Three soft skills Gen Z can learn from early financial education and entrepreneurship
In March, 2020 (pre-Quarantine), fifteen year old Zoë McCall and a group of her peers stood up in front of their county school board to testify for the benefits of personal finance education for high schoolers. The Maryland school board passed the resolution to require a personal finance course for all high school students in the region. 25 states and D.C. have proposed similar requirements for schools in 2021.
Zoë herself is a testament to the empowerment of a financial education. She has taken to being business-minded naturally. Her motivation to make money began when she was a middle-schooler who “loves to have money on the side.” She explained, “when I’m going out with friends, when I’m going to the movies I wanted to have money to spend and I couldn’t always have a job, so I babysat.”
Besides learning hard skills like budgeting, what other benefits can an early financial education offer young people? Zoë shared some of the soft skills she has learned from her entrepreneurial experiences. This article explores three of her key financial abilities and attitudes that make her a stronger college applicant and leader.
My favorite part about talking with Zoë is that her financial literacy activism — the awesome thing that got her on the news in the first place — is just the beginning.
Her parents have always encouraged her entrepreneurship and supported her efforts. She admits that she is lucky to have had their guidance. “They’ve always been able to steer me in the right direction and give me great advice,” she says. “I know everyone doesn’t have that, which is why financial literacy is so important — because, yes, I can turn to my parents to help me manage my money but some other people can’t turn to their parents. So that’s why we need to be able to educate people if they don’t get it at home.”
She’s not only an advocate for financial literacy though. “I’m a big advocate for financial literacy as well as mental health, and… I feel like they can go hand in hand sometimes.”
Like many others in 2020, Zoë began thinking more about mental health during the quarantine lockdowns of the pandemic. She learned that “your outlook on everything really makes or breaks your personality, your mental health, your wellbeing.” She aspires to share those ideas with others who suffer from mental health challenges, especially those in the African American community. Over the summer, she started a blog and a podcast called “Optimism Lab” to explore the power of positivity.
Because of her passion for the topic of mental health, she is working on becoming a pediatric psychiatrist “to work with little kids, preferably little kids of color, and basically getting them the mental health resources that they need, whether that’s medication, whether that’s therapy, whatever the case may be. I want to be the person to give that to them because mental health is something that’s important to me.”
My favorite part about talking with Zoë is that her financial literacy activism — the awesome thing that got her on the news in the first place — is just the beginning. Her financial and entrepreneurial ability is a launchpad for the fulfillment of her other ambitions.
Now a sixteen year old junior in high school, Zoë is focused on becoming a well-rounded college applicant. No doubt admissions reps will be impressed by her successful activism at the school board and her poise throughout the media coverage thereafter. She also can add to her application the two small businesses she’s started (babysitting and mask making), her involvement in student body government, and her participation in Junior Achievement programs in her region. She hopes to go to Harvard.
Success to her looks like helping people in her community who struggle with mental health challenges. She strives to become a pediatric psychiatrist who can help young people understand that “it’s okay to have mental health illness, and it’s okay to get help for it. You don’t have to suffer in silence… You can get the help you need and live a peaceful, a successful, a wealthy life.”
With those dreams ahead of her, Zoë has a huge advantage over everyone else her age.
After she accomplishes that, she wants to help even more people. “So along with being a pediatric psychiatrist, I also want to start either a program or nonprofit for children of color because in the African American community, people of color in general, when it comes to mental health assistance,… there’s a stigma that it’s unnecessary, that you don’t need it, that you’re not really depressed or you don’t really have anxiety; you can pray it away. Things of that nature. That’s a big stigma in my community.”
In short, she strives to become “a pediatric psychiatrist who will eventually have her own private practice and who will eventually have a platform where she can educate people on the fact that [mental health] is real and [it’s] something that everyone deals with.”
With those dreams ahead of her, Zoë has a huge advantage over everyone else her age. She has very specific and personally relevant goals that have the potential for far-reaching impact on others. What’s more, they are goals that are uniquely her own — not her parents’ nor anyone else’s — and that derive from her understanding of her personal strengths and advantages. Three of those strengths are skills that are directly related to her entrepreneurship experiences and her personal finance education.
After her interview for the CNBC article, she got to attend the Junior Achievement Entrepreneurship Summit, a five-day “intensive ‘startup boot camp’ where high school students are challenged to design ready-to-launch, socially-conscious businesses.”
The biggest lesson Zoë learned through that program was “knowledge is power.”
The young entrepreneur explained: “So in whatever you’re doing,… it’s not a good idea to go into something blindly and to start something and just hope for the best. And what you really need to do is dedicate time and dedicate resources beforehand to educate yourself… because whatever you’re going to do, someone has done it before in some aspect… Even if you have great new ideas, someone before has done something like [it].”
This principle is how business owners reduce risk and maximize returns — they leverage the knowledge and experiences of others in order to come up with a better plan. Zoë can apply this thinking to anything she sets out to accomplish.
From her experience starting her babysitting and mask making businesses, Zoë has developed a mantra: “Pay yourself first.”
“The most important thing when you’re earning money and when money is cycling in and out of your bank account is to pay yourself first… A lot of people, especially my age, you get money, you spend it because you know you’re going to get more. That’s just in simplest terms what happens. You’ll spend it with the idea of, ‘Oh, well I know I have a paycheck coming on Friday, so I can spend this now because I’ll get paid again on Friday, and it’ll be fine because I think I will be replenished.’ But a lot of times if you’re just spending and getting back and spending and getting back, you’re not really doing much. You’re only impacting yourself currently, but we want to think on a long term type of scale.”
As a business owner, having cash reserves can help a business or any person weather unexpected tough times. There is also a psychological benefit to having the security that back up money can provide. Thinking like a business owner has taught Zoë how savings can protect not only the health of a business but also her own mental and personal health.
As a busy high school student with many side projects (like her new mental health website and podcast), she is learning how to prioritize.
“…if you have to say, ‘Okay, I’m going to have to stop this for a little while to make sure this is good,’ that’s what you’re going to have to do. Because all in all my grades come first, and with the podcast, I had to stop the podcast for a little bit to make sure my grades were good. And once my grades are where I want them to be, I can go back and record another episode because it’ll always be there. The blog will always be there.”
Not everyone desires to run their own business, and that’s ok. However, most modern people must rely on money to create the things they want in their lives. The basic financial principles that keep businesses running can enrich anyone’s personal finances as well.
The middle school girl who “loves to have money on the side” learned how to make and manage her own money. Now her dreams are bigger than money: they look like educating, helping and healing (and Harvard).
Zoë will enrich the lives of others because her money and her mindset have been mastered.
This is a feature story of Zeneration Wealth — a platform for empowering Gen Z and beyond with new ideas of financial wealth and well being. As a community, we are creating a new paradigm of success. If you have your own thoughts on these topics, feel free to reply to this post to keep the conversation going.
Read our blog and find us on social media.
