Letters to My Kids

Choosing to get married is a big step in your life, and almost invariably it’s one you underestimate.

Marriage seems so simple as a young person – you find the “right person”, fall in love, get married and everyone lives happily ever after. Well, it sort of works that way chronologically, but it’s a very naive view of the relationship.

Marriage is not about love, it’s about commitment.  It’s about two people determining that they are going to stay together, stay in love and stay committed to the relationship, despite the fact that they are two individuals whose preferences, goals, habits, appearance, finances and other commitments will change over time.  They have to be willing and able to make compromises and deal with human growth over time in order to hold things together.

Look at the person you are considering getting married to.  That person will be a different person in 5 years.  And a different one in 10 years.  And a very different one in 50 years.  You may look at the person you’re dating and honestly claim you could spend your life with this person.  And perhaps you could.  But that person will not be around in 10 years.

And what’s more, you will not be “you” in a few years.  You  may have a gut instead of washboard abs.  Your burning ambition may be replaced with a desire to sit on the sofa and watch sports all day.  You may acquire a dehabilitating disease and have to be attended like a baby.

And since marriage requires both parties to commit and compromise, you have to make the decision about your potential partner, too.  While you’re wondering if you’d love your potential when her figure is gone, you need to wonder as well if she will love you when you’re no longer a young Adonis.

“What’s so difficult about marriage?” 

• If either party is not committed, it falls apart.  One person can’t hold a marriage together. You both have to be working toward staying together.
• After the “honeymoon period”, people start to relax.  That’s good on a lot of levels, but if you begin to take the relationship for granted, trouble follows.  Imagine being offered a job for life – one from which you could never get fired.  Some people will rest on that security and do a great job free from the pressure.  Others would get really lazy and do nothing at all.  People in a relationship can be like that also.
• Marriage means you share everything.  Where your money goes, what your house looks like, who your friends are,  what you do for fun, etc.  Everything is a team decision.  If you don’t agree, conflict arises.
• Marriage means you’re together a lot.  For a long time. After a while, even endearing quirks can quickly become annoying.  Have you ever spend an extended period with your best friend and found they just annoyed you to death?  Think about being there for the rest of your life.
• You can’t “go home” at the end of the day and get a break from your partner. When you start an argument, you’re there until you finish.  If you try to get a break by going home to your parents or off with the guys, you just amplified the problem you’ll have to deal with when you return.
• Men and women are wired differently.  All the communication problems you had when dating are amplified times ten until you begin to understand how each other’s feelings work.  And you never completely figure it out.

On any given day, you’re going to disagree on things like this – You want to go to the game this weekend, your spouse wants to go shopping. You want to go to “your church”, they want to go to “theirs” or stay home.  You want the house neat, they don’t care.  They want a new car, you want to save money and fix the old one. You both want to live close to your families, but they live on opposite sides of the country.  Your boss wants you to spend extra time at work, they want you home for dinner. You think it’s their turn to change the baby, they think it’s yours.  Any one of these difficulties is a source of tension.  Now imagine dealing with all of them, every  day, for 50 years.

That is what makes marriage difficult.  It’s not being able to deal with a single point of conflict successfully.  It’s about dealing with many points, on all fronts, every day, no breaks for the rest of your lives.

“Why does it have to be for a lifetime?”

Sure, in modern days the lifetime commitment doesn’t get as much respect. People take on a marriage just like they used to take on dating relationships – if it doesn’t work out, we’ll separate and  find someone else.  It’s true that you can work it out legally pretty easily, but there are consequences:

• Rarely does it end well.  You tend to kill your relationship and often the split becomes hostile.  You can expect to lose a lot of money, a lot of time and a lot of respect from groups of people.  If you’re a guy, you can expect to be paying a second set of bills that you don’t gain any benefit from for the rest of your life as well.
• If you’ve been together long, you tend to lose your friends.  Either they take sides and resent you, or you have no place as a single with all the couples you spent time with.
• If your relationship gained you a job, a position, a certain standing in the community you may be in danger of losing them by the same association.
• Despite being common, there’s still a stigma that will carry into your next relationship.  No matter your reasons, you have the spectre of “couldn’t make it work” over you.  Future partners will hesitate.  Although you explain all the details, somewhere in their heads a little voice is saying “what did they do to ruin it?”
• If you have children, you disrupt their lives and their psyche severely by divorcing.  They will wonder if it was their fault, no matter how you work to assure them.  You will also now only have the joy of your life for a limited time, and competition between your former spouse and any new people that come into your lives will be heated.
• When you get back on the dating market, you will not be who you were.  You will be older, lack confidence, lack rapport, tend to turn people off by discussing your past relationships and probably look a lot worse than you did.

“So how do you know if this person is the right one?”

First, understand that there’s not a mythical “one person for you” out there.  Likely there are quite a few compatible people that you could be happy in marriage with.   The “right” person is the person you happen to connect with that has qualities that can hold a marriage together.

First of all, understand why you are considering this person.  What qualities do they have that draw you?  Are they temporal factors that may not be around in a few years like popularity, physical attractiveness, wealth?  Or long lasting characteristics like kindness, trust, cheerfulness?  And why does your significant other consider you?  For lasting traits or temporary ones?

