Let’s make a promise to build something, to build something of importance. This could be a piece of art, a published research paper, a business, a book; there are a lot of options. I believe people these days, especially young people are conditioned to care so much about a few indicators of talent and success such as a GPA. A good GPA has its place but it isn’t the end all of everything like many people make it out to be.

At this point there are plenty of self-appointed young go getters who will speak out and whole heartedly agree with me, