Fed up of a system that labels children as failures? There’s another way.

“You remake yourself as you grow and as the world changes. Your identity doesn’t get found. It emerges.” Reid Hoffman

In our podcast with Maneesh Juneja, he insists that the future of health care needs innovators who learn differently.

Maneesh mentioned Reid Hoffman’s book The Start-Up of You. In this book Hoffman explains why you need to manage your career as if you are running a start-up. In a changing world, the key to success is the entrepreneurial mindset.

Imagine if we imparted these lessons to every young person:

#1: Know your assets, values and passions to find your competitive advantage.

“Sometimes freedom from normal rules is what gives you a competitive advantage.” Reid Hoffman

Everything that matters in life will involve some competition. The secret is to know where you have the upper hand.

We teach students to succeed by doing exactly what everyone else is doing.

Study better.

Do your homework.

Revise in your free time.

This creates a system where there are winners and a lot of losers.

What if we taught them to find leverage for success in the intersection between their personal assets, values and passions.

Their niche will begin to emerge. Show them how that niche can interact with demand and 🤯

#2: All workplaces will change. Adapting to this is as simple as planning from A to B, then Z.

“Hard work isn’t enough, and more work is never the real answer.” Reid Hoffman

In your work, learning and life, strategy matters!

In the past it made sense to tell our learners to pursue a specific career. We even told the ones who were unsure that they would find it eventually. This advice is now inadequate.

We need to teach them a strategy for life. Using their competitive advantage to achieve plan A, but also having a plan B where they can apply lessons learned from plan A. Then having plan Z, where they want to end up.

Plan Z drives personal innovation and motivates them for success.

For more on this, we discuss having a strategy for life in Episode 190.

#3: Make smart, calculated risks, and you will have the advantage.

“An entrepreneur is someone who jumps off a cliff, and builds a plane on his way down.” Reid Hoffman

Risk taking for the sake of it is dangerous. Calculated risks are the key to getting from A to Z.

How do we teach our young people to calculate risk and then have the courage to take it? If we can’t do this and they don’t discover it for themselves, they will live their lives primarily in plan A.

Success depends on getting to plan Z.

They need it.

The world needs it.

We hope these lessons impact your life. But most importantly we hope you share this knowledge with our young people.

Then we can abolish the failure that’s inbuilt into our education system and give all learners the tools to be successful.

“Society flourishes when people think entrepreneurially.” Reid Hoffman

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