Maybe We’ve Been Asking the Wrong Question

My daughter recently turned thirteen. She’ll probably roll her eyes if she ever reads this, but watching her grow has made me realize just how different her future may be from the one I imagined at her age. In about five years she’ll graduate from high school, and I have no idea what the world she’ll be stepping into will look like.

Maybe every generation has looked ahead and wondered what the future would bring. But this feels different. The pace of change is unlike anything I’ve experienced in my lifetime. Technology is evolving faster than our schools, our workplaces, and even our ability to imagine what life might look like ten years from now.

When I was growing up, my parents never had to wonder whether the careers they were preparing me for would still exist. The advice was relatively simple. Study hard, get good grades, go to college, find a good job, work hard, and build a career. It wasn’t a perfect roadmap, but it gave families something many of us long for, certainty.

Today, I’m not sure certainty is something any of us can promise.

Whether you have children of your own, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, students, or simply care about the next generation, I think many of us are quietly wrestling with the same question. How do we prepare the people we love for a future we can’t predict?

Lately, though, I’ve started wondering if that’s even the right question.

Instead of asking what my daughter should study, or whether college will look the same by the time she gets there, I keep coming back to something deeper. What kind of human being do I hope she becomes? The more I sit with that question, the more it changes the way I think about preparing her for the future.

A few weeks ago I attended a panel where a group of high school students were discussing artificial intelligence. I expected to hear conversations about technology. Instead, I found myself watching something much more interesting. These students weren’t waiting for permission to explore. They were experimenting, teaching one another, questioning what they were hearing, and trying things for themselves. It made me stop and think that perhaps one of the most valuable skills we can develop isn’t knowing, it’s remaining willing to learn.

Maybe what matters most isn’t preparing our children for one career. Maybe it’s preparing them for many reinventions. None of us really knows where the world is heading, but perhaps we can help the next generation become comfortable learning, adapting, solving problems, building relationships, thinking critically, and beginning again whenever life asks them to.

The more I think about it, the less interested I become in preparing my daughter for one specific future. I’d much rather help her become curious, kind, creative, resilient, confident, able to communicate well, able to think critically, and willing to keep learning throughout her life. Those qualities feel timeless to me.

I don’t pretend to have the answers. In fact, every conversation I have about the future seems to leave me with more questions than certainty. Perhaps our job isn’t to predict what’s coming. Perhaps it’s to help ourselves, and the young people in our lives, become the kind of humans who can meet whatever future arrives with wisdom, compassion, curiosity, and courage.

Whether you’re thinking about your child, your grandchild, a niece, a nephew, a student, or even your younger self, what qualities do you hope will matter most in the years ahead?

If you’d like to hear the full conversation, including the stories behind these reflections, you can listen to this short episode of The Courage to Be here.

Listen to the Top 2% Global ranking Podcast by clicking here