Most valuable thing NOT on my Linkedin profile, #YouthEntrepreneur

What do Robin Chase, Richard Branson, Maya Penn, Aaron Hurst,  Tonya Surman and over 80 percent of Ashoka’s top social entrepreneur Fellows have in common?  

They started a purpose-oriented organization before 20.  

Once formed during adolescence, Aaron Hurst’s research shows that your work orientation remains relatively stable throughout your career.  He found purpose-oriented workers are 50% more likely to be in leadership positions.  In an informal study using Linkedin data, I found a similar pattern of early achievement leading to later success; members who signaled they started something noteworthy before 20 are 4 times more likely to be a top corporate (C-level) executive.  Entrepreneurial and changemaking experience you had in middle or high school would seem to be worth putting on your profile. 

But it’s not on my profile.   Nor is it on most people’s profiles.   

It wasn't until my life history interview at Ashoka that I realized something I did in high school would be relevant to my career.   I learned you need to connect the dots going backward to see the path forward more clearly.

At age 17, I relaunched my Catholic high school newspaper as a regular business with local news reporting, editorials, features, advertising, and a circulation manager.   You could say it was peer-to-peer, social journalism.   As a symbolic gesture, we ran a series of articles about Rupert Murdoch’s attempts to buy us but we wouldn’t sell out.  We wanted to change the world, not be acquired.  We ran into trouble though when I wrote the editorial, Women Should Be Priests.  The administration shut the paper down. They loved the paper but felt blindsided.    Thanks to a petition by the students, and a compassionate meeting with our publisher, we were reinstated quickly with an even greater reputation.

Taking agency at a young age to change the world helped me build skills in changemaking, empathy, creative problem solving, and building teams that I couldn’t learn in just the classroom.   While I may not in the same league as the entrepreneurs mentioned above, I can see how it formed my life.

Why should you care?

The skills you learned in preschool, and how you practiced them in middle and high school are rapidly being seen as what matters most now at work.  In a world defined by exponentially accelerating change, unprecedented communication and rapidly disappearing repetition-based and “knowledge work” jobs, what used to be prized before is not as much now.  

This is hard to believe in an era where science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education and skills are seen as most important.  Geoff Colvin’s article, Humans are Underrated, makes a convincing argument that the more valuable skills will be those with which computers can’t compete.   Mainstream is just catching on to this.  It's a good time to get the word out using your Linkedin profile.

Here’s three reasons why: 

1. Sharing stories and insights about our early entrepreneurial experience is a great way to help young people grasp this new paradigm for success in growing up.  
2. Those doing business with you get to know you better.  Work related accomplishments when you are young are a key part of what you are all about.  Your truest identity is reflected in the distance of where you are now, where you came from, and where you are going next 
3.  Putting your entrepreneurial and changemaking experience in middle or high school on your profile is a great way to legitimize its value to your organization and the world.

If you had a similar entrepreneurial experience growing up, please join me by sharing about it via #YouthEntrepreneur or #StartYoung