What You Need to Know

Federal youth labor laws will allow you to work limited hours if you are sixteen or seventeen, with few exceptions. By the time you are eighteen, all the youth restrictions are lifted, which means you can jump into a nine-to-five routine as soon as you stow your cap and gown and frame your high school diploma. Work is a huge part of adult life. Your mission is to figure out if now is the time to begin, or if you should take advantage of the next few years to experiment with other opportunities before settling into a job.

But first things first: There’s a big incentive to getting straight to work for one obvious reason: you make money. The sooner you start making money, the longer the span of years you have to grow and accumulate that income (provided you don’t blow it on stuff you don’t need) and the more stable and secure you can become. Age or lack of degree won’t get in the way. According to the US Department of Labor, twenty-four out of the thirty fastest-growing sectors of our economy only require a high school degree or equivalent to get a job. Only three require a bachelor’s degree, and the remaining three require an associate’s degree. Many of these occupations are service oriented: nurse’s aides, home health aides, food prep workers, and retail workers. These may not be your dream jobs, but they are paid work.

Work is a tricky subject to offer as an option, because eventually everyone has to do it. For most of us, it’s not a choice. The only choices are when to start (for many this isn’t a choice) and what kind of work to do, for how many hours, so you can make ends meet. There’s also the long-term, more radical difference—the happiness quotient difference—between doing work that you love and clocking hours at a job just for cash. Your goal in adulthood should be the former, but at this stage of the game, the vast majority of work available to you is going to be the latter: low-on-the-totem-pole, minimum-wage, minimal-skills-required labor. The upside to this kind of work is that you can do it and still do other things that inspire you more, like write your screenplay, refine your business plan, play music, or study. The downside is that these jobs are often physically tiring, boring, and more than a little soul sucking, which can take the wind out of your sails if you don’t have a life goal that you are working toward.

If you are blessed to have parents or a benefactor willing to give you some financial breathing room over the next couple years, my best advice is to take it. Put off getting a full-time job, and further your education or training in some way. If you are burning to start a business and your parents are willing to help, the same thing goes. This may be the only time in your life when you will get that breathing room, and that money should be considered an investment in you. You have the time and the energy right now to make a lot of things happen. If you have funding, too, that is a recipe for real success. I say this assuming you want to be a success and eventually will return your parents’ investment by taking care of them in some way when you are older.

If you need to fully support yourself, there’s no reason to think that the other options outlined in this book are out of reach. They just may take more time to achieve. It is possible to hold down a thirty-hour-per-week job and take two night classes a semester at your local community college, trade school, or state university. After a couple of years, you may have saved enough money to take the time off to finish your bachelor’s degree or apprenticeship elsewhere, travel, start a business, or participate in a cool service opportunity that leads to a whole new chapter.