Every person has to make their own decision about what’s valuable in a mate.  Here’s what I think is worth looking for:

• Trust.  If you’ve spent a lot of your relationship assuming the other is not trustworthy, or vice-versa, it’s not a good choice.
• Commitment.  Does this person keep their other commitments in life, or blow off the ones they lose interest in?  If you do not commit yourself daily to building trust, love, respect with your mate, the marriage will fail.
• Friendship.  You will be friends much more of the time than lovers.  If you don’t feel as comfortable with this person as you do your best friends, they’re not a good choice.  You’ve got to be able to get through hard times, share disappointments and kill a day with nothing to do.
• Kindness.  You’re going to need a lot of it in life.  If this person is unkind to people who can’t do anything for them, they’re a bad choice.
• Support.  You’ll need even more of this.  If this person doesn’t stand behind you in smaller matters, they  certainly won’t in larger ones.
• Communicative.  Communication will be one of your biggest problems in marriage.  The more easily you communicate, the better chances you’ll have.
• Similar degree of intelligence. Einsteins and dumb jocks/ditsy princesses don’t get along in the long run.  You have trouble with conversation, goals and standards.
• Similar goals.  If you want to be President and they want to be a welfare case, you’re not going to make it.
• Humor.  Bad times will come. You’re going to need help getting through them and get used to making light of the heavy.
• Equals.  If you find yourself constantly thinking that you’re really out of their league or vice-versa, don’t try it. It will lead to inequities in the relationship that will cause you trouble all your life.  If you feel like you/they “got lucky”, you/they probably did, and luck doesn’t last.

Two items I didn’t include are physical attraction and common interests.  I didn’t ignore them because they don’t matter, but because if you’re at a point of considering marriage, you’ve already got those things taken care of.

“Why get married?”

There are lots of good reasons:

• Unconditional love, stability and support.  You can’t buy this kind of emotional strength.
• The opportunity to share yourself completely. Your spouse is likely to be the only person that understands you thoroughly – maybe better than you understand yourself.
• Confidence.  Knowing you have someone who supports you no matter what is an amazing confidence boost. It can literally make a man out of a mouse overnight.
• Family.  A solid family unit is the only place children work well.  It’s the best chance of having support in your old age as well.  And the time invested in these relationships will last longer than any others you form.
• Lower cost of living.  It’s practical, but true.

There are also bad reasons:

• Thinking you are getting too old.  Rushing into a commitment that isn’t right is recipe for disaster. Take the time and find someone you can build a lifetime with. One year with the right person  is better than 50 with someone you hate.
• All your friends are.  Marrying to keep up with the Joneses or to stay in a social circle is again, recipe for disaster.
• In love with the idea of marriage.  Marriage will not make everything OK in your life.  If it’s the wrong choice, it will just amplify the problems.
• To help me grow up. Marriage you are unprepared for will make you grow up, but not in the way you plan.
• Fear of losing someone. If they’re the right one, they will wait.  If not, you’ll just enter into a more difficult relationship.

Marriage can be the most rewarding relationship you’ve ever expected.  It can also be a living nightmare.

Think.  Make the right choice.

Beyond the applicable skills for a job, there are a number of soft skills that will benefit you to develop if you want to move up and be recognized.

•  Appropriate dress. When in doubt, dress up instead of down. Wear a suit when it’s proper, a nice casual outfit on casual days or in fitting situations.  Something about a suit commands respect, even over a sport coat and tie. Even if you’re a junior, people tend to treat you like an executive.  And what’s more, over time they begin to see you that way. Wear it enough that you feel comfortable in it, so you appear to be relaxed and in your natural habitat when meeting with other suits. It really makes a difference in the way you’re regarded.
• Get a haircut that matches the suit. Nothing will kill the respect you gain with the suit than a haircut that’s completely out of sorts with it. People don’t see a professional anymore, they see a rock-star-wannabe trying to look like a suit.
• When you meet, shake hands and introduce yourself.  Besides showing basic politeness, it breaks the ice to relationships you need to form.   You make the move first – when you offer your hand, you send the signal that you are in control of the relationship. Give a firm handshake even if you are offered a “cold fish”.  When ladies shake hands with men, they generally try to give a “man’s shake” to assert themselves.  You can show politeness by accepting it, but squeezing gently.  I always make it a practice to squeeze a lady’s hand with just two fingers.  Lead with your own name – “Hi, I’m John Smith”.  If they don’t immediately offer, follow with “… and you are?”  Always express that you are pleased to meet them.
• Don’t just introduce yourself and drop the ball.  If there are several people, move along to the next.  After you’ve introduced yourself to the group, give a slight pause to allow people to speak and if no one does, start a general conversation that all can reply to.  “Where are you guys from?”, “How do you like X”, etc.
• Remember people’s names.  It’s so embarrassing to ignore a name at the front of the conversation and suddenly realize you need to know it before the end.  Make a mental picture of the name or some mnemonic that helps you remember it.  I.e., if it’s “John Brown”, picture his face colored brown.  If it’s more difficult like “Nancy Abromowitz”, you might think “A-broom-a-witch” and picture her as a witch on a broom.
• If it’s appropriate to do so, exchange business cards at the END of the conversation.
• When you need to speak with someone at length, ask to make an appointment.  If they have time, they’ll go ahead and give it to you, but offering shows them you respect their time.
• Speak clearly.  Avoid slang or “ums” or familiarities. Don’t curse, even if they do.

A lot of these will seem flexible and it’s OK to ignore some of them when you’re among friends or in a more casual atmosphere.  But it never hurts to use them and it can hurt to ignore them.  Bottom line – if you’re not absolutely sure it’s OK to ignore the convention, don’t.

