I recently read an article on Inc. online, titled “5 Traits Older Generations Don’t Understand About Millennials (According to a Millennial)”, by Nicolas Cole. You can find it here.
It’s a good read, although, it may raise your blood pressure a bit. Read it. What I have to say may not make a lot of sense without his article as a prerequisite. Read it and cut him some slack. We were all there once.
What cracks me up the most is that this could have been written 10 years ago, 20, or 30… When I was young, we were thought to be the narcissistic self centered arrogant punks full of ourselves. The old folks thought us to be useless and lazy and wanted us to calm down and wait and see – we’d understand in a few years.
We didn’t. We rolled over that generation and changed the world. They didn’t know what hit them.
And this millennial generation didn’t invent the vision quest, the “finding myself” by traveling the world. We wanted to travel and see it all. We didn’t want to accept the status quo and settle into a single career, falling asleep until retirement. And we didn’t. The millennials have access to everything – the world at their fingertips because my generation said about life and the world: “It’s not good enough – we can make it better.” And we did.
Foregoing the American dream? The so called “American Dream” was not a white picket fence to us. The American dream for us equaled possibility. It meant that we didn’t have to settle into what we thought the old world expected. We could make the dream what we wanted it to be. And we did.
Our American dreams are the reality of the Internet, your smart phone, global connectivity, supercomputers, space probes, robots on mars – those were our American dream, and, as you can see, we didn’t forgo it, we made it happen.
Our American dream was equality and fairness. Not a dream limited to a few or to just those like us. This has been the hardest fight, yet the most important. It’s far from done, but we were not about to accept any dream that ruled people out. The house at 927 W. Drury Lane only existed for the privileged class, so we burned it down.
Oh, did we ever want – and find or make – something of our own! The on-fire startup was born in my generation. The rejection of the establishment for creations of our own was a solid theme for us. We rejected, We built our own, and we never looked back. We recreated business, media, entertainment. We wanted our own, and we made our own.
that little phone in your pocket that allows you to do so much; we made that
Tackling brand new industries… You don’t know the half of it. We destroyed old industries. Not just industries, we smashed the whole economy into bits and built our own out of the shreds.
Again, that little phone in your pocket that allows you to do so much; we made that. We ripped the cord out of the wall and remade communications. We thought it up. We made the infrastructure that enables it and we built it. Then we kept rebuilding it and making it better.
The gaming company that hired you – they’re only here for you because my generation rejected the old and created your world for you. We liked board games, but they weren’t enough for us. We liked sports and activities, but they weren’t enough for us. Not only did we create digital versions of it all, we reinvented it in the physical world too.
And, don’t think you’re special because you’ve done all of your great work in the shadow of economic demise, terrorism, and global competition. Even we didn’t invent that one. But we certainly lived it. When I was young, the American Century was over. We were getting our clock cleaned by Asia and Europe. Malaise was the watchword of the day.
The Soviet Union was putting weaponized smallpox into ICBMs to finish off anything their nukes missed. Western Europe was expecting the tanks to roll in at any moment. We grew up always 30 minutes from a fiery obliteration. Hang that over your head. It nearly happened, by accident or by design, more times than I’d like to count. I’ll take the world of now over what we had, any day.
So, you also think you’re special and different because you’re the modern-day disrupters? You d*** well better be. That self-confidence you speak of – you’d better have it and you’d better have it in quantity. If you don’t have a wanderlust, a disquiet, and need for more, that will make my generation’s version of the same look small, than you are letting us and yourselves down.
You see things different than my generation does? I hope so. You are obligated to. You owe it to us, yourself, and the generations that follow to see things differently. My generation didn’t create all of this stuff for you to rest on our laurels. We built this new world so that our children and their children can take it to places we can’t even imagine. Don’t waste what we built. There’s too much that still needs to be done.
And one final thing I ask of you; when your kids say something similar about themselves vs. your generation, as you have in this article (and they will), don’t get defensive. Tell them that it’s their job to think different and to never be satisfied with the way things are. It was my generation’s job, it’s yours now, and it will be theirs soon. Tell them to never back down.