Start Following Your Dreams, Stop Worrying About What You're 'Supposed To Do'

In elementary school I could not imagine why I was being tortured by Latin or math, and, as a crashee, I had a twisted perception of soccer.

But I loved starting things, especially newspapers. Once I had saved enough to buy a mimeograph machine (a low-cost printing press that saved me from collapsing over typewriter keys and a stack of carbon copies), I was unstoppable.

The logic of producing what would become a 32- and then 50-page newspaper with writers and circulation beyond my school was also irresistible. I had to go out and get advertisements, and I had to organize peers in many places. The method was obvious to me, but the means…well, let's just say I was not always where I was “supposed to be.”

Many years later, when my mother died, I found correspondence with the principal of my school. My mother was more than a little worried. (Why is my fifth grader neither in school nor at home?) However, the principal patiently, and ultimately successfully, argued that everyone should trust me and support my efforts. “Don’t even show him that you’re anxious,” he advised my family and friends.

Bless him!

Once a young person has chased a dream, built a team, and changed his or her small world, he or she has the power to express love and respect in action—the heart of what brings health, longevity and happiness.

He or she will be a changemaker for life—a real contributor in a world where value increasingly comes from little positive disruptions and not, as it has for millennia, from efficiency in repetition. It is no accident that over 80 percent of the 3,000 leading social entrepreneur Ashoka Fellows started something in their teens, usually early teens. Today, more than half have changed national policy within five years of launch.

Here at Ashoka, we have long believed that the education reform discussion has largely missed the boat. It is focused chiefly on access to schools driven by an outdated set of objectives, mastering a single body of knowledge and a set of rules. That makes sense in a static world—but not in one defined by accelerating change.

Now we must ensure that young people—our future leaders—master core changemaking skills like empathy, teamwork and leadership before they turn 21.

The only way they can do so is by practicing, failing, collaborating, learning from mistakes, and taking responsibility for making a difference. (See Ashoka’s Start Empathy and Youth Venture initiatives.)

“Different people need different things,” says Ayla Gavins, principal at Boston’s Mission Hill School, a leading Ashoka Changemaker School.

“If we want children to be inventors, we have to give them opportunities to invent…If we want them to be problem solvers, we [must] give them moments of independence to figure out things for themselves.”