People at about my age, which is forty something, may be wondering: why is that, when we were young, the old man had the ball; and when we are getting old (and obsolete), the ball is in the young man's hand. Well, that may be just my personal feeling, but I think to some extent it is true that the young is invading into our territory.
This morning, I read the headline on the newspaper: "Two Teenagers Won the Science Fair with Only 200NT". They are just junior high school girls. Their work, "A New Method to Measure Surface Tension: An Re-Application of the Connected Pipe Theory", won the first prize of the 2008 International Science Fair in Taiwan.
Every now and then we have this kind of news circulating around, and we take it for granted that young man are taking the lead in the world of science. We, the middle-ager, mostly engaged in business or social matters, do not have to worry, so we tell ourselves. But is it that safe to keep ourselves focusing on things other than natural science? I doubt.
My friend Su is a radio program moderator, and the program is about books. She invited me to her program and talk about Greenspan's book, The Age of Turbulence with another guest- to my surprise, her student. He is just an elementary school boy.
Oh, no. If a schoolboy can talk about economics on the air, then the young are not just invading in the fields of natural science. Fortunately, I found that boy can not understand the book, and he could only squeeze words out with difficulty. I felt relieved as well as compassionate.
But I still think that the middle aged can not protect themselves from the young with knowledge. In the era of Internet, information and knowledge is never an advantage of the aged. We can only at best keep up with the young. Never think about to leading or teaching them. Some of them can even be erudite.
So, what moat do we have? What 's so important and the young are lack of? Experience? May be. But mind you, the only thing that we can learn form experience is, as the famous history saying goes, we never learn from experience.
Money? May be. But that is not a real moat. The young are getting rich ever faster. They may be richer than you already.
Social connections? May be. But the young have their own social networks, and you have yours. You have already seen many companies run buy 'kids', and they run the companies pretty well, if not better than you did.
OK, I propose one. Credits. I mean not only the bank credits, but all kinds of credits, such as your work, papers, medals, honors, some good things, and most importantly, the prizes you've won.
In the business world, we tend to judge a person by historical records. And this is a very important vetting process. We don't have to evaluate a person in every aspects, we only count on his records. And a series of good records or credits is just something that the young can never acquired when young. Some may think that the credits now can be built up much faster than before, but I doubt.
Most of the Credits are built up through competitions. And it takes time to compete. That is perhaps something the old-timers already done.
So, next time when you see some young stars in your company about to compete you out of your position, don't try to start learning computers, take trainings, or even go to schools. It's too late and useless. Besides, it is not easy. Never try fighting your enemies in their wars.
You try to be the sales of the year, to take part in an important task force, to lead a challenging project, and so on. And DON'T FOCUS ON ROUTINE WORKS ONLY. Leave them to the young. You'd better make mistakes instead of making no noise.
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