I ran across this the other day
while opening an article on the Forbes
magazine site:
Thought of the Day: "For millennials, to be inspired is to
become creative, innovative and energized." - Tori Utley
Utley is a Forbes columnist who
specializes in talking about Millennials, the students I have taught for the
past decade and a half. Her comment has prompted me to think. I always consider
that a gift.
Photo found online at https://placester.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/millennials.png
Enormous, As Yet Largely Untapped Potential
Over the years I have had to observe Millennials, I have
come to believe that they hold the greatest potential of any generation thus
far, both for good and for ill. As the vanguard of Generation Y winds down,
already beginning to feel their successors in Generation Z breathing down their necks, intentionally
thinking about inspiration, creativity, innovation and what energizes those
qualities among Millennials has never been more urgent.
Millennials have had access to a potentially wider
perspective of the world than any preceding generation. They are developing
technological capacities that their predecessors would have given their eye
teeth to have been able to assume as a given in their daily lives. And they arrived
at the end of long, bitter culture clashes that have rendered many of the
prejudices of the past - once seen as common wisdom - no longer comprehensible.
In many ways, they are the beneficiaries of fortunate births, indeed.
It is this enormous potential that I and so many others so
readily see that has prompted me to continue to call, encourage, challenge and cajole
the Millennial students I have taught to live into their enormous potential at
every opportunity. I absolutely want them to be inspired, to become creative,
innovative and energized. I greatly desire to see their enormous potential
realized. Our world needs them to become all that they can be.
But this will not simply happen by chance. Like every
generation preceding them, Millennials come of age as diamonds in the rough. They
can live into their potential but only through refinement and polishing.
The interests currently driving the socio-cultural context
in which this generation’s potential is being developed would readily squander
it for the imperatives of the wealthy and powerful just as it did with the potential of its
predecessors. Like the large cohort of Boomers before them, the Millennials have
the privilege of creating a new world based in the new values they hold and the
new vision they can see if they are willing to do the hard work to get there.
What is clear to them and to many of us who would mentor
them is that it is precisely a new world that is needed. But like the Boomers
before them, the Millennials will face a wide array of sirens hoping to deflect
them from the very changes they have the opportunity to make.
Bear in mind, Boomers did not start out as Yuppies.
Photo found online at http://media4.s-nbcnews.com/i/newscms/2014_18/416146/140502-millennials-mn-1050_360088ebbf3a5feb2b25c6f6d91dbe5a.jpg
The Costs of Becoming Fully Human
To live into their enormous potential which is largely yet
untapped will require assuming the active duties of citizenship, not buying into
the alluring passivity and resulting mediocrity of mere consumerism. Choosing
to opt out of politics because it is messy, mean-spirited and dominated by
moneyed interests may feel good - even self-righteous - but it is ultimately a cop out which allows
the very status quo Millennials rightfully despise to continue directing our
society unabated.
Inspired creativity will mean coming up with one’s own
ideas and innovations, not simply waiting to choose between the limited options
offered by consumerist marketers or merely recycling the cultural expressions
of preceding generations. John Mayer was wrong. Simply “Waitin’ for the world to change” will not be enough. It was Gandhi
who got this right: “Be the change you
wish to see in the world.” He recognized that personal and social
transformation must go hand in hand.
For Millennials to live into their potential will require
them to intentionally engage the world outside socially mediated tribes,
investing time and energies to be fully and physically present with others,
particularly those who are not like themselves. It will mean developing
relationships that are deeper than superficial “likes” and the endless configurations
of smiley faces on social media which allow one to keep a safe personal distance
while never getting one’s hands dirty with the messiness of actually engaging the other.
Indeed, for many it will mean having to actually develop in-person interactional
skills that for many have become stunted by lack of use.
To live into their hype will mean Millennials must be
willing to endure the pain of suffering both in their own immediate lives and the
larger world around them. That, in turn, means not presuming constant comfort
is a birthright, one of the many siren songs of a consumerist culture. It will mean
being willing to delay gratification and continuing to toil at work which can
only be accomplished over the long term, remembering that most things worth achieving
do not come without a wait and a struggle.
Becoming fully human will mean intentionally and
regularly taking the time to actually be alone with oneself in silence, an
intentionality that is required to adequately reflect upon life in an increasingly
complex techno-society. It will mean turning off the distractions that are
inevitably and relentlessly ready to impose themselves upon our lives and dash off with our attention and imaginations. For most, that will mean unlearning an awful lot of unconscious behaviors and the values
which inform them.
It will mean developing the capacity for the critical
reflection required for distinguishing between rudimentary forms of knowing - data,
information, knowledge – and more developed forms of knowing - understanding
and wisdom - recognizing the former as mere means to the latter. And it will
mean rejecting the temptation to see the advice of elders forged in years of
experience as valueless, an exercise in unrecognized generational hubris and a
loss of potentially insightful counsel that every culture and every thoughtful
human being needs to develop their full potential.
We Boomers had to learn the hard way that not trusting
anyone over 30 was a losing proposition. And trust me, you, too, will be 30 one
day. Indeed, some of you already are.
Becoming What Their Marketing Says About
Them
I continue to believe in the Millennials. They have the
power to change our world, actors who have come onto the world stage at a
critical point in its history. And they face a wide range of challenges from
climate change to financial disparities to electoral dysfunction unprecedented
in our history. We need them to
become all they can be for their own sakes as well as ours.
Like the author of this quote, I greatly desire to see Millennials
become inspired, creative, innovative and energized. I hold out major hope that
they will do so and I believe we are beginning to see some of that potential
realized already. The questions I continue to ponder is how that change
will occur and what kind of world it will usher in.
I wish this cohort of bright young potential stars well
in actually becoming all that their marketing is saying about them. And, as
always, I continue to pledge my willingness to assist them in that process in any
way I can. As the Motel 6 ads say, I’ll leave the light on for you.
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Harry Scott
Coverston
Orlando,
Florida
If the unexamined life is not worth living,
surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth
holding.
Most things worth considering do not come in
sound bites.
For what does G-d require of you but to do
justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your G-d? (Micah 6:8, Hebrew Scriptures)
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