Making Your Teen Indispensible
Maybe you’re old enough to remember Mikey, the young boy in the Life commercial? He liked the cereal that no one else was going to try. Your teen can take a lesson from this; Mikey gets the whole box of cereal to himself. No one else was daring enough to try it and it ended up being good.
Your teen is going to enter a world where there are people with tons of most of what your teen has. If your teen is cute, there is someone out there cuter (I know you might not think so and that’s okay), there will be someone who speaks one more language than they do, runs or thinks a little faster than they do and on and on. You get the idea. Because there will always be someone bigger, better, faster, it’s important that your teen perfect that which is unique about them and in the case they think there is nothing that unique about them, they must create something to distinguish them in this way.
This type of thinking doesn’t necessarily require that your teen be one step ahead although that’s a great gift to have and start, but it does require that they do it in a way that make them invaluable to others. Perfect examples are speaking a challenging language. The military found this out when they needed people to translate Arabic, being an expert in a special field like social networks for the elderly or knowing sign language. These skills are not common and help distinguish your teen form others who may have graduated from equally good schools with equally or better grades.
So get your teen to go out on a limb and learn a new skill, try a new subject or taste test a new cereal, it may end up placing them in a position to distinguish themselves from thousands of applicants leaving the whole “box” for them.
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