The Spring Festival is coming, and schools have already had winter vacations. Recently, what caught my attention was a news report that at 6 a.m., the factory gate was full of college students looking for winter vacation workers. In this regard, there was fierce controversy and polarization in the comment section on social **.
One of the views is self-blame and distress, thinking that they are incompetent and letting their children come out and suffer; Another point of view is envy and admiration, praising other people's children for being sensible and knowing to care about their parents; However, their own children are not angry, and will only play games at home.
These perspectives are actually a good reflection of the real reaction of parents in reality. What do you think?
First of all, I'm the one who supports the search for winter vacation work. However, there are two more situations in this supportive position.
One is the situation where you come out to work and endure hardships in order to earn living expenses; Another situation is to experience life for future needs. Let's talk about each of these two cases separately.
If it is the first case: the family conditions are relatively poor and cannot afford to provide for it, so it is necessary to go out to work to support the family, and rely on selling their physical strength and time to earn living expenses. For such children, it can be divided into two situations: one is that they understand the hardships of life, know how difficult it is to make money, and must try to get out of the fate of this cycle and try to start a business to earn more money; The other situation is to accept fate, get used to the lifestyle of working to make money, at most only think about how to find a better working environment after graduating from university, at most can only learn the experience of getting along with superior and subordinate colleagues, and adapt to work life.
In the second case, these children usually choose to look for work experience not because they lack money, but in order to really understand society in advance. There must be someone behind such a child to give guidance, it may be a parent or another family member. During the work placement, these children will also behave differently, and they will consciously obtain information in a certain way, such as observing how the leader handles the relationship between superiors and subordinates, product processes, or sales channels.
Under the guidance of different purposes, the gap between college students who are also looking for winter vacation jobs can be very large, as if they have entered different factories and spent completely different stages of life.
Why do some people say that poverty is inherited? This is because in families with poor family circumstances, if there is no one to guide them, they often see being able to endure suffering as a virtue that is passed down from generation to generation.
In an era of material scarcity, backward technology, and closed information, enduring suffering is indeed a competitive advantage. Because there is no other way to compete, you can only show yourself through personal physical strength, time and dedication. However, the times are completely different, and now is an era of material abundance, technological progress, and advanced information. If you still stay at the level of only competing in suffering, it's like someone else has already started to use a laser chainsaw, and you are still using a primitive stone axe, and your combat power is not at the same level at all, and you can't beat the other party no matter how you compare.
In fact, many of us are in the middle of this great divide right now. On the one hand, there are very large regional differences, and there is a serious imbalance in development between the east and the west, which creates a gap (and of course represents a huge market). On the other hand, the changes and leaps in the more than 50 years since our reform and opening up have been very enormous, and it took us hundreds of years to gradually come to the place that we have gradually completed, and it took us less than a generation to complete. Naturally, there will be some people whose thinking and value orientation cannot keep up, and they are still stuck in the last century.
Being able to endure hardship is an excellent quality, and working within the system is the most stable and decent ......
But for those who have always been in such a circle of values and knowledge, they will not think that the outside world has a wider blue sky, and can even rise from the wind and reach a height of 90,000 miles. In their cognitive system, this is just a myth, and it's okay to listen to it, but if they really want to try a life that their parents have never seen before, they may be asked, "Then why don't you fly to the sky?" "In the end, they can only repeat the same fate as their ancestors.
If you want your children to have a different destiny, you have to make them do things differently than you do. Why do I always encourage everyone to start a light business right away, even if it's a side hustle? Because only by breaking away from the part-time job system and experiencing the ups and downs and challenges of the business field can we re-establish our own cognitive system.
As for letting children go to work, you will tell them that in addition to earning money, they can also gain more experience and knowledge through observation and learning. And not just tell them to suffer. Nor should we blame ourselves for letting children suffer difficulties too early, especially those that are low-level and unnecessary, because these difficulties do not lead to wisdom and opportunities to change one's fate.
It is precisely because of poverty that it is more necessary to start a business, because anything that can change one's destiny is accompanied by risk. Otherwise, everyone can change their destiny by starting a business. Those who just want to find a job to pass the time, eat and wait for death, are not qualified to have the conditions and background.
If you have nothing and want to be stable and comfortable without taking any risks, how can you transcend? Looking back at history, all turnarounds, whether national or individual, have resulted from decisions made with a spirit of adventure and exploration. For example, Columbus, Magellan and others changed their fate by discovering the New World through exploration; The first people to immigrate to the American continent were also some troubled, frustrated, landless people in Europe who went to the Americas in search of entrepreneurial opportunities.
Look at those overseas Chinese who go to Nanyang, who are they? They come from Wenzhou, Meizhou, Zhangzhou, Chaoshan and other poor areas that cannot survive due to lack of resources and overpopulation. They had no choice but to leave their hometown and start their own entrepreneurial journey in Nanyang.
The same is true at the national level, whether it is Spain, Britain and other early countries, or the rise of our China, it is because it has reached the end of the mountain, and only through expansion or opening up to the outside world has it walked out of the road of becoming a strong country.
Therefore, rich people can not start a business, because they have capital and connections, and it is enough to keep a business. But for a poor person, who has no capital and connections, if he doesn't even have the courage to try, why should he want to change his fate?
Someone on Zhihu asked me, what should you do if your parents are not willing to support your business? Who says you need capital to start a business? I have repeatedly emphasized that now is the most friendly era for individual light entrepreneurship, and one person can start a business and build a profitable company to achieve an annual income of one million yuan. And in 2023, the year called magic, we have experienced and successfully replicated this model.
Finally, it is the same sentence: what you have not seen does not mean that it does not exist, but it is just beyond the boundaries of your cognition. If you just want to change your fate, but you don't want to put in the effort, then it's better to wash and sleep. People who really want to change their fate and are willing to put in the effort immediately move and devote themselves to practical action.