Hello to whoever reads this!
I’m a 21-year-old trying to navigate the path my future will take. I come from a lower/middle-class family, the way I’m currently living feels like a potential nightmare if it shapes my future or the resources I can provide for my future children. I understand you might wonder why I’m thinking so far ahead, but with many of my peers progressing in their lives and graduating university, I can’t help but consider my own trajectory. I want to build a name for myself, and in this era of high living costs, a normal job might not suffice. It seems like nowadays the only wealth that lasts is being born into generational wealth, which I wasn’t born into and so now I’ve gotta think outside the box.
Now, during my university break, the idea of starting a business or venturing into e-commerce (specifically, dropshipping) has been on my mind. However, navigating this market proves challenging, given the advice, some say “dropshipping is dead” while others sell their courses. It’s a bit overwhelming, and I’m left wondering where to start and who to trust for authentic guidance. Ultimately I aim to invent and launch a brand, my current wage feels inadequate for such goals. Therefore, my plan is to build my income before diving into the challenges of running a business.
I find myself at a crossroads, uncertain about the best path forward. I’m determined to make money, so any advice or guidance would be greatly appreciated. Help a person out.
Most of the people here are individuals who find the idea of working for little money or free or not being the majority shareholder or having all the power to be unacceptable. In other words older people who want to make money for themselves or only themselves.
If you are 21, you are young. That means you can take years off or time off and probably have little in the way of responsibilities (ongoing costs) unless you have a child or sick parent. That means you can join an accelerator or pre-accelerator. They will take you, work with you for six months and after the end of it you will team up with three or five or ten other people and use a fair equity sharing model to proceed.
https://slicingpie.com/the-new-pie-slicer/
Most people here cannot do this because they are not interested in creating a company that scales globally, only enriching themselves. That’s why you hear dropshipping, opening this or that store, doing real estate and so on. All of that is actually not what most serial entrepreneurs would call global scale. On top of that, most of these are low skill in that they don’t take ten thousand hours or a lifetime to master or hone the skill. That sounds a lot like having a job, but you actually have to bring something to the table or else your compensation and equity in a fair split (say slicing pie model) would scale accordingly (and you would end up making up for lack of skill or assets or value with excessive work which would make it like a job for sure).
Your best bet is to join the accelerator and work in a group (working in a group greatest chance of success). Your next best bet is to gain skills and be very good at whatever it is you do (which also carries into a career or a job). Most people here are actually going down the wrong path and will have very low chances of success. As always be careful what you listen to on the Internet. Go local, join a local group of entrepreneurs and you will make it real and actually accomplish something as opposed to locking yourself in a basement for years or trying to do everything yourself and failing because you don’t have all the necessary skills.
I love this. I agree. The term “skill” I feel has lost its attraction for the younger generation. And that includes people that are 35 and think they are old. Just wait 15 more years, and you will understand. You create wealth, unless you’re lucky and win the lottery it takes hard work and dedication to learn enough and gain valuable experience, and that’s how you build wealth… and. …security! There is so much to learn. You have to put in the work if you want it to last. Good luck, and enjoy your youth. Get real-world experience in an occupation you’re interested in and go from there. Good luck
Skill is always the harder path since it takes dedication. There’s also the risk you pick the wrong skill for profit in a market. You have to keep an eye out on trends.
Not everyone can gain skill in everything. Results is talent or intangibles times effort so some people will gain more results than other people for the same amount of effort. But talent untrained is useless. Most skills can be trained given enough effort. Once you have skill you can focus on smart work over excessive hours (hard work).
I think the sad truth is that most people have personalities or hobbies unsuited for survival in our capitalist dog eat dog world. Maybe take a deeper look at your hobbies and free time and see whether you’re just a consumer taking or if you’re a creator giving back. Beyond that most hobbies can be monetised. This attitude to life doesn’t sit well with those who believe in training and education but is actually a key difference in thought between rich people and workers (rich and wealthy tend to think in terms of skills and workers tend to think in terms of education or papers). Reality is probably somewhere in between and there’s more than one way to achieve success. You need to do what’s best for you and for most people that’s gaining skills. For others it will be rolling dice. But even if you’re a dice roller you got to setup so if you roll snake eyes you can roll again until you win.
I agree. The younger generation is always so detached from the world of social communication and person to person creativity. I always try to help them understand the greater picture of business. Clients can be accumulated thru so many channels online that most people don’t emerge themselves in a situation where you can gain real world knowledge about the target market or consumers feedback and take part in the whole experience instead of targeting people’s habits thru algorithms. The world has changed and evolved so fast its hard to get ahead of the new fade, that you must create the new idea or you will always be playing catch-up and ride rhe coattails of the creativity of the bold. You have to hustle for it 💯 make it happen!
I think the “younger generation” is making rational choices based on return on investment. You could choose to take risk or work hard but if the payoff isn’t enough then obviously you can refuse to do it. So “laying flat” “quiet quitting” and all of this is actually a rational economic choice for many people. Nevermind that the way that the “older generation” got ahead was to practice exactly the same. The only difference being, the price of homes was much lower so you could get 10x or 100x return for the same amount of effort.
It’s harder for younger people to make it work especially starting from 0 now. You also have to ignore the advice of well meaning but out of touch older people like buying only your dream home or a brand new detached home (now it’s get any property at all and not waiting), ignore distractions like crypto alt coins or picking stocks (you have to invest in an S&P500 index fund but you can’t make stock picks because that’s gambling) and so on. The amount of knowledge required to succeed, the knowledge floor and decision floor if you will has gone up.
One wrong move won’t ruin you, but ongoing bad decisions (every day you decide to keep all money in cash, delay buying any property, staying in the same job for too long because of fear, etc.) would compound and create extreme difficulty over the long run.