Undergraduate Blog / Career Development

We’re All Future Millionaires

Millenials are a generation of future millionaires. Well, at least that’s what we tell ourselves. While studying at Babson and meeting other college students my age, I have not yet met someone who does not believe that they will be wildly successful someday. I have met future CEO’s, CFO’s, and CMO’s. I’ve met future Entrepreneurs, who will be featured in Forbes’s, future diplomats who will create social change across continents, and future finance and tech moguls, who will star on Shark Tank.

Now, the odds of all of us of reaching such incredible success is actually pretty low and we won’t all drive Ferrari’s and live in mansions like we dream about. But one thing is for sure: we will all be millionaires. You don’t have to have a million dollars in your bank account to be a huge success. Millenials live in a world where our access to experiences and knowledge provides us with so much more than money.

The world keeps getting smaller and smaller as technology advances, and our generation has the ability to interact with each other in ways our parents would have never imagined. We can meet people from across the globe through different apps on our phones. Business leaders can collaborate and create break-through innovations without having to be in the same room as one another. We can travel the world for cheaper, and we can stay in touch with everyone we meet, as long as we have access to Internet or cellular signal. We can experience different cultures and grow to understand and appreciate their differences. Most of us won’t grow up with cultural blinders. We have technology that will let us experiment and create inventions that could change the world. Very few people from earlier generations had the ability to experience the world the way we get to. To us, this is a way of life for us and may not seem significant all the time, but when you step back and look at what we are capable of, and what we have been able to do already, you realize how incredible our lives are.

If someone wants to learn today, they can. They don’t have to sit in a classroom or have a teacher lecture them. They can go on YouTube and watch some of the greatest minds talk about science, literature, math and business. We can read as many books as we want, and we can listen to music from centuries before us. We can go to museums and see art from historic painters or sculptors and see ancient pieces of history from incredible civilizations. We can watch the news and see what is happening all over the world, and we can read about the various view points, and some of us are able to take part in these important conversations about the problems going on in our world. We can use our travel experiences to help educate us about the world and the people who inhabit it. Anyone can be the next great innovator if they really wanted to. We can change the world if we want to.

Now, obviously, not every member of our generation lives in a country where they have this type of access to the world. If there was ever a generation that could change that though, it’s millenials. There are already so many people working to help under developed countries gain the necessary technology to learn and experience the same way we do, and someday they will.

I always hear people from older generations talking about how millenials have our heads in the clouds, and we live too loudly or too wildly. Well, what would you expect from millionaires? We have limitless access to knowledge and experiences, and with that, we have the ability to think beyond what past generations were ever capable of. We are a generation of people who can change the world.

If you want to understand millenials, if you want to get into our heads, you first have to understand the mind of people who have no limits. We are people who will grow up to live extraordinary lives and that we crave things that teach us more, and let us experience more. We crave knowing that we can see or do anything we want if we have the drive to do so. Maybe our bank accounts will never see a million dollars, but the lives that we will live will be worth much more than that.