Blind to it 2

re-post

A young woman sits in a hipster coffee shop, puts her phone down, and looks around. She sees "people talking freely, working on their MacBooks, ordering food they get in an instant, seeing cars go by outside, and it dawned on me. We live in the most privileged time in the most prosperous nation and we’ve become blind to it."

Even the American poor can hardly compare to the the poor of the rest of the world. "Virtually no one in the United States is considered poor by global standards. Yet, in a time where we can order a product off Amazon with one click and have it at our doorstep the next day, we are unappreciative, unsatisfied, and ungrateful."

photo

A young politician claimed recently that her generation has never seen American prosperity.

"Never saw American prosperity. Let that sink in. When I first read that statement, I thought to myself, that was quite literally the most entitled and factually illiterate thing I’ve ever heard in my 26 years on this earth."

from "Thoughts from a Hipster Coffee Shop"

Carvana 1

"I wasn't sure people would buy a used car online without seeing it," said Ernest Garcia II. Sounds like a reasonable doubt. But his son, Ernest Garcia III, thought differently. 

The dad already owned used car dealerships across America. The son wanted to sell those cars online. He got started with his business idea in 2012.

You've seen the gimmicky commercials with cars in a huge vending machine. That's for real. The business is Carvana, and it does almost $2 billion in sales. Their stock has doubled in value since January of this year.

Ernie (III) says, “Our mission is to remove the stress and anxiety from the car-buying experience and make the process fun and exciting."

(cont'd tomorrow)

Blind to it

A young woman sits in a hipster coffee shop, puts her phone down, and looks around. She sees "people talking freely, working on their MacBooks, ordering food they get in an instant, seeing cars go by outside, and it dawned on me. We live in the most privileged time in the most prosperous nation and we’ve become blind to it."

Even the American poor can hardly compare to the the poor of the rest of the world. "Virtually no one in the United States is considered poor by global standards. Yet, in a time where we can order a product off Amazon with one click and have it at our doorstep the next day, we are unappreciative, unsatisfied, and ungrateful."

photo

A young politician claimed recently that her generation has never seen American prosperity.

"Never saw American prosperity. Let that sink in. When I first read that statement, I thought to myself, that was quite literally the most entitled and factually illiterate thing I’ve ever heard in my 26 years on this earth."

from "Thoughts from a Hipster Coffee Shop"

Stay-at-home

More millennial moms are staying home to raise their babies. 

"For many millennial women, staying at home is both a desire and a convenience . ." They want to bring up their own children and they want or need to earn income - both of those things. Sometimes the money/time cost of a full-time job just isn't worth it.

No surprise there, since most (not all) women would like to have the best of both of those worlds. But more millennial moms are figuring out a way to do it today than generation-X moms did 20-30 years ago. 

photo: playfulnotes.com

Wants to farm

An article in WSJ last week says that, "A growing number of young Americans are leaving desk jobs to farm."  

"Liz Whitehurst dabbled in several careers before she ended up . . crating fistfuls of fresh-cut arugula in the early-November chill.

"She joined a growing movement of highly educated, ex-urban, first-time farmers who are capitalizing on booming consumer demand for local and sustainable foods and who, experts say, could have a broad impact on the food system."

"This new generation can’t hope to replace the numbers that farming is losing to age. But it is already contributing to the growth of the local-food movement and could help preserve the place of midsize farms in the rural landscape."

This isn't a huge increase of young farmers - only about 2% more - not nearly enough to offset the huge numbers of older American farmers who are going to turn over their farms to somebody else pretty soon. 

(cont'd tomorrow - what Joel Salatin says about the trend)

Viral video

Millions upon millions of people have seen this viral video since it came out last winter. If you have any interest in the millennial generation, really, you should not miss it.

He says failed parenting strategies have produced a generation that thinks they can have anything they want in life just because they're special. But after they grow up and enter the "real world" they find that they're not special, that their mom cannot get them a promotion.

They find that "impact" doesn't happen in eight months. They find that they don't have effective coping skills to deal with stress.

"Job satisfaction and strength of relationships - there ain't no app for that. They're slow, meandering, uncomfortable, messy processes."

He thinks that the wisdom that their parents should have taught them will now have to come from leadership in the workplace. But there's another source. Some churches fill the wisdom gap with good leadership, thank God.

(Btw, these are generalizations. That means that there is some truth in these statements for large numbers of millennials. Generalizations do not apply to every single individual, by definition.)

Quarter-life

When danger and opportunity meet . . you could think of crisis that way. The "quarter-life crisis" presents both to twenty-somethings. It's frustrating if you don't know what direction to go. Here's advice from one who's been there.

Avoiding debt

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

Millennials (age 18-34, roughly) seem to value financial independence for themselves, maybe more than their parents. At the same time, a sizable number of millennials live with their parents, probably because of heavy student loans and the high price of homes today.

But according to a recent study, some young women in their 20's and 30's are making good money decisions that will have them spending less than that horrific average of $600k (yesterday's post) on debt service over their lifetime.

photo: forbes.com

"Creating wealth is all about choosing correct habits now," common sense from a finance expert.

Those young women ranged in income from $30k to $150k and had these things in common:

1) they knew their income, what they had to work with
2) they knew their expenses and had worked out a budget
3) they set spending priorities
4) they used some device to save or invest money, like an automatic savings deposit

Motivating #2

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

A genuine plan to take people to Mars has captivated - even electrified - some people. That's because no serious, credible problem-solver has ever taken on this mission and promised a completion date so soon. Elon Musk is unique.

Those two volunteers who paid mega-bucks to hold their place on the first crewed mission to Mars (yesterday's post) are betting their lives that it will really happen. 

Here's a comment posted when SpaceX made the announcement on its fb page:

"Make this happen while it still can. I don't want our descendants to see us as the only civilization that could have colonized Mars, but in the end didn't bother, but instead sat around watching streaming video on their phones."

Peter Diamandis, head of X Prize Foundation, says SpaceX "has a mission and transformative purpose to make the human race a multiplanetary species . . That vision is intoxicating and powerful.”

Motivating

"What’s the number one work motivator for Millennials? Making an impact."  Every millennial working for Elon Musk at SpaceX, Tesla, or Solar City must be convinced that his or her company is making an impact.

Their boss has been very public from the start about what drives him: protecting earth from fossil fuels, and going inter-planetary for humanity's future.

From the website of SpaceX:

"SpaceX is like Special Forces… we do the missions that others think are impossible. We have goals that are absurdly ambitious by any reasonable standard, but we’re going to make them happen. We have the potential here at SpaceX to have an incredible effect on the future of humanity and life itself."

(cont'd tomorrow)

Elon Mus

Chose chicken

Michael is 33 years old and has an MBA from Harvard Business School. He interned at Google one summer, says he loved the spirit and the energy there. For two years he was a brand strategist at Facebook, says they have a mentality to "move fast and break things."

Obviously Michael has business credentials. But he's no longer in Silicon Valley. He left his high-profile experiences to work at Chick-fil-A in Atlanta.

“People who ask why I left Silicon Valley haven’t experienced the culture of Chick-fil-A,” he says. “There is such a strong culture built on relationships and valuing one another . . [it brings] out the best in people, fulfilling leadership potential, and great business performance.” 

Michael gathered a team to "expand their digital footprint," including a new app. "For the first three days after launch, it was #1 free app in the App Store, ahead of apps like Facebook. Since it was launched on June 1, it has been downloaded over 7 million times."

Skills gap

Teenagers should think realistically about life and work after college before they actually go to college - if preparing for a career is one of their main goals.

"While 87% of recent [U.S. college] graduates feel well prepared to hit the ground running in their new job, only half of hiring managers agreed." Somehow they're not getting what is needed if they want to "hit the ground running."

The skills hiring managers are most likely to consider absent or deficient directly following graduation is called "The Skills Gap."

This writer from the U.K. (where half of recent college graduates have non-graduate roles) has a very practical suggestion: charge a lower price for university and college courses that educate for skills in high demand.

"We should be incentivising our students to opt for courses that will keep talent pipelines well stocked."  

NOTE-- Skills that employers will pay extra for are here

(cont'd tomorrow)

House concerts

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

"[E]qual parts recital and party," these classical house concerts have small and crowded venues packed (they do sell out in NYC) with 20-somethings. 

“Modern audiences are willing to sacrifice what musicians think of as acoustic superiority in favor of proximity,” said Fleming. He enjoys these kinds of performances, where he feels he connects with the audience.