If you decide to work for someone else, you will very quickly notice that although your new job is pretty good, there are better ones in the company.  Jobs making more money, carrying more prestige, offering fringe benefits and doing more interesting work.  Maybe it’s your boss’s position, or his boss’s. And sooner or later, you decide you’d like to have some of that for yourself. So you begin the ongoing effort of moving up the ladder to better positions.

Who gets the best jobs?  Well, sometimes it’s a matter of privilege -  being the boss’s son or a stakeholder’s relative or something beyond your control.  Sometimes it’s a matter of seniority, which you don’t have yet.  But quite a few of them are occupied by people who didn’t have a leg up.  How did they get there?  Because outside of favoritism, the best jobs go to the best employees.

It usually takes some time in the job market to figure this out, amazingly.  You get so caught up in doing your own work that you don’t look around at the bigger picture.  And in many cases, your only examples are people who aren’t getting ahead themselves.  So I’m going to give you an up-front primer that you can use from Day 1 to establish yourself as a good employee that’s a natural choice for the good jobs.

•  First and foremost, a good employee gets their work done. It’s complete, shows quality and you make whatever effort is necessary to bring it in on time, within budget, filling in all the necessary paperwork and going through the right channels.  This seems natural, but once you get in the flow you will be tempted to take shortcuts that you think are unimportant.  These will come back to trip you up, and even if you had the best intentions, you are now “the guy who didn’t follow the rules”.  So get your own job done first, and do it right.
• A good employee takes initiative.  That doesn’t mean you step on toes and try to do someone else’s work as well.  It simply means you pay attention and do what needs to be done even if you haven’t been explicitly told to do it.  Taking time to be friendly to a customer while serving them is initiative. Finding something that helps other employee work faster/better/more effectively and suggesting it to a superior is initiative. Cleaning up the area around your workstation when you’re only supposed to clean your workstation is initiative.  If there’s a period of time when they have nothing to do, they find something constructive to do that benefits the company.
• A good employee takes responsibility.  They don’t pass the buck and say they couldn’t finish X because Y didn’t deliver.  They make it clear that if you give them  a task, you can trust them to deliver it.  And when you have difficulties getting results from Y, you ask advice from your boss – both for the support and to let them know that Y’s getting in your way without being a tattletale.
• A good employee honors his commitments.  That means you return calls, show up to meetings on time, come prepared, etc. Don’t ever be “the guy that didn’t get back to me”.
• A good employee does not whine.  They register complaints when they are truly hindrances, but they do their work cheerfully, don’t complain about the conditions and generally give off the vibe that they’re happy to be doing what they’re doing.  Whining puts you on everyone’s bad list.
• A good employee has people skills.  That doesn’t mean you have to be the office socialite, but it does mean you can get along with people, keep personal conflicts out of your work relationships, can talk casually and socially to other employees (and bosses!) and generally are the kind of person people like to spend time with.  No one will move you up to work beside them if they can’t get along with you.
• A good employee always remembers that the customer is #1.  Even if the customer is problematic, they always treat them with the utmost respect and go out of their way to please them.  You’d rather serve a customer and be late on your own tasks than to be on time and leave the customer unserved or pass them off to someone else. You especially have to watch this, because it’s easy to just pass them off to another employee who may not be available.  If you can’t serve them, stick with them until you can assure that they will speak to the person they need to next.
• A good employee is consistent.  They do good work every time.  They don’t shine like a star on one project and fall like a stone on others.  You  may get a pat on the back for standing out, but you’ll get promoted for standing out every time.
• A good employee gets noticed. This is an act of balance. You don’t want to be seen as someone who blows their own horn all the time, but if you do all this great stuff anonymously, you don’t get credit for it and bosses just assume you’re just a face in the crowd. You can do this on a low profile, in various ways – copying your bosses on communications they need to know about – that happen to mention your involvement, asking someone questions about the right way to do something – something outstanding you’re doing, etc.

With these qualities, you’ll rise fast.  Understand you’re not going to get promoted on your second day – it doesn’t work that fast.  But by following those guidelines over a period of time – a natural  period would be your regular evaluations – you can establish yourself as promotion-worthy.

So, with a demonstrated track record of being a good employee, you need a little strategy to make the move.

• Find out what it takes to get to the next step.  Are their education requirements, or specific skills you can gain?  Does the company have a formal promotion policy?  Ask your supervisor in your performance reviews what they are looking for in that position, or if it’s in a different department, make an appointment with that supervisor and ask them what they’re looking for.
• Start looking for ways to meet those requirements.  If it’s outside your regular responsibilities, maybe you could involve yourself peripherally.  If you’re a presentation whiz, you could find a way to ask an executive if they’d like your help putting together a presentation using some new techniques you’ve learned for their big board meeting.   And remember to always get credit, and always do it subtly.
• Most steps up are to management, so you can work on building general management skills.  Go to seminars.  Read books and materials.  Read trade publications to get a bigger overall picture of your industry and workplace. And let your superiors know you’re doing this by bringing up relevant things you’ve learned when the opportunity presents itself.
• Organizational skills are always good to develop.  People generally have trouble with organization and showing yourself to be a standout is always a big positive.
• Don’t make enemies by stepping on people, not giving them credit or stealing their opportunities.  Even if you don’t care about your co-workers, word gets around that you’re cut-throat; and no one will want to see you up on their level cutting their throats.
• Build social relationships with the right people.  So much of business is politics and social connections.  No matter how much you despise them, go ahead and develop them. People promote people they like – there’s no way of getting around it.  And vice-versa, don’t form strong relationships with the people who are not good employees.

