Last week we launched a discussion of 10 powerful forces affecting your 12-year-old’s future, given the massive Internet-driven economic restructuring we’re living through. Today we cover ideas Nos. 5 through 10, along with some brief suggestions for launching a dialog with your child on each.
5. All returns increasingly accrue to creativity
In a world of free-flowing information, simply knowing something isn’t worth much. Being a lawyer? College professor? Intrinsically valuable when information was hard to gather, search, and access. Much less so now. Economic power will flow more and more to those who create, synthesize and deploy rather than to those who just know.
Starting point for your 12-year-old: “That’s cool that you learned that today. Did it spark any new ideas or thoughts you didn’t have before?”
6. We systematically overestimate entrepreneurial risk
Our gathered wisdom has been that the road to economic self-sufficiency is paved with grave risk. But what’s really riskier: Tying your fortunes 100 percent to a single employer or becoming an independent economic actor who earns a living from a small portfolio of customers or clients? The culture of our most successful industries — Silicon Valley and Hollywood, to name two — are built on the idea that failure is a stage rather than a dead end. But we transmit a sense of bogeyman risk to our kids for any path that deviates from what worked in the past. It’s a myth your child can’t afford to believe in.
Starting point for your 12-year-old (refrigerator magnet alert): “What would you do if you could not fail? What steps would you need to do first if you were going to pursue that?”
7. It’s a borderless world. Soak it in
In a world where collaboration among individuals and companies is increasingly frictionless, international borders are ever more irrelevant. But we Americans, blessed with a huge domestic market, have been remarkably domestic in our economic ambitions. Now with our factory floor in Shenzhen, China, and our IT support desk in Sri Lanka, we have to be ready to sell ourselves and our ideas in those places and Sao Paolo too. Or someone from somewhere else will.
Starting point for your 12-year-old: “I’d love our family to start to see the world. What would you think if we skipped our beach trip this year and saved up to go to an incredible place in Asia or Africa next summer?”
8. Live below your means
Living in the coming “Individual Economy” will require more financial self-discipline and personal responsibility than does our current system. We’re moving from someone handing us a check every week to the less predictable cycles of plenty and scarcity. “Living paycheck to paycheck” is a fool’s luxury, made possible only by the idea of a weekly stipend and the ill-advised notion of using all of it every week. Near-perfect information makes frugality easy (while allowing for discounted splurges for important items like No. 7 above) and the emerging notion of “collaborative consumption” lets consumers easily share goods like cars and tools and vacation homes.
Starting point for your 12-year-old: “Hey, my cell- phone contract is up. How about getting online with me and helping old Dad figure out how to get the same service for less?”
9. Live and breathe the Internet and its applications every day
When hunting and gathering was the human condition, it was critical that humans learned how to hunt and gather. When our progenitors developed agriculture, learning how plants grew and livestock thrived became critical. The Industrial Revolution required manual and mechanical skills, as well as the understanding of how to find and keep a job. Now the Internet and its ubiquitous information flows are deconstructing the industrial economy. Guess what kind of full literacy is now required?
Starting point for your 12-year-old: “Here’s our new family tradition: On Sundays after dinner, everybody’s got to bring a cool website or mobile app to the table to show everyone else.”
10. Develop great shock absorbers
Living in a time of revolution means we will be shaken again and again and again by forces beyond our control. Resilience and adaptability may be the most important qualities you can develop in your 12-year-old. There’s no easy starting point — it’s a philosophy and an outlook that our trophies-for- all society doesn’t foster.
Nobody said this was going to be easy. But being attuned to the changes will help you help your kids — of any age — thrive in the trying economic climate ahead.
Dave Maney, an entrepreneur and former journalist, runs . Reach him at davemaney@ .
