Michael Strong argues that schools trap students in fear-based thinking when they should teach entrepreneurship as noticing what sucks and fixing it. He proposes voluntary learning clubs where students explore philosophy, science, and creativity together, then scale their solutions through conscious capitalism to reshape how millions of young people see their purpose.
Hello, I'm Michael Strong with expanseonline.co, a talent development accelerator for middle and high school students. And one of the things that, um, I envision, that I think very few people envision actually, is a world in which everybody all day every day is waking up and doing things that they love that make life better for other people. And I think given the extent to which most people are focused on the various miseries, pain, catastrophe, disaster, threats to the world, I think many of us are stuck in what John Hagel, co-chair of Deloitte Center for the Edge, calls a fear-based narrative as opposed to an opportunity-based narrative. And Hagel and I both believe that an opportunity-based narrative is a much more powerful path forward than our fear-based narratives. In fact, the fear-based narratives can actually undermine progress in various ways. So going back to my crazy belief that we can create a world in which we're all day, every day, making the world a better place for other people. So let me start with my favorite definition of an entrepreneur. An entrepreneur is somebody who wakes up at night thinking about what sucks and how to fix it. I'll give you a trivial example, and then we'll go to bigger examples. You know, I'm old enough to remember alarm clocks as these noisy things, sometimes with bells, that you'd set and then horrible. Then in the '70s, we started to get radio alarms where instead of the horrible buzzing, you had the option of waking up to music or at least your radio station, which may be talk radio, maybe an advertisement or whatever, but at least it was better. Gradually over time, now we have alarm clocks that gradually wake you up with light from a dark room. They'll put light in the room. There are alarm clocks that wake you up to scent, so the room starts to smell wonderful. There's an alarm clock that can wake you up with making coffee or cooking bacon, if that's your thing to wake up to. Going the other direction, there's alarm clock that if you are too prone to hit the snooze button will run away from you in the room, and you have to hop out of bed and chase the little alarm clock robot. These are all examples of creative entrepreneurs thinking of ways of how to address this issue of, you know, waking up. Personally, I favor waking up naturally, but, you know, people need alarm clocks, so there's that. So how do we help people get to the point where they're making each other's lives better? Well, let me go back to education, which is what I've spent my life doing. And if one is in the right circumstances, there's no greater joy than working with others to develop one's own skills and working with others to develop their skills. And so I am all in favor of schools that are completely voluntary, no coercion. Nobody's forcing anybody to be there, nobody is forcing anybody to study what they don't want. We're here together as a learning team, as a learning club, in order to have fun exploring philosophy, literature, psychology, anthropology, mathematics, science, the world of creativity, the world of entrepreneurship. Our program is designed to help people do what they love and love what they do in community. And ultimately then we get to cohorts of people that are working in communities to make things better. They are working to build better buildings, safer, cheaper, lower-cost buildings. They're helping us travel more cheaply in new and better ways. They're helping to make virtual experiences more real and authentic. More sensitive. We're working to help develop interpersonal skills so that insofar as you may be around people that are obnoxious right now, in 2035, I'm gonna help contribute a world where most people have been trained to be extremely respectful of each other in their interpersonal interactions. There are thousands of ways to think about this. You know, obviously we need to develop systems that protect the environment. And we also need to develop systems that allow for broad-based prosperity and above all peace, because war is the greatest horror. My book, "Be the Solution: How Entrepreneurs and Conscious Capitalists Provide a Very Early Draft of This Vision," but the key element is this shift from a fear-based narrative to more of an opportunity-based narrative and help more young people now small numbers, but eventually we want thousands, millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of young people who focus on lives of creating better ways to do things, as well as understanding the legal systems that support us in creating better ways to do things. So I can't get into all that in a short video, but I just want to draw out those of you who are ready to look at an opportunity-based narrative rather than a fear-based narrative. And let you know there are others out there working in just the same way. Thank you. I'm Michael Strong of expanseonline.co.
