters flourish in the void left by schools who do not prepare students to function independently.

As events such as Coronavirus only accelerate the evolution toward remote workforces. Companies struggle to redefine their workflow to facilitate decentralization. Additionally, Elite workforces such as Coders and Engineers, are increasingly positioning themselves as freelancers instead of traditional employees able to take on multiple projects and juggle them with less oversight.

What this means is that skilled professionals across the economy are learning business ownership skills on the fly.

They were trained to function in their field. They were never trained to manage their practices. For example, Doctors learn medicine, but far fewer take the time to learn about the business of medicinal practice. The same is true with lawyers, contractors, and others.

The primary solution is to recognize that business skills are as fundamental as learning to read. Teaching a young person to conceive, plan, and launch a business model, is usually the most valuable skill that you can teach anyone. No matter what their field is, they become far more effective when they learn to build the business that administers their specialty.

Let’s reform our current education curriculums. Business and business founding should be a central theme in all education systems going forward. With high school actually being the optimal time. Let’s add a new first year to high school education geared totally around learning how to build on a business idea. All education they receive afterwards will be more properly framed when they consider how they may use it in their own ventures.

Let every young person receive guided experience in creating profitable projects of their own. Many will graduate already in control of their careers and finances. Most will emerge with a skill set that will truly serve them for their entire lives. Creating a business in one’s life should be looked upon as a high achievement but also a fundamental activity that is reinforced in our young people early and often as a duty.

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A side from the individual good for each business educated student, there is a larger good for society in general. Tomorrow’s elite economies will be service based economies whose functional units will be millions of small business operations moving fluidly towards and away from opportunities and risks. Buying and selling often, they are the key driver behind the velocity at which money circulates through an economy. The faster the better.

For those among us who wish to find jobs, small businesses can provide. In fact, we can assume that any one person who creates a successful operation will be able to hire at least three others that couldn’t. However, it’s important to provide all students the opportunity to learn and experience independent enterprise. By giving all students the opportunity to try a better path, we will maximize our discovery of those that can achieve.

If our goal is to collectively achieve a dynamic, cutting edge economy, we must first prepare the workers of tomorrow to participate. It’s not enough to say “learn a lot of something, but organize it if you can figure it out.” The new motto must be: “Learn and apply. Here’s how.”

We must foster a wider recognition that our economy is what sustains us. Economic activity flowing around us is just as vital as the blood flowing inside. There an be no other way for vital goods and services to reach us. Also taxes that businesses pay are the primary source of whatever social safety net we may one day need to fall into. By developing our young people to actively participate, we are actually developing a vital support system for ourselves. So, It’s not only helping others live better lives. Optimizing a young person’s progress is also about self-preservation.

Around the world, authoritarian economic policies have gained a foothold in popular culture. Economic justice and veiled attempts at social engineering, are now being espoused as an anecdote to chaos. Young and old alike buy into the premise that we should be able to depend on government for our needs, and governments see an incentive to oblige in exchange for individual sovereignty. What follows is the inevitable decline into a sort of corrupt serfdom.

A bulwark against such a catastrophe is an educated voting base that understands the value of personal responsibility.

Business ownership can instill these values through experience. Let us institute and regiment the development of business owners as a safeguard against destructive social movements; recognizing that the ticket to a brighter future has “Business” stamped right on the front of it.

Today, all around us, are some of the brightest minds the world has ever known. We’ve spent much time and effort teaching them how think. Let us also show them what to do.

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About the Author: Ryan Perkins is host of the Business Love with Ryan Podcast and Creator of the Ryan’s Business Class channel on YouTube. Having made his living starting and consulting small business projects, he is currently partner in an emerging early-stage startup consulting firm yet to be named.