If you lack opportunity, then sweat equity.

Canadians are facing a problem. As of April 2022, in Vancouver, BC alone, there are over 9,000 entry-level jobs in labour, hospitality and trades that don’t require a college degree.

Yet unemployment in young adults 15-24 is greater than 10%.

We need to ask ourselves a question.

What do we value?

Office jobs are receiving dozens of applications per posting in the domain of marketing alone (I have first-hand experience with competing with these outrageous numbers).

Over past decades schools have told us to get a good education, then settle into a cushy job we can idle away in and retire near the end of our lives and that will make us happy.

This is still a VERY new idea.

It hasn’t been 100 years since the Great Depression.

If this was true, why a 10% unemployment rate for the most employable age group?

The reason, I propose, is a misrepresentation of what matters. People want to be comfortable. They actively avoid anything that demands them to feel pain or sweat. This weakness is a learned behaviour. We learn being safe in a little room with a few windows and a screen is the best way to live. In doing so we grow frail in body and spirit behind a desk longing for a connection to something we’ve forgotten. Something deep and primal – the need to experience what it means to endure and grow. This is how we find ourselves. We follow our ancestral calling and we use our full selves in what we do, not simply a single part.

If a school tells everyone to get a degree, then everyone has one. They stop being special and become standard, driving impossible competition for inexperienced youth to live up to as they enter the world buried in debt they can’t pay.

How did this happen?

I want to give the youth of this country a message that I learned the hard way.

1 – Sweat equity, and you’ll find abundance.

2 – Work smart AND hard. Your body and soul need it.

3 – Look the other way. Find a gap to fill, and bleed for it.

Now pick something hard yet in line with your values and get back to work. It will test you, but keep going.