5 Easy Ways YOU Can Change the World

More people are doing more to deliberately change the world than ever before. They are creating jobs, building the economy, and circulating wealth in brand new ways that we can all learn from. Here are a two examples:

• Australian Nick D’Aloisio began teaching himself to code on computers before he was 15 years old. He built a few small apps, but launched a major app called Summly. Last year, when he was 17, D’Aloisio sold it to Yahoo for $30 million. In the process he hired dozens of programmers and made others wealthy, too.
• At the age of 12, Charles Orgbon III founded a nonprofit called Greening Forward. SIx years later, his youth-driven, youth-led, and youth-imagined environmental organization is teaching young people across the U.S. how to make money through the green movement. His program has reached hundreds of communities across the country and helped thousands of students learn about the environment in a productive way.

The stories of people changing the world can go on for days, and as we all know, this has always happened. However, more than ever, its the youngest among us who are actually doing the most, and have been for more than 100 years—and throughout all of history: Joan of Arc, Mozart, and countless unheralded people under 18, 21, 25, and 35 have changed the world.

Youth are changing the world in ways we all follow all of the time, whether we’re aware of that or not. While we routinely don’t acknowledge them for doing it, the fact is that society is dragged forward chained to the heels of young people, today and throughout all times. There is a lot we can learn from them.

Ways Youth Change the World

Robert Kennedy famously summarized the cliche ways young people change the world in a speech from 1967, saying, “This world demands the qualities of youth; not a time of life but a state of mind, a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the life of ease.”

Its important to move beyond cliches though, and towards a practical, responsive logic that shows clearly why and how young people are changing the world. Here are five ways that’s happening right now.

• Youth are in school. Learning conformity through standardization, having their schedules delineated for them, and being forced to learn what others want them to teaches some youth to stay in line. For others, its an excuse and even permission to get out of the box and think in radical new ways. They’re learning about politics, they’re learning about the real world, and they’re launching their lives during current times, right now. Transforming education by demanding public accountability for public schools and forcing educators and education leaders to become responsive to the democratic citizens they’re responsible to and for is ensuring these young people change the future.
• Youth cannot vote. The demands of democratic civic engagement overburden many adults, effectively preventing them from voting, becoming involved, and owning the political process. Since youth cannot vote, many are driven towards apathy and disregard for the system. Those lessons will be applied to many things throughout their lives, and for some, that is civic life. These young people are becoming enraged, motivated, and empowered to take action and deliberately pave the road to the future.
• Youth are living in “my house by my rules”. Homes and neighborhoods around the world are ruled by tradition and culture that routinely, systematically, and wholly takes power away from children and youth. Growing up with the melancholic conformity of middle class suburbs, the deafening roar of poverty, or the privileged access wealth provides will each force a percentage of young people to deliberately seek to change the world throughout their lives. Warren Buffet was young once, as were Maya Angelou, David Gilmour, Dr. King, Napoleon, Da Vinci, Pho Khun Sri Indraditya, Julius Caesar, and Imhotep. All these world changers grew up in someone’s house and sought to change the world later. Those seeds are always planted in our youth, just like they are still today.
• Youth are connected. Like no generation before, young people are connected to each other, often in ways adults cannot imagine. The mapping of human ecology has never been nearly effective in history as it is now, with the appearance and immutability of social networking and technology to support connectivity becoming as ubiquitous as it is. These connections are becoming more obvious than ever before, and while the benefits are still becoming apparent, today’s generation of youth are growing up with it. Because of this, they are changing the world in ways we’ve never imagined.
• Youth are able of acting beyond expectations. As we age, most adults seek familiarity and ease. Growing increasingly distrustful of change, we latch onto consistency, segregation, and tight knit connections for our lives. Young people operate in ways that are counter to each of these, actively fostering and thriving within the unknown, the deeply entwined, and the actively frayed edges of social connectivity. Generation after generation, they are actively paving the road to the future because of this reality.

These may be obvious, simplistic perspectives on how young people are changing the world today. However, It can be hard to see what adults can do to practically do to make a difference themselves.

5 Easy Ways YOU Can Change the World

Parents, teachers, businesspeople, and adults everyday can help ensure that young people are paving the road to the future with five easy steps.

1. Keep forcing youth to do what adults want them to. The more we cause children and youth to do what we want them to, the more likely more young people are rebel. If you want to change the world, do not allow young people to use their voices, disallow them from becoming involved in civic life, and force them to follow arbitrary rules based on negative adult assumptions rather than scientific realities. This will change the world by encouraging so-called “youth rebelliousness”, which is generally anything in defiance of tradition and adult-identified “acceptability”.
2. Smother youth with adult-created culture. Promote young peoples’ sense of inability and indifference by pushing music, clothes, movies, tv, and other adult-created culture throughout the lives of every young person. Push them to believe sub-cultures and identities are segregating factors, and encourage them to negate their own self-worth. This will change the world by forcing more youth to make media for themselves and for adults who don’t buy into adult-created culture.
3. Limit the access youth have to technology. If you’re attending the average school or youth program today, you know its common to find rules against cell phone usage, classrooms completely devoid of computers for students, and limited Internet access throughout a lot of schools and nonprofit organizations intending to teach youth today. With the impending end of net neutrality, we will see the demise of free and unimpeded access to knowledge via the internet. If you want to change the world, continue to restrict youths’ access to technology and prohibit their free access to information and resources. This will push them to further innovate in technology and free the boundaries of knowledge however they can.
4. Force youth to follow the rules created by adults. Despite advances in science and clearly demonstrative examples of the contributions they make throughout society, for more than a century adults have clearly denied the increasing capacity of youth to self-manage and negotiate the world they share with us. Instead, we routinely infantalize youth, talking down to them, incapacitating and disenfranchising them with wholly discriminatory laws, policies, and rules that reflect traditional assumptions. This causes young people people to actively dismantle age-based, race-based, gender-based, and other bias-based perspectives that limit growth around the world.
5. Stay away from youth. Forced age-based segregation between youth and adults disallows young people from forming healthy, proactive, and equitable relationships with people older than them. This segregation is systematically enforced within schools, through after school and summer youth programs, throughout our business sector, and across governmental decision-making and policies. Dissatisfied by inept adult-driven, ineffectual economic choices, more young people will become more motivated to change the world in the coming years.

These steps are easy because they are already happening right now. If you want to ensure change the world, just let these steps keep happening!

My career is focused on working with adults and youth to build their awareness and ability to change the world on purpose. I believe that every conscientious adult has a responsibility to themselves, their families, and succeeding generations to take actual, practical, and positive action that changes the world, no matter how they do that. The list in this article does not represent that.

If you want to actually make a positive difference in the lives of young people, here are some simple things you can do right now:

• Read inspiring stories about what kids can do
• Learn how discrimination against young people affects everyone
• Form youth/adult partnerships at home, in your workplace, and throughout your community.
• Find out what you can do to change schools right now.
• Engage youth in changing schools, and in changing the world.

Whatever you choose to do, simply do something. Any action is generally better than no action, and with young people you actually can make a difference.

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