So you’re motivated to find a good job. Given that you now understand what makes a job good, you have to ask yourself what particular job fits your interests so you can start preparing for it.

Most kids head off for college with the vaguest ideas of what they want to study, change majors a few times and end up working in a job they didn’t prepare for. 99% of those people do so because they never took the time to think about what they wanted to do. They got thoughtful around their senior year and decided being a doctor sounded cool. Or their dad was a salesman and he seemed to do pretty well. Or they loved a teacher and thought they’d like to be a cool teacher like that. That’s the least effective thing you can do.

I’d like to challenge you to make a smart decision about your education by thinking ahead.

• Is their a particular field that fits your interests? Is there anything you have a passion for? Do you love movies, or TV, or music, or sports? Do you like the idea of being a community pillar like a small town doctor or lawyer? Does a political position intrigue you? Do you like to teach?  Do you want to be seen as an intellectual?  Do you like the idea of working in entertainment?  Do you like the idea of helping people?  You’re just looking for a general category or two at this point.
• Once you’ve got a general category, start thinking about tasks you enjoy. Do you enjoy leading people, or trying to convince them to commit to something? Do you enjoy working by yourself? Did you like math in school, or science, or history? Did you enjoy working with a team? Make a list of the things you enjoyed doing during your high school years and summer jobs to refer back to.
• Now think about your capabilities. What do people tell you you have a talent for? Ask people where they think your talents lie – your parents, teachers, etc. Do you communicate well, study well? Are you a whiz with figures, or great with physical work? Are you a people person or a loner?  Do you enjoy travel? Again, make a list.
• Now start looking at your lists side by side and see if anything jumps out at you. If you were good at math, a loner and enjoyed sports, you might enjoy doing stats. If you were outgoing, a great leader and loved TV, you might think about sales within that field. If you don’t find anything immediately, don’t worry – but if you can you’ll be even better prepared.
• Spend some time researching the industry you like.  Look at trade publications or classified ads. What kind of jobs are out there in that field? Which are plentiful? Do they pay what you want them to? Do they have sufficient prestige? What kind of education and skills are demanded of this profession? Will you have to move away to get this kind of job and is that OK with you?
• Hopefully by this time you’ve got some ideas about what jobs you might like to fill. Now’s the time to experiment a little. Try out your potential profession. If you think you’d like to make movies, make a movie. Use a home videocam, recruit your friends and try to make the most professional looking movie you can. You’ll likely discover that it’s harder than it looks to make a great movie. You’ll also learn what about it you enjoyed and what you didn’t enjoy.
• After completing a test project, regroup and think about it. Maybe you discovered you didn’t like directing as much as doing special effects on a computer. Or maybe you enjoyed recruiting friends and selling them on the idea better than the actual movie making. Or maybe you realize you shot a horrible movie, but kept the best records of anyone you know. Try a couple of these little projects to test the waters.
• After your projects, re-evaluate what you think you might want to do. If you found you were great at recruiting teenage actors, you probably have a talent for sales. Try getting a more serious job in that field. If you can’t get hired, volunteer. Sell ads for the yearbook. Get a job in a department store selling clothes. Test it out a little more in a situation that’s closer to the real world. If you don’t like it, go back to your experience with your projects and start again on something else.
• When you’ve got an idea of your desired field and a general idea of the kind of job you might like, do some more research and understand the practical job path. If you want to be an NFL sportscaster, no one’s going to hand you that job straight out of school. But you might see how you could start covering local games, move on to college and then to the pros. If you want to be a big Hollywood director, you probably will need to find a day job that will build your skills (like with a local TV station or independent film company) while you work toward the creation that will put you on the map. Talk to guidance counselors, do research and understand what you’re going to have to do to get there. What kind of education do you need? What skills can you be learning from books and other independent study materials? What sort of jobs could you take as a student that would use similar skills?
• Once you have your path laid out, start working toward it. If you want to be a sportscaster, you can probably start learning by volunteering to do menial work in the booth at local football games. Or maybe you could convince your school to let you do a student broadcast on the internet as a project. If you want to sell, learn about your desired industry and sales techniques – there are plenty of resources for free right in your local library. Get started learning.
• If you decide in this process that you made a mistake about enjoying doing this, start over again. Go back as far in the process as you are confident and begin it again.

Be flexible when you’re looking.  For every interesting job you know about, there are other well paying jobs that are just as interesting behind the scenes.  Even if you determine you can’t be a football star, rock star, movie star or what have you, you can still be involved in these fields, often just as closely as the people in the limelight.

• Maybe you love movies, but see that there are only a few top name directors in the world at any time. Behind every movie director there are producers, specialty directors, cameramen, technicians, special effects guys, stunt men,  writers, managers, financial experts, engineers, etc.  Establishing yourself in one of these could lead to being a director yourself.  If you really enjoy directing, you might combine it with other interests and specialize in documentaries, or corporate films, or something similar.  You might like teaching others to direct. Or you might find a better fit for yourself that you didn’t even recognize..
• Behind every pro athelete are managers, coaches, trainers, financial experts, therapists, accountants, analysts, etc.
• Some jobs lend themselves to any industry.  Sales, accounting, computer work, management, leadership, etc. are always in demand and have the added benefit of being able to move those skills from field to field if your interests change.

You might notice that this process is going to take some time, and it does. Most people get a late start and have to re-educate themselves by going back to school and only finding their dream jobs later in life. So start early! It’s never too early. If you can have a good idea of where you’re going before you make college plans, you can put yourself strongly ahead of the pack. It’s the difference between being another face in the crowd and a standout prospect for the recruiter that visits your school.

