ASK GORICK ANYTHING
“How can I help my teen get their motivation back?”
💡 The quick answer: Explain the Ten Year Rule—then ask your teen who they look up to, what fires them up, and what they’re good at.
THE QUESTION
“Hi Gorick, I’m a longtime fan of your book and have a question for you about my son. He is a sophomore in high school and a well-rounded kid who planned to study computer science. But he’s told me that he doesn’t want to go to college anymore, citing things like daytrading YouTubers as a way to get rich quick.
Fine - I can be on board with exploring options, but he’s dropped any aspirations and just sits in his room watching videos. I’d write this off as typical teenager behavior but nothing I say gets through. What can I say to help him get excited about his future and working towards something again?”
—Nadine K. from Indianapolis, IN
GORICK'S RESPONSE
Hi Nadine!
Thank you so much for taking the time to reach out and for trusting me to share some (hopefully useful!) thoughts on how to help your son reignite some of his passions around a future career path.
Your question has given me a lot to think about, especially as the dad of a 2½-year-old who does the opposite of everything I want her to do (so thanks for giving me a sneak peek of what’s to come in ~13 years, too)!
Below you’ll find why I believe your son is far from being the only one facing feelings of demotivation, my recommended framework for helping teens think about their futures in a hopefully more positive and productive way, and the 3 questions that I plan to ask my daughter one day when she’s more grown up.
Why is my teenager so unmotivated about the future?
If your kid isn't motivated to plan for their future career, you're not alone. Countless parents have shared a similar struggle with me.
First, it’s important to realize that their pessimism isn’t entirely irrational. Imagine you’re a 16-year-old today:
- You go on social media… and all you see are people who are all happier, wealthier, and prettier than you—and somehow all of them made it happen overnight.
- You look at the smart kids who went off to study subjects like computer science… and all you see are example after example of those same obedient people getting laid off.
- You look at what you’re learning at school… and all you see is theoretical subject after theoretical subject that you’re expected to memorize when you know that a quick answer is possible with an LLM (Large Language Model—fancy speak for the AI tools so many of us use these days, whether it’s ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Copilot).
- You look at the news… and all you see are examples of people getting rich not due to their hard work but due to their connections.
- You look around some more… and all you hear are discussions about an uncertain economy, ecological disaster, or AI taking all of our jobs.
This is a lot to take in for anyone, let alonea teenager who is still making sense of the world.
But you—the adult—know 3 things that the next generation does not—and I’ve actually written about it before:
1. The Ten Year Rule means it takes about a decade to start feeling the wind at your back in your career
When people seem like overnight successes, you're seeing the outcome, not the journey.
The example that I like to use is someone that your high school sophomore definitely knows: MrBeast. Look up MrBeast (or read my essay), and you’ll quickly learn he’s the top-grossing YouTuber. But if you find yourself thinking, "Wow, this person came out of nowhere,” well… he didn't.
As of this writing, MrBeast has been posting YouTube videos for 14 years. “Want to be ‘successful’ like MrBeast?” I ask the teenage audiences I sometimes speak to. “Well, what have you done for 14 years straight?”
Here's another example that might resonate with you and your kid: Taylor Swift. The singer-songwriter seems to be everywhere, and plenty of people want to be a celebrity or singer like her. But let's look at the facts.
First, Swift got started very early, at the age of 12. That's not too far from where your kid is.
Second, even after she became “successful” (which is itself a subjective concept), she still puts in the repetitions! What was Swift doing to prepare for the Eras Tour? She was rehearsing her entire set of 44 songs, which runs over three hours, on the treadmill, every day—for 6 months.
Third and lastly, consider Swift’s earliest songs. She has sung some of them over 500 times ("Love Story," for one). “Want to be ‘successful’ like Taylor Swift?” I again like to ask my teenage audiences. “What have you done 500 times over 10 years?”
2. Career success = skill x drive x luck
As I’ve tried to argue through my essay on the topic, it takes time to build one’s skill, to hone one’s drive, and to create one’s own luck. Achieving success in any field typically requires all three ingredients.
But while luck no doubt plays a role—think Taylor Swift having parents who were willing and able to uproot themselves to support her music ambitions—the financial markets take luck to a whole new level.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, investor turned author of Fooled by Randomness, offers my favorite thought experiment:
Imagine gathering 10,000 people in a room and asking each person to flip a coin. Anyone who flips tails is eliminated. Anyone who flips heads moves on to the next round.
After 1 round, roughly 5,000 people remain in the game. After 5 rounds, about 313 remain. After 10 rounds, about 10 people remain. And after 13 rounds, you might have just 1 person left who has flipped heads 13 times in a row.
Was this person an expert coin flipper? Or were they just lucky?
Now imagine that person writing a bestselling book about their secret to flipping heads 13 times in a row. Would you buy it?
