YouthFund
Welcome, Autumn
Autumn is a season of reflection, of new beginnings. The end of summer used to make me a bit nostalgic, and some years it still does. But mostly what I feel now is expectation. A new school year is a fresh start you get handed every single time, and I cannot wait to see what you do with this one.
One thing about the adults here before I say anything about you. We are still learning too, on purpose. I keep asking what I am missing and who I have not listened to yet, because that is the only way I get better at this. If the people running a program have stopped learning, you can usually tell.
Read a whole book this fall
Last week I was invited to give a two-minute opening remark, and I prepared for it by reading a book cover to cover. Two minutes. Perhaps it was overkill, but I do not regret a second of it, because I loved the reading itself. I kept going long after I had what I came for, not because anyone was going to check, but because I wanted to.
For me, luckily, that habit started early. In first grade I read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in Chinese and fell in love with reading. I have gone back to it since, in English years later, and then in a couple of languages I taught myself. It was not an assignment that did that, it was that book. Years later, Harry Potter proved the same point at a scale nobody could have imagined. People your age will read, and read long, and read late, when they love what is in their hands.
So here is what I want for you. Not excerpts. Not summaries. Not the first three pages and a search result. One whole book, finished, before winter.
And then tell your friends and your peers what you read, what you took from it, and why you chose that one.
Pick it yourself. You are looking for the one you cannot stop reading, and you will not find it by taking someone else’s word for what that is.
Then discuss it with someone
Finishing a book is half of it. The other half is what you do with what you now think.
The book I went back to recently is two people who disagree about almost everything in American education, sitting down and talking anyway. What I love is the form even more than the content: real disagreement, nobody scoring points, two people reasoning out loud and taking each other seriously. (A Search for Common Ground, by Frederick M. Hess and Pedro A. Noguera, if you want it.)
That is what I want for you this year. Bring a topic you actually care about. Take it to your peers. Listen to them. Reason with them. Push back, respectfully. You do not have to end up agreeing, and you should not pretend to. The point is that you thought it through together, with someone who saw it differently.
I am all ears too. Bring your topic to me.
Where to start
Sign up and you are in our peer community. Every month we bring you a Hero Talk: someone who has built something, telling you how it actually went, live, with your questions. Free, online, no application, no screening. Founders and founders-to-be alike. Everyone is welcome.
And if you finish that book, tell me which one and what you thought of it.
Please know that your notes and your stories brighten my day every single time, and I cannot wait to hear more of them.
Here’s to a good autumn.
Ariel