You’re going to be working for most of the day, most of your life – so you might as well find something that’s a joy instead of a burden. And there’s no better time than the present to get started.

All your life adults do their best to impress upon you the importance of getting a “good job”.  And I’m sure you don’t disagree – everyone wants to be successful, secure and motivated to get up and go to work in the mornings.  But you may be confused at any point in time as to exactly what a “good job” is for you.

I’d like to give you a little advice on what I see as a “good job”.

• A “good job” is what you consider to be a good job. Adults may encourage you to be a doctor or lawyer or something of that nature – they do that because they assume you hold this positions in the same esteem that they do.  But even a prominent, well-paying job is not a good job for you if it doesn’t fit your particular needs.
• A “good job” is one doing something that you enjoy.  Certain jobs are always held in high esteem – doctors, lawyers, etc.  But if the idea of treating patients or working with the law is excruciatingly for you, it’s not a good fit.  In the end, this is going to be the #1 critical factor for job satisfaction.  Salary, benefits and hours will not seem nearly as essential if you really enjoy what you’re doing – because it doesn’t really feel like working.  If you can tell yourself “I’d do this job for free”, that’s a pretty good hint.  Happy is better than wealthy.
• A “good job” pays you enough to fund the lifestyle you intend to live. If you want the big house on the hill, luxury cars, vacation homes, etc., you’re going to need a job with the earning potential to get that. You are not going to fund a $250K/yr lifestyle with a $30K/yr. job.
• A “good job” has a payment model that matches your personality. Some people value the security of a salary over the earnings potential.  Some are motivated to work by commission or case, generating money for each sale/client they follow through on.   Some prefer self-employment where they are paid based on the overall performance of the business.  Salaries make it easy to budget and the money is generally there when you expect it, but you don’t really have a chance to move beyond those rewards.  Commissions/case work will have more fluctuating income, highs and lows you’ll need to plan for, but carry the opportunity of “making the big sale” and bringing home an unexpected windfall.  Self employment is the same, but usually more extreme.  You need to find the kind of payment model that motivates you to succeed.
• A “good job” gives you the opportunity to learn and grow.  No matter how fascinated you are with a job starting out, it’s going to get old eventually. If you don’t have a chance to take on new challenges and new responsibilities, you face a strong risk of burnout.  For example, doctors with a private practice will be challenged for the first few years, but burnout is easy to achieve when you see the same people, the same illnesses day after day.
• A “good job” has advancement potential. Because your need for challenges, income and growth are going to come, you need a job that will let you step up as well.  If you receive the challenge without the reward, you’ll feel devalued.  If you get the rewards without the challenges (unlikely), you won’t be motivated.
• A “good job” has an atmosphere that suits your tastes.  You may feed off competition and want a competitive environment.  You may be social and need a group of friendly, supportive co-workers. Or you may be an introvert that would prefer working in an office with a closed door most of the day. If you really hate meeting new people, you probably shouldn’t go into sales.  If you hate being alone for long periods of time, you probably shouldn’t be an astronaut.  If you hate authority figures, you should probably work for yourself and not for the military.

Remember nothing is permanent.  If you don’t have a “good job”, you can start trying to find one.  If you have one, there’s nothing to stop you from choosing another, even in another field.  But since it is a big step, you should at least do your best to make sure you’re stepping somewhere that will improve your situation.

What’s a “good job” to you?

Around your teen years, you’re going to start having difficulty with the adult world. We’re going to seem very disconnected from you. We don’t care about the things you care about and vice versa. We spend all our time watching the news instead of entertainment programs. We do things like improvements around the house instead of playing games or hanging out. We don’t understand why your loud music is cool, or your outrageous clothes/hair are desirable. We worry too much about your grades, your friends, your future. We fixate on money and work and don’t understand how tough peer pressure is. As a matter of fact, you may think at times that we just don’t have anything valuable to contribute to your life at this point besides a meal ticket.

Well, it’s true, to a degree. We do worry about different things and focus on different things. We disapprove of some of the things you think are great.  Maybe it seems like we just have hopelessly incompatible ideas about life.

But it’s your job to understand us, not the other way around. As your Dad, I do everything I can to understand and support you and to help make things better for you, but in the end it’s your responsibility to understand me and the adult world as a whole.

“Why”, you say, bristling. “Why do I have to try to fit into your world instead of you fitting into mine?”

It’s very simple. Adults are in charge of the world. We own everything. We make all the rules and enforce them. We own the businesses, we run the government, we make the laws and enforce them and we decide at any given point exactly how much of the world you can enjoy and what you’re allowed to do.

Think about it for a minute. As teenagers, you “own” a tiny little subculture -basically some ways to dress, speak and behave – and you probably learned them from some adults marketing them to you – selling you on the idea that something is “yours” so you’ll give them some money. You don’t own anything. You’re in the minority and you have no real power. What little power you believe you hold over adults is just by benefit of our concern for you. If you all packed up and left we’d be missing the emotional connections, but functionally everything would keep going just fine.

Think about a baby. Basically, they know how to cry, poop and eat. They have no concept of friendship, community, sacrifice, pressure. They are completely self-centered and they have no idea how the world works. If you were to leave them unsupervised, they’d die. At age 16, you’ve got nearly 16 years of a head start on them. You’ve got 16 years worth of experience about how the world works, how to get things done, how to get ahead and what’s worth enjoying.