This is the danger of confusing luck with skill—and it's especially relevant to the stock market. Unlike a coin toss, investing isn't purely random. Research, judgment, and skill can matter. But with enough investors making enough trades, some will inevitably achieve extraordinary winning streaks through luck alone.
I have many close friends in the public-markets investing world, given my past life in finance—and questions about how much of their performance comes down to skill versus luck are never far from their minds.
This is a hard concept for a teenager to understand: Is that millionaire daytrader they’re following online (A) talented, (B) lucky, or (C) lying? Given that anyone can claim anything online these days and anyone can technically flip heads 13 times in a row, we’ll never know.
What do we know? That some of the most successful investors have built their track records over decades, not months.
Warren Buffett? He’s been investing for 80 years. Ken Griffin, founder of the hedge fund Citadel? He’s been investing for 40 years. Yes, both started in their teens—so that’s a relatable detail—but they didn’t make money and stop. They kept up their drive and bettered their skill for longer than you’ve been alive (I’m speaking to your kid now). And for every Buffett and Griffin there are countless people who lost money. It’s just that "survivorship bias” means that we’ll never hear about them.
3. “You can’t be what you can’t see” (and you can’t want what you can’t name)
The idea is this: life can be unbearably boring and demotivating to navigate if you don't see a purpose.
(The first part is an age-old quote. The second part in parentheses is my addition.)
Unfortunately, a lot of what I hear from today’s kids and their parents is that they don’t see a purpose in their lives. And even when kids do see a bigger purpose, it moves far more slowly than a video game or the thrill of seeing a stock go up on a trading dashboard.
So, the exercise that I often do with high school students is to ask them:
- What's something that frustrates you?
- What is something that you're fired up about?
- Who is someone that you want to help?
- What is something that you would like to see be different in this world?
- What have people not given you credit for? Where do you want to prove them wrong?
People need an enemy. People need a mission. People need a quest. Without a real-world quest, it's easy to just go with whatever ends up in front of them in real life, on their YouTube Recommended page, or their TikTok For You page—like video games or day trading that promise quick, easy riches.
What do I say to my unmotivated teenager?
Ask who they look up to, what fires them up, and what they're good at. Then, help them connect the dots.
What does that mean? There are 3 questions you can ask—and then there's a fourth consideration that has nothing to do with them.
Question 1: "Who is someone that you look up to? Why?"
Once you know who your child looks up to, sit down with them and reverse engineer what that person did to get to where they are today. Just like we did with MrBeast and Taylor Swift, look up what they were doing at your child’s age and, moreover, all of the drive and skill they had to exercise before stumbling upon luck.
Question 2: "What is something that gets you fired up?"
Another way of phrasing this is, “What pisses you off?”
The goal? Talk about the problem, and then pivot to talking about the career path that’d allow your child to become a part of the solution.
Question 3: "What’s something that you can get lost in for hours?"
This is my favorite proxy question for uncovering someone’s strengths and interests.
If you're good at something, you're probably more likely to like it. And if you like something, you're probably more motivated to get better at it, too.
In school, your child is expected to be good at everything. This is great if you’re one of the few among us who are good at everything, but utterly demotivating if you’re not.
But here’s the good news: you only need to be good at 1 or 2 things to make something of yourself. Michael Phelps would be a terrible figure skater and Alysa Liu would be a terrible swimmer. Half the battle is in helping your child recognize that they should be a swimmer, not a figure skater.
What if my teen won't listen to me?
Now, the last point: It's not just about the message. It's also about the messenger.
Whether you can have these conversations depends a great deal on your relationship with your kid. Does your kid come to you with questions and goals? Can you have an open conversation? Do they feel safe that you won't judge them or shove them into something? If so, great: Have this conversation.
If you don't have this relationship, look for somebody else that they do see as a credible messenger. That could be another parent, another family member, or a friend from school. I've seen many parents open the conversation by involving that trustworthy friend.
Hope this was helpful, and best of luck!
See you in November for our next AMA,
Gorick
Interested in getting your own career question answered? Submit it here for a chance to be featured!
WHAT I'M READING
Here are 3 articles that I found interesting recently (some with paywalls, but your first article should be free):
- How ‘hyperselection’ is making modern life efficient, pleasant – and boring (The Conversation)
- The future job market will break career ladders. Find out who could fall. (Washington Post)
- Why do we like being scared? (American Brain Foundation)
SOURCES
- Fooled by Randomness
- Only to have their jobs taken away by AI
- She was rehearsing her entire set of 44 songs
- 500 times
MORE OF MY WORK
Every newsletter is free and a fraction of my work. Here are 4 of my paid offerings that may interest you:
1. Keynote speaking: If your organization is looking for speakers for your internship program, new hire orientation, new student orientation, manager training, all-hands meetings, recruiting season, year-end performance evaluation season, or something else, let's chat!
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3. The Unspoken Rules: My Wall Street Journal Bestseller that Arianna Huffington calls “a blueprint for anyone starting their career, entering a new role, or wanting to get unstuck.” Used by top companies and MBA programs.
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