We're all the same (pretty much)
I read a great post yesterday about how to manage and market to millennials. Some good advice for sure. But it got me thinking.
Are there really such stark differences between the generations?
I don’t think so.
Gen Xers (myself included) like to rant about the entitlement mentality of today’s younger workers. And we’re not completely off base. I’ve seen it in action.
But were we really all that different?
Does anyone actually remember the early 90s? Remember what people were saying about us back then? We were slackers. We were anti-establishment. We weren’t interested in following our parents footsteps. And we thought all of this somehow made us special.
In other words, we were young.
Like the boomers before us, we wanted to chart our own course. We had ideals and felt they offered us a unique perspective on the world. Kurt Cobain was our messenger, telling the bloated bureaucracy we weren’t interested in what they were selling.
Sounds familiar, right? Sounds an awful lot like what we hear about today’s 20-somethings. Their dreams are different than ours. Their vision of the world goes beyond working for the man, blindly.
The bottom line? Every young person wants to change the world. Every kid out of college has a head full of ideas that need to be heard.
And that’s great. Young people do change the world. The boomers helped end the war in Vietnam and brought the issue of equality to the forefront. My generation tapped the power of the Internet to create a whole new world of opportunity and began the push towards creating more acceptance of gays and lesbians. And millennials have changed the world yet again, creating a social web experience that has altered the way humans interact and has been responsible for massive political change across the globe.
So when someone says we need to get into the heads of these “young folks” so we can figure out how to market to them, let’s avoid treating it like we’re examining an alien civilization.
Just think back 10, 20 or 30 years and remember who you were at that moment. And talk to that person. Chances are he has a lot in common with the 20-year-old sitting next to you.