As a father, I’ve got 30+ years on you. And I haven’t been sitting dormant or getting stupider during that time. I’ve been doing exactly what you’re doing – learning how the world works and how to make it work for me. I don’t watch the news because I’m boring – I watch it because I know how those news stories affect me and what I might have to do because of some recent development. I’ve been learning about friendship and loyalty and culture and history and having real world experiences dealing with people. Most other adults have as well. And we use that knowledge and experience to set things up so the world works for all of us.

I’m not saying this to demean or demoralize you. I’m saying it to make a point.

As a teenager, it’s your responsibility to learn to be an adult. You don’t really get to dodge the process. Either time, experience or need is going to ensure that you become an adult. If you want to get anything done in life, you have to be an adult. Even the teenagers who get held up for starting businesses or saving the environment or getting recognized by the media got there by interacting with the adult world. The teenager who raises money for some noble cause does so by talking adults out of their money. Teen movie stars or pop stars didn’t get themselves there – their parents did. The money you earn for a job you earn by acting like an adult for an adult.

I’m not suggesting you give up your childhood. Enjoy every stage of life. Taste the unique flavor it offers. But the fact is, the sooner you learn to fit into the adult world, the better:

• The world just does not make sense to you until you start thinking like an adult, because adults own and operate everything. We make the rules the way we do because we’ve learned that this is what works. And the sooner you learn to think like an adult, the sooner the world will make sense to you.
• You can’t achieve your dreams without establishing them in the adult world. And the sooner you realize this, the sooner you can take advantage of it.
• Adults treat other adults with more respect and freedom because we’ve all been through the growing up process and recognize that another adult has a basic degree of knowledge and competency we can count on. So to get treated with that respect, you have to act like an adult so other adults know you’re capable of handling it.
• You’re headed that way anyway – you might as well start establishing yourself there so you can be a front runner.

Even if you don’t really care for our culture and methods at this time, that’s the best way of getting inside our systems to make things work for you.

• You may think your wild hair/clothes are cool, but you’re more likely to get hired for a job if you look like an adult, because the adult boss wants someone that he can count on acting like an adult.
• You may not care about finances, current events or other grown up topics, but when you learn about them you get a better idea of how these worlds work and how they affect you.
• You may not want to get a job, but the sooner you start interacting in the workplace with other adults, the better prepared you will be when you get serious about going to work.

You don’t have to give up what’s meaningful for you as a teenager. Just understand you have to function on adult terms to get things done in the adult world. And everything you learn in the process is 100% applicable to the next stage of development you’ll be taking, so it’s worth the effort.

There’s a time to grow up.

I’m hoping you’ll never need to read this post to learn something new. I’m doing my best to teach you from a young age about how finances make a difference in your life and plan to continue that practice. But I think it’s critical to state it in case you ever need a refresher, a reminder or something to pass on to a friend in need, because it’s a very serious lesson.

Money matters in the real world. It really does. It’s not the most important thing in life and I think it’s unhealthy to focus on it too intently. But there is no getting around the fact that you need money to have a life worth having in America.

As a teenager, you probably don’t thoroughly understand how much money it takes to make it in the world. Maybe you think finishing your schooling isn’t all that important or that the parents are so demanding that you’d be better off hitting the streets on your own. Or maybe you’re set on becoming an artist of sorts and don’t want to waste your time on business when you plan to be a rock star or famous author someday.

Let’s try a little hypothetical example. Suppose you’ve just had it with your parents and school and decided to drop out and run away from home, or you packed your guitar/notebooks and headed out to learn about fame and fortune. Let’s talk about what it takes to get started on your own (in 2007 figures, in your average medium size town – obviously the costs will be more in later years and larger cities):

• First you’ll need somewhere to sleep. An apartment will run you between $500-$1000 /month for a nice place comparable to your home. The cheapest you can go would be a $300-$500 range (if you can find it), and that’s for a place that’s ugly as sin, substandard or nonexistent heating/cooling, broken plumbing, dirty, smelly, pest-infested. In either place, you can count on putting down 2 months rent to get started – and since you’re young, probably a security deposit of about half your rent to make sure you don’t wreck the place and leave. You’ll need to turn on the power, for about a $20-$30 fee, and probably a security deposit of $100-$200 since you have no credit history.
• You’d probably like a phone – either around $60/month for a cellular or $25/month for a landline with no long distance. You can count on about $30 to install that landline and at least a $50 deposit, since you have no credit history.
• You’d probably like cable TV, which is about $60/month and $50 to install it. You also need a TV, but you can get by with a 13″ for around $100.
• You need to furnish the place – at least a bed, table, chair and sofa. You can’t afford new stuff, but you could probably find some used things in the classifieds for around $300-$400. If you don’t have transportation, you’ll have to get a friend to help pick it up or rent a truck for $150-$200 to go get it and pay some men to help you move it in.
• You’ll also need dishes, silverware, pots and pans. Most apartments will come with a stove, but if you haven’t a lot of cooking skills you’ll be looking for a microwave. You might get that with an upper end apartment, but more likely you’ll need to buy one. You also need towels, sheets, blankets, pillows, toilet paper, cleaning supplies, toiletries, etc. Don’t forget an alarm clock. And a bit of food basics to get started – milk, water, salt, sugar, condiments, etc. At least another $300, bargain basement.
• You’ll need transportation if you can’t use public transit. A new car is out of the question, but you might find a junker for under $1000. To drive that car off the lot, you need $35 for the title transfer, $150-$300 for the license plate, 8% of your purchase price for tax and $50 for your first tank of gas. You’ll have trouble getting insurance since you’re underage – most companies will simply refuse you. If you find one, it will cost $2000 a year to insure you and they’ll want at least $800 up front to activate it.

So far, that’s around $5000 up front to get started with a junky apartment, and a junky car. If you didn’t steal that much upon leaving or have a credit card to finance it on, you might as well check into the homeless shelter. But let’s assume you actually have a credit card with a large enough limit to get started and all these entities will actually take it instead of demanding cash. So let’s talk living expenses/month:

• Rent = $300-$500
• Heating/Cooling/Electric = around $150-$250
• Car Insurance = $100
• Gas = $50
• Basic food = $200
• Phone = $25-$60
• Cable = $60
• Car Repairs/Maint = $100 (a junker car is going to need repair fairly soon and if you aren’t saving, you’ll be sitting)
• Credit card bill = at least $100/mo just to pay off the minimum balance.

So, how are you going to pay for this bottom of the barrel lifestyle? You’re going to get a job. Since you don’t have a college education, you’re likely going to be working a minimum wage job, currently around $5/hr.

Doing a little calculating, you’re going to see that you need to work about 55 hrs/week in order to meet that $1100 monthly expense (best case scenario). No one is going to hire you to be paid regular overtime, and most places will limit your hours to 20 to avoid paying you benefits. That means you’re going to have to be resourceful enough to get 3 jobs with schedules that won’t conflict – probably day, night and weekend work. You’ll be working 11 hours a day, 5 days a week and go ahead and cross off a couple more hours for transit and the inevitable breaks in time between shifts.

So here’s the price of freedom and independance: You live in a dump with junky furniture and a junky car. 13 hours of your day are consumed with work and at least 3 hours eating and keeping yourself maintained. With 8 hours sleep, that’s your whole day. If you have a car accident, you’ll lose your work while arranging for the insurance to pay for it and you’re on the street. If you have health problems of any sort, you’re on the street. You have no money for clothes, dating, entertainment, music, parties. If anything goes wrong, you’re done for. Get a traffic ticket and your insurance goes up, get the flu and have to miss work for a week – you’re out on the street. Once you’re there, you lost all your startup costs and you’ll need to pull together another $5000 to get started again.

This is called poverty. This sort of no-future, working 60 hours a week, can’t make ends meet, no way out kind of existence. The cost of entry to an American life is extremely high. It’s just a fact of life.

A few things should be evident to you by now:

• An education or job training is a must. You have to invest in yourself so you can make more than minimum wage – you can’t survive with anything you’d want to call a life. You don’t mind making minimum when you’re a teenager because it’s just icing on the cake. Your parents have paid the cost of entry, pay the rent, probably pay your car, insurance, clothes and take care of the “what if” situations. It doesn’t cut it on it’s own. You’ve got to have a professional job to make it out there.
• You need that education up front, because it’s incredibly hard to go back to school when you’re working to support yourself. Especially a situation like I’ve described – without someone taking on your bills and expenses, you literally couldn’t work and school at the same time. The inspiring stories you see on TV are the exceptions, and they had to push themselves to the limit to make it work.
• You need your family to help you get started. Even if it’s just letting you take your furniture/stereo/tv/etc. and the mismatched dishes/silverware and a couple week’s groceries, that start makes things manageable for someone striking out on their first paycheck. Don’t burn your bridges there or feel a need to be “independent”. They can and want to help you – and you need it. Without their help, you start with an incredible load on your back.

Suppose I’ve convinced you that you do need an education and a good job to make it. Let’s take it to the next level.

Your parents worry about money for this reason too. Not only are they worrying about those same issues for themselves, they’re worrying about them for every member of your family. If they go under, your mom, sister and brother all come down too and get to live under the same conditions.

In addition, there are new money worries. Everyone has to be insured thoroughly. They want a good school, a good neighborhood and a good atmosphere for the family to live in, all of which means more money. Think about all the extras that come into play when you’re a parent – Christmas, birthdays, proms, soccer teams, vacations, eating out, movies, school pictures, yearbooks. And if they’re smart, they’re putting away a significant amount for retirement so they don’t call on you to move in your house when they get older.

Even in an environment where your parent make a good living, there’s always the unexpected. A hospitalization, someone gets downsized, a mother decides to stay home with the children or a sick parent. The dangers are the same as the first situation I described. Sure, there’s a little more padding between the sweet life and the street, but that makes the cost of re-entry greater also – in the $50000-$100000 range.

Believe me, your parents would love to be a little more flexible with their money. They’d love to take the family on a world vacation for a few months, buy the most expensive homes/cars/clothing/etc. just for the fun of it. They’d love to fund you in your every endeavor and send you off in style. You don’t believe it, but they’d like to send you off to college in a luxury car, the hottest designer clothes, an apartment in the most expensive complex in town and fully stock it for you with every cool thing you can imagine. Parents like to overspend on their children – it’s an artifact we learned from our parents. But because we have to “pay the rent” and we don’t want to all be enjoying our family love out on the street, we’re cautious, we save and we budget. Because as great as blowing our savings on fun sounds, it doesn’t near measure up to the fear of living on the street.

Someday, I imagine you’ll want a family as well. You’ll see similar situations and concerns. You’ll have a lot of stress on you as well.

So the big lessons…

• Even if you are frustrated with your life as a teenager and think your parents are stupid and school is stupid and you’ll go crazy if you don’t pack up and head out on your own, remember that the day you decide to do it, you will have to pay the rent.
• It is important to plan for a future in which you make a good amount of money because after you leave home, you will have to pay the rent.
• Your parents spend a lot of time worrying about money and giving you grief about overspending because they pay the rent for all of you.

Please understand – money is not the most important thing in life. But it’s a fact that without it you starve, and without enough of it, your life is not going to be the sort of life you’re used to. You go to school, get a good job or start a business to give you the ability to not stress over survival matters and apply your efforts to your passions.

I can’t tell you how many times you’ve asked me “How much longer do I have to go to school” in your childhood. I’ll admit that I wasn’t a fan of school either when I was in it. But I can tell you about an experience that changed my mind about it.

In my senior year I was taking the only computer science course my high school offered. For the most part, it was a boring exercise into things I already knew pretty well. Until the day that our teacher showed us a silly little character animation she got from somewhere. It was so laughably out of date that a couple of my friends and I just felt like it was ripe grounds for a prank. So we got the source code when the teacher was out of the room and started studying it. And the next time the teacher pulled it out, it had been edited creatively into a little joke about some of the people in the class and the teacher. Yes, it was juvenile and probably something I shouldn’t have done. But it left an mark on me that continues to this day – learning with a purpose can be really fun.

Quite a few people let their school experience kill their enthusiasm for education. Mine was just the opposite. My study habits occasionally went by the wayside while I pursued other interests, but I’ve become a voracious learner, absorbing everything of interest I can put my hands on. I read between 10 and 20 books a year and many more magazine and news articles. I see something interesting and make a hobby of learning how to do it. I see complex systems and want to know how they work – how to take them apart and repurpose them and make them do new things.

The fact is, the world keeps moving forward. If your education ended with school, you can count yourself behind and getting farther behind every day. You have to do a certain amount of learning just to keep up. And a certain amount beyond that to pull ahead.

Don’t lose the enthusiasm for learning. Examine your goals and determine what skills will get you there sooner and find a way to build your knowledge. Pursue items of interest – know that “you CAN do that” and learn how. Go below the surface of required knowledge and find the gems underneath.  Learn to love ideas and experiment with them.  The impossible is only impossible until someone finds out how to do it.  Ask, learn and love it.

It will make you the person you can be.

It happens to all of us.  You start out with the best intentions and a powerful drive, but somewhere along the way enthusiasm wanes.  Two days into your diet you find yourself on the sofa with a bag of chips.  A week into your big project and you’ve hit writer’s block.  Your goals seem less important and you’re tempted with the ease of abandoning your efforts.

Staying motivated is never easy, but not impossible.  There are more than a few ways to get yourself back on track.

•  Reconnect yourself with your motivational roots.  What inspired you to get started? A book, a person, an observation? Go back to it and rekindle the fire.
• Reconnect yourself with your goal. Visualize the end result.  Take your mind off the here and now.  Spend some time picturing yourself completing your goal and how you’ll feel about that accomplishment.  Remind yourself that time invested is time well spent.
• Make it easier.  Put structures in place to get you moving toward your goal.  Eliminate bad foods from your household to stay on a diet.  Make exercise a no-excuses daily event.  Don’t allow yourself to watch television until you’ve written a certain number of pages. Roll out the red carpet for your goal so it’s easier to pursue it.
• Find kindred spirits. Find others who are pursuing similar goals and motivate each other.  Be responsible for each other.  Find a workout partner, or a working partner.  Have a little friendly competition. When you have someone to answer to, it’s a little easier to keep pushing.  And if you can’t find a particular someone, then work on it in public.  You tend to be a bit more motivated to work if you think others are looking at you.
• Teach someone else. Commit yourself to helping someone that’s at a lower level than you.  To keep your enthusiasm up for your baseball practice, teach a younger kid the fundamentals.  Volunteer to help a coach with Little League.  It really helps to reconnect you to the enthusiasm of just starting out.

Above all, just take action.  Thinking about your problems make them appear a lot larger than they really are.  Agonizing over them actually sets you back, since you’re fighting the dread you’re creating along with the problem. If you’re doing something about it, you’re moving forward.

Never disclose how much money you have, earn or spend to anyone but closest family members and financial professionals.

I can’t tell you how many times I see people do this and do harm in the process. There is zero good that comes out of disclosing your financial situation. One way or another, someone gets hurt. Share your salary with a co-worker and one of you is going to feel undervalued and discontent and a little bit angry. Share your income with your friends and one of you is going to be jealous. Share it with a used car salesman and you’ve just lost bargaining power. Mention how much you spent on an item and you either inspire jealousy.

This is not something you usually plan out, it just happens. You accidentally mention to someone the $2,000 desk you bought and then realize that the person you shared with is having financial problems and you just made them feel a little worse about their situation. You share a comment on salaries or perks with a friend and suddenly they’re jealous.

Make it a habit to never mention specifics. Never tell a friend you made a $5,000 commission – just say you made a “big commission”. What’s “big” to you and them stays flexible and feelings are spared. You didn’t buy a $2,000 desk, you bought a “really nice desk”. Even if someone asks “how much did you pay for those shoes”, respond with “well, I probably spent more than I should have on them, but I think they were worth it.” It just seems to work much better when actual amounts are left out. You don’t want to devalue someone by revealing that you receive bigger rewards than they do.  Though we know it’s not true, everyone wants to live under the assumption that we’re all operating on basically the same level.

Share it with your spouse. Share it with parents on a very limited basis. Keep things vague with siblings and even vaguer with everyone else.

There are some exceptions here and there, but they are few and far between. Trust me, things will be much better in the long run if everyone doesn’t know the specifics.