The Balance Between Earning and Learning

As a college student, I’m bombarded with advice left and right and most of it is unsolicited and irrelevant.

Too often I hear poor career advice thrown around that too many college students fall prey to.

From needing to treat everyone I meet in college as a networking opportunity to adding as many titles and accolades on my resume as possible, most of it hurts than heals students’ chances. These perspectives and approaches are beyond scary.

But I cannot mention poor advice without revealing by far the worst one.

Here we go.

I hope you read this carefully and DO NOT follow.

“Never work for free.”

Put your thumbs down and please don’t @ me.

I get it.

Everyone’s time is precious, valuable, and their favorite commodity. We must guard it with our life or else it won’t be savored.

But coming in with the expectation to always make money every time you want to learn or work is severely hurting your chances, especially when you're a student. I learned the most valuable lessons in life when I worked minimum wage and or for free.

Below age 14, the federal child labor working age, no one should be expected to earn a living. It’s a time of growth, failure, and experimentation. Up until 18 or suggested 21, your sole responsibility is to act as a sponge. You need to absorb as much as possible and learn that way. If you can get paid for it, great, but it shouldn’t be expected. That’s why we pay a quarter of a million dollars for a degree. We skip out on 4+ years of earnings straight out of HS to get ahead with a college degree. No one has real expectations of you at 13 besides showing up.

I didn’t start getting paid for real work until 13, 14. My piggy bank got thick as my own employer. As a daughter of immigrants, I’ve always had an entrepreneurial bone in my body and created a ton of side gigs for myself, mainly out of boredom and a lack of business classes at school. From a lemonade stand to working as a model staring at age 10, money flowed in from having fun and exploring the world, not out of necessity. Money was never my intention, academics was and still is. I didn’t even know how to count back then!

Money Chain

If you come in with the mindset to only earn, you will learn less. Similarly, when you attach success to happiness, things start to become blurry and purposeless. There’s no doubt you need to earn to supply a living for yourself but that’s why you rely on your parents until you fly off to college and officially become an independent adult. If you can earn, great, but that shouldn’t be a deciding factor within a position at age 16 or below. Money can block kids from discovering what they’re curious about.

In volatile, unpredictable, unsteady fields of the performing arts, non-profit sector, and startup world, you must rely on other sources of income to keep yourself afloat. This is a good lesson for those who believe no job is replaceable. Tasks can be, not character. More often than not those who earn top incomes also have the highest spending habits. Since the average millionaire has 5–10+ income sources at all times, this is a habit everyone must adopt for ultimate success. Once you establish your cushion, you can then take on more risk. It’s not how much you earn, it’s how much you keep.

If you’re 14 and feel forced or need to keep the family afloat by working at a startup, that’s a major problem you and your parents need to resolve. It is their responsibly to pay for everything until you start working full-time or at least have some education. Strive to work in a setting apart from the classroom as early as possible in order to expand your network, skillsets, EQ, and community, not simply to keep your family afloat. You will pay the bills later once you learn.

Having a child is costly in itself and expecting them to support a household at a young age is not realistic. Especially with a lack of financial literacy, the burden of W2 income tax, time commitment of the job, and inflation, there’s little to no earnings that come out from one’s first few jobs anyway. It’s all about the applicable skills that count that slowly multiply later on in life. These are hidden earnings that eventually compound.

Just like health is wealth, knowledge is power.

Mindset is everything. The younger you are, the more you should be open to seizing any opportunity that comes your way and testing it out, even if it doesn’t seem of interest. The worst thing that can happen is that you learn something new. Big Deal! The younger you are, the less responsibilities, dependents, and more flexibility you have. You aren’t tied to a major or path yet. Try out the most unrelated indirect fields to see what you enjoy earlier than later.

It’s better to start now and I highly recommend being a holistic open-minded generalist, not a close-minded specialist who only knows a lot about a few things as opposed to a decent amount about a lot of things.

Once you complete your internships in college and are looking for a full-time role, then you can and should start focusing on pay. That is normal. To a degree money keeps us sane, supported, happy, and motivated. We all need it to live, eat, sleep, and be healthy. But be careful. Too much of anything is a bad thing. Happiness comes from the inside. Companies frequently ask candidates in an interview their desired pay range to make sure it aligns with the candidate’s expectations and or their previous role’s compensation package. Companies are here to support you because the happier life you live, the better performer you are at work.

Shift your mindset on money as a teen. Saying ‘no’ is okay but not preferred when the world is your ultimate oyster. You have absolutely nothing to lose!

Opportunities don’t just fall onto your lap. You need to knock and sometimes open the door for them to happen. If you get used to guarding your schedule as a teen to the point where it becomes empty, you will continue that practice until you cannot afford to do so anymore. At this stage, you have the most energy, can fail many times, test, experiment, and actually remember what you learned!