Violinist Annika, 20, agrees, “It’s exciting for us, to literally have people sitting almost in your lap.”

"The last generation to broadly love classical music may simply be aging, like World War I veterans, out of existence." I sure hope not. As Groupmuse's founder says, "All you need is one or two of these evenings to understand that Beethoven is no joke.”

Groupmuse

"[B]ack in 1937, the median age at orchestra concerts in Los Angeles was 28. Think of that!" Whatever the median age of classical concert audiences today, it's decades beyond age 28. Audiences today are much older and smaller.

But a 26-year-old came up with . . wait for it . . a start-up business that may be creating a new audience for classical music. A millennial starting up a business, yes, this sounds familiar. But classical music instead of technology - that's different.

The start-up is "Groupmuse." In Boston about three years ago, they started organizing house concerts. Since then about 1500 have been set up in cities like Seattle, New York, Denver, Chicago, San Francisco. 

(cont'd tomorrow)

Smart source

“There’s not a better source of smart, enthusiastic [workers],"  says  the CEO of  startup Eden which supplies "on demand" office support in San Francisco. His remark refers to students, who make up 10% of their workforce.

"Uber for tech support" is how Eden describes what they do.  "Make something people want" (good advice) is the motto for investor, Y Combinator, and so far it looks like offices are buying it.

Just last November their customer base became other businesses only, and big growth ensued. Big investors are optimistic, putting down $3.3 million. The startup is only a year old.

(cont'd tomorrow)

Experiential

Uber is successful. Lots and lots of people use it for rides (1+ million per day) or to drive for income (15k new ones per month). There are other ride-sharing options out there, Lyft for example. But this author says Uber resonates with their market uniquely, using experiential marketing.

NYC customers in 2012 had the chance to enjoy their ride in 1920's era cars with uniformed drivers, per HBO show Boardwalk Empire.

In 2014 Uber partnered with Red Bull in connection with the PGA tour opening in Phoenix.

That year they also partnered with Paramount Pictures and GM. Dallas, LA, and Phoenix passengers rode in an "Optimus Prime" truck when the movie "Transformers 4" opened.

No car?

(cont'd)

So Uber has great value as an alternative to the taxi industry (yesterday's post). But investor Bill Gurley sees the company playing a bigger economic role than that.

It turns out that a significant segment of the potential new-car market would rather use Uber than own a car. 

If you had to guess, what segment of the population do you think might make this choice? Right, age 18-32. According to Gurley, "[Millennials] view cars as a utility, not as a social statement."

"Uber is . . replacing or at least reducing how many cars people own. That's the real game-changer," Gurley says.

They're doing well over a million rides per day. It may be disruptive to the car manufacturing industry.

Job culture 2

(cont'd)

In addition to freedom/flexibility and team collaboration (yesterday), millennials are also looking a work culture that will:

* facilitate life success - a "recognition that people’s lives matter . .  requires leaders and managers who are strong coaches and mentors .  . 79% of Millennials say this is important to them."

* communicate how they plan to change the world - example: everyone who works at Tesla Motors knows that Elon Musk's goal is to reduce the world's dependence on fossil fuel

(quotes from "Why millennials don't want to work for you" at Forbes)

In my own family, my daughter-in-law just changed jobs and happened to site the second item (yesterday's post) as part of the reason why she did. Makes total sense to me.

Job culture 1

Workplace environment is changing in some good ways. That was my impression after reading "Why millennials don't want to work for you" at Forbes.

Millennials (age 18-34) are of course a growing percentage of the work force. What they're looking for is :

*  entrepreneurial culture -. the freedom to "work when, where and how you like as long as you are delivering results . .  the flexibility and freedom – where possible – to be [your] own boss with a focus exclusively on results."

*  team collaboration - "When I think of effective teams and the concept of true collaboration for a common purpose, there is no better example than a medical trauma ward. On such a team, competition, silos and politics are dangerous. Everyone must be unified and focused on a single outcome to achieve success."

These points would have improved the jobs I've had. Two more tomorrow.

(cont'd tomorrow)

Work perks

According to the chart, millennials (age 18-34) place top value on being trained/developed in their work life. It makes sense. Information expands faster and faster, so they know they must keep learning. And . . continuing to get better at what they do will ensure being able to afford more of the rest of this list.

image: forbes.com