You & The Opportunity
Adaptation is one of the hallmarks of biological, social and cultural progress. Those that see the change coming lead us into the new age. Those that join in with the change become more equipped to live in the new world. For those that do not adjust, they are left behind and in some cases end up obsolete.
Those that do not adapt face an enormously challenging struggle to survive and, in some ways, mindlessly try to keep doing the same old thing expecting to make it. Unfortunately, this seldom works and are proven to be unfit for survival in the new environment.
This is where the sub-50/sub-150 find themselves with respect to the financial environment. It has been adapting for some time and is now a completely different environment than the one many us began working in and is 180 degrees different from the one we were raised to believe existed.
A significant source of hope for change of getting off the current road to being the future poor resides in the ability of those on the older end or the sub-50 to adapt and learn the new environment from the next generation. This is often the challenge of generational difference and generational change. Newer, faster and different can be frightening but the adaptation holds the key to getting us on a new course.
Old ideas of the way things work must give way to the new world we are living in. Information, individual abilities and the nature of work have all shifted
Information
Plenty has been said about the negatives of the internet age, social media, and smart phones being in Everyone’s hands. There is no doubt it has had life altering impact on fear and anxiety, especially in younger people. It has led to a strange world of news, misinformation and confirmation bias as algorithms continue to learn what things you look at, like and send you more of the same. It has conflicted the nature of the ‘public square,’ contextual elements and freedoms of speech. All of that is true as is the truth that can learn and access things that were once out of reach in ways never before.
There is no subject, no skill and no strategy that you cannot learn endlessly about. This is true in the financial realm as well. No longer is the world of finance reserved only for the elite or the licensed or the suits in an office. That divide has been broken down. That old mentality is done away with. There is still a technical knowledge that those of us with training possess but it is no longer reserved only for us.
The Pixar movie Ratatouille about a chef rat has as its main emphasis that “Anyone can cook.” Armed with that, Remi the rat pursues his love of food. Anyone can learn about financial products, investment strategies and so on. The internet is full of wonderful resources from articles to videos to books to advisors. The next generation is armed with this power and they are using it.
Over the past couple of years I have been surprised by the number of people approaching me about financial concepts they are learning about on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. This makes me excited and I want to throw in a word of caution. These platforms are giving people the ability to teach concepts, market financial ideas and debunk some old financial myths we may have all learned along the way. Armed with this education, more and more young people are making financial moves early and often and generally being more active with their finances than any previous generation.
The word of caution is that many of the strategies, whether it’s day trading stocks, buying crypto, being your own bank, dealing with options and margin, and aggressive real estate investing have a sophistication and careful planning that requires extensive knowledge, careful construction and, in some cases, great amounts of risk. By all means, learn all there is about these with what is available to you AND seek out a professional to go deeper into these and help you relate it to your specific situation.
Ignorance is now a matter of choice. Approximately 720,000 hours of content is uploaded to YouTube daily. Within that, each day, more knowledge, more information, more training, more concepts are being given to us. If you can search up funny cat videos, you can also search up financial strategies. Or, if you’ve ever looked up how to fix a leaky faucet or how to cook a steak, you could look up how to save for retirement and start learning some things in bite sized increments.
Individual Abilities
The information and learning environment we currently are in has opened the door wide for people to develop beyond their formal education and work experience.
One of the terms that I have found helpful is the idea of ‘talent stacking.’ Elsewhere, I have written that the old idea of a rigid job description that puts a limit around your work contributions is a thing of old. Business are quickly realizing that their work force has skills that go beyond the specific role they were hired for. Those that capitalize on these abilities increase productivity and employee well-being. Some companies even have a type of ‘free-time’ built in to the work week for people to think outside their role or work a contributing product that may be way outside their ‘job.’
This isn’t just a phenomenon of chance that you find someone is particularly skilled in an area you did not think. No, people are pursuing the expansion of their abilities in areas that interest them or that they may be proficient in. This knowledge is beyond something that resembles a hobby. It is genuine skill, ability and in many cases professional certifications. No longer do you require an additional 4 year college degree for competence in a skill set. You can learn to code, do graphic design, be software certified, and more with less time, ease of access and more cost effective than the way it was before.
Many of the old constraints have loosened or have gone away completely when it comes to individual ability and it has started to reshape the workplace, how work gets done and the entire way people earn money.
Employers are also rethinking their hiring models, job descriptions and how they access the ‘non-job description’ talents of their workforce. There is also higher levels of specialized training being offered or funded by employers to aid their team member’s development, make people more marketable and help contribute to broader success. All of this is part of the shifting economy of work.
Entrepreneurship, The Gig Economy & Side Hustles
Working a single 40 hour per week job as your only source of income is rapidly becoming a thing of the past and I am so glad that it is! To be clear, I believe in these jobs. They are economically and culturally important and have been the foundation for sub-50/sub-150. Some would even say that this is what America was built on.
The reality of having a single 40 hour a week job has created a situation where there is little distance between the cost of living and wages, like we have broadly within America. There simply is no way to nickel and dime your way to saving enough. Most can’t get a second full-time salary job for a variety of reasons. Most employers would laugh at you if you requested for your pay to be doubled. If you are paid hourly, labor laws prevent you from being able to work two times more hours at your job. It simply isn’t the right scenario for exponential earning.
What has grown out of this need for more income is something that couldn’t be more at the heart of an individualistic, capitalist, democracy and that is the entrepreneurial spirit. In many ways it highlights some of the best aspects of the human will, spirit and ingenuity. It can also be a high risk, high reward endeavor. In either case, entrepreneurship is one of the keys to the new economic world but also a powerful player in the remedy of the future poor.
Entrepreneurship is one area of life where you can exponentially increase your income and have money work differently and more in your favor than a W2 job. The restrictions on earning are more within your power and control than when they are based on a pay grid, salary structure, industry average of pay and so on. Those are important and designed to cap wages for the sake of business viability and profit. It isn’t only in the realm of starting a business or inventing a product, it is professional sales where there are no earning caps, content creating, the gig workspace and side hustles.
This connects perfectly to the shifting nature of work and how work gets accomplished. Businesses no longer need to rely completely on their hired staff as more and more work gets outsourced to professionals and qualified individuals. In some cases, you may be paying a premium for the contracted work but this may save you from overall cost of having employees. Some still cling to the idea that things for the business can only be done by those we employ. This can work when the resources are there to employ expertise or where the level of time required may be more than can be outsourced.
For example, Someone that is proficient in a particular software, skill or have a professional certification like an accountant can utilize that in more ways than ever before. An accountant, for example, can have a W2 job as an accountant for a business. They could also be the outsourced option for 10 small business that need part time bookkeeping and tax help. The second option opens up the possibility of exponential income potential