My dad recently sent me this Wall Street Journal Op-Ed by Emil Barr, founder of Flashpass and Step-Up Social, two multi-million-dollar social media marketing firms. In Barr’s provocatively titled piece, “So You Want to Be a Millionaire? Don’t Wait Until You’re 20,” he flips the common advice so many of us hear in high school and even college: “You have plenty of time to figure it out, don’t rush and don’t worry.” The truth is, the best time to figure it out was yesterday, and the second-best time is today.
Barr presents this perspective specifically through the lens of entrepreneurship. If you are to have any pronounced success or longevity enjoyed by those prolific Silicon Valley visionaries, you need to start when you’re a teenager. Barr cites many examples of the benefits of youth, but, most notably, he highlights the ability and tolerance to fail at a young age. As we age, our remaining time decreases, and, consequently, a major loss (financial or otherwise) becomes harder to recover from in proportion to the time we have left on Earth. It’s the same concept that many financial advisors recommend: a riskier portfolio strategy for teenagers and young adults than for those in retirement. If you are 18 years old with ten thousand dollars total, incurring a thousand-dollar loss on a risky investment is much more recoverable than for a pensioner with no substantial work opportunities in front of him or her. Ultimately, it’s a matter of scale and perspective.
To any dismayed 20+-year-olds reading this article, this is not to say that your life is over as soon as it starts, but rather to remember the value of starting early and often. Your failures, at any stage, are still a more definitive mark of progress than your opponent who never started. Whether you do find value in the cutthroat path of entrepreneurship, or you simply want to secure your next upward rung on the corporate ladder, your progression to that goal needs to begin now.
It’s tempting to think about those you may know who encountered major (and successful) career and life pivots far into their future and thus extrapolate that to your own life, but these cases only further prove my point. These people with extraordinary and fruitful life shifts were determined to make a change and often began working toward their new goal as soon as they could. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter so much where or to what you’re aiming, but rather how and when you’re working toward it.
Author Neale Walsch popularized the phrase “Life begins at the end of your comfort zone,” an especially pertinent mantra to retain as we continue to think about and visualize what we want our life to look like. Truthfully, everything that you want to be or do is just past that border of comfort and normality, and it takes a concerted effort to break past what is familiar to you. This effort doesn’t necessarily require a different way of thinking; it just requires you to take one step after another. Only when you look back after weeks, months and years of progress will you realize how far you’ve come and subsequently how much further you can go. Certainly, it’s not easy; in fact, that’s why it’s called “breaking out of your comfort zone.” It’s tempting to stick to what’s known and proven, but if anything of substance in this life came easy, I wouldn’t have written this article. Whether you have it all figured out or are just starting, the most important thing is that it’s a continual and concerted effort because, ultimately, it’s in reaching the end that we can finally begin.
Michael Doyle is a freshman from Haddonfield, New Jersey living in Knott Hall studying computer engineering. When he's not rehearsing his violin for the campus orchestra, he's spending his paycheck at a farmer's market or playing golf. He eagerly awaits any discussion you want to bring forth at mdoyle25@nd.edu.
