Young people with a defeatist vision of work?
First, a clarification. If I use the term young, it is by convention: that is how people speak today. Besides, at 38, I still consider myself young.
That said, I was quite shaken in recent weeks to see so many young people and high school students demonstrating against the new labor law in France.
I am not trying to support the content of this law, which I only skimmed, but rather questioning the fact that these young people give laws the almost magical power to save their future, as if their situation and possible fulfillment depended only on the job market.
Let us be realistic: no law will protect your future.
No law will protect your future, allow you to know success, save you through state aid, change your life through a politician, or guarantee your happiness.
Wanting to toughen dismissal rules amounts to saying: I know I will not be very useful in my future company, so I might as well be protected by a law so they keep me when they realize it and want to fire me.
It is incredible to think this way when you are still in high school or university, full of energy, at the age when you want to remake the world, when you have time to learn and make any employer want you.
What a defeatist position, what an outdated vision of the world of work.
Just remember all those examples of factory employees or old industries supported by unions who ended up unemployed because they believed they were protected. That is precisely why one should not follow or be seduced by those siren songs.
You may answer: yes, but you were lucky, you must have been born into a rich family, you must have had great studies, you probably had a network. I have nothing.
Even though experience only lights its own path, my answer may surprise you: no. My luck was being born into a family where my parents always managed on their own, with the same means available to each of you. I did not do great studies either. I started working at 16, then passed the baccalaureat to please my mother, and I passed only after the oral retake. And no, I knew absolutely no one when I started.
Passion and desire as engines move you faster and further than fear and the search for comfort at any price.
It would be tedious to tell my story in detail, but in short I was lucky, or intuitive, enough to have a computer quite early, around age 10, to discover the Internet in 1994 at age 16 before almost everyone here, and to start writing in the press about it. A few months later, I was forum manager on CompuServe, an ancestor of the Internet.
At the time I was paid 2,000 francs per month, a little more than 300 euros, by Ziff Davis. That was enough to pay my phone bills and Internet connection, which cost a fortune then.
I barely went to high school. I wrote magazine articles during class while teachers thought I was taking notes. I was passionate.
In 1995, I was still lost. I had work and I loved it, but what studies should I pursue? My teachers repeated constantly that it was very important.
That is when I met a man who told me: you know, you do not have to study if you are already an expert on a subject. Most successful men in the world are entrepreneurs, and almost all of them left school very early.
I finally had the answer to my question. If I am an expert on a subject that interests me and interests the rest of the world, why should I study another field? I might as well sell my expertise.
Optimism of will
I left school without the slightest fear for the future.
Why? Because I was young enough to take almost no risk by starting. I had the right and the time to fail several times without putting myself in danger. I ate and slept at my parents home. I needed only a computer, a connection and metro tickets.
Because I was, and still am, an eternal optimist. I think every problem can be solved, and that every misfortune or failure is always for the good, a lesson to go further. Being deeply religious helps me think that way.
Because during my freelance wanderings, I often met people who offered me the chance to join them. What interested them was precisely my atypical path.
After joining two companies at the same time, ZDNet three days per week and a CD-ROM publisher two other days, where I became online manager at 18, I decided to leave both.
At 19, I created my own company. At 21, I employed more than 50 people.
Some thought I was brilliant. I was not. I was simply optimistic and confident about the future throughout my path. That is what makes it easier to launch any project. I also started before those around me, almost 10 years before my friends finished their studies. Perhaps I am lucky. Or perhaps I was simply attentive to opportunities and not afraid to seize them.
Do not count on anyone.
In 2000, when I was under 22, I gave a conference at the Senate organized by Jean-Pierre Raffarin. A senator asked me what I expected from politicians. I answered: precisely, I expect nothing from them, and that is why I move forward.
Did they take it badly? No. They applauded, some even stood up. One senator even came to ask me to help his son find a job.
Of course, I did not succeed in all my projects. To be honest, I think most of them failed. But that changed nothing. What remains is what worked, and each time I learned from projects that did not succeed. You need failures, which are more instructive than successes, to progress.
Today I advise investors and CEOs around the world who employ tens of thousands of people, and I am myself cofounder or manager of several companies.
Having started working before having a family to support, I never went into debt because I had very few personal needs. That is what made my failures almost painless financially.
Today many young people are in debt because they must repay their studies, or the car beyond their means they bought to show off. I find it very superficial to add constraints that are not indispensable.
To move forward, you need a wild desire to succeed. Conversely, fear of failure always prevents good decisions. To succeed, you must put yourself in a situation where failure changes little in your life.
The youth of every country must understand that they must and can rely only on themselves, and that they should listen to no career counselor whose best job, if you think about it, was precisely career counselor.
Trust yourself. There is no reason it cannot happen to you too. Stay optimistic all the time, even in failure. At some point you will succeed. You just have to try several times, so you might as well start as early as possible.
P.S. To be perfectly clear, I am not recommending that everyone must leave school to succeed. I am simply saying that you should at least start a professional life alongside your studies as early as possible, and not hesitate to leave school if the call of the market resonates louder than that of university. There are so many ways to progress and study throughout life.
Good luck to all.