A young man sent me an email looking for advice. He recently graduated from the “comfort blanket of college and chucked towards the open jaws of real life.” He was hoping to receive guidance for young people in his situation to “make the world outside not seem so threatening and overwhelming.”
The first step is to understand that although the world can be very overwhelming and threatening, it is also amazing and magical and overflowing with opportunity.
The problem is that when confronted with uncertainty and overwhelm, most people hide under the false security of the status quo. A paint-by-number approach to life is tempting. We believe that if we do what we’re told, play by the rules, and color inside the lines, everything will be ok. That path seems safe, but it draws you away from living the life you were made for.
My advice to young adults is to start chasing their dream now and stay the course. You don’t need to know all the steps or exactly where it will lead. Just take the obvious next step, no matter how insignificant it appears. This path will get hard, yes, but it only gets harder later. You have the advantage of naïveté, energy, low overhead, and very little to lose. Kim and I went years living on her kindergarten teaching salary, eating Hamburger Helper, and not running the air conditioner in our dumpy apartment. It was never fun or easy, but it was easier than trying to do it with three kids and a mortgage.
Don’t wait to get established.
Don’t wait until you have figured everything out.
Don’t wait for the timing to be right.
And for heaven’s sake, don’t give up.
I have a message of even greater importance for everyone else, the ones for whom graduation is a distant memory from a simpler time.
As the old saying goes, the best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second-best time is today. Yes, there are certain advantages when starting young, as I outlined above. But it’s worth keeping in mind that although I didn’t have the pressure of three kids and a mortgage to contend with back then, I also didn’t have the wisdom and experience I now have, which I’m sure would have helped shorten my learning curve.
Don’t surrender the rest of your life wishing you had started sooner or lament the choices you’ve made this far.
Make new ones.
You may not yet have everything you need to finish the race, but you have everything you need to start.
Leave a Reply