THE TEENS PHASE IS AS THE MORNING SUN
I envy teens. The teens phase of life is the best phase of life not because that’s when the pleasures of life begin for you, but that’s when you start discovering fascinating things about yourself that becomes pleasures for you later in life. Writing primarily to place one’s success in life and one’s teens phase of life side by side— though non-objectively so, I’d like to say many adults wish to return to their teens life again because there’re prices they’re paying right now in their adulthood that they ought to have paid in their teens: prices like reading and getting acquainted to the world; prices like discovering yourself and getting good at something; prices like learning about building relationship and wealth creation (as wealth has become the parameters for measuring success), etc. It’s so important that teenagers recognize the value of money and understand that it’s not an unlimited resource in the evolving gig economy that we’re currently in. Although it’s not too late already for some adults, but at the same time one can’t have one’s cake and eat it.
Of course teens shouldn’t preoccupy themselves with these things mentioned so much so that they forget about the fun part of their teenage life, but they also shouldn’t give themselves entirely to the ‘empty’ pleasures the age offers them. The most important and inevitable thing that follows one from adolescence into adulthood is ‘attitude.’ Everyone wants to be successful but only few are developing the right attitudes to becoming successful. And developing the right attitude for a human starts at the teens phase. It’s in the teens phase an individual develops an indelible imprint, affecting their personality.
The world is fast evolving, wading off traditional ways of life, becoming more and more technical and fascinatingly so. Funny enough, it’s the younger ones that are in control of it: digital age? So, it doesn’t matter how young you are; and because the world now doesn’t care how young you are, you also must tell yourself I don’t have to get to a certain age to be what I want to be. The gig or freelance economy has started stomping into developing countries like Nigeria. Being a free market system, the gig economy care less about age—with little or no training and experience in a job, you’re offered a platform to exhibit the skills you possess even if you’re not going to earn from it.
To conclude, I leave you with this quote crafted purposely by me to instigate Nigerian teens:
There is so much one needs to know before one dies; there are opportunities one needs to explore before one becomes feeble in mind and body. Adulthood comes with a lot of inevitable anxieties and burdens that one can prepare oneself before hand by how much one knows at the time one’s life is just setting in. We have the Internet as the cheapest tool for the teens to go about that, but who makes the wrong use of the internet the most?
I write this to the teens around me who’re yet to know that this is the best time of their life. I write this to draw a picture about their life for them, by asking them to look at the sun and take note of it by 9 a.m., by 2 p.m., by 5 p.m., and by 9 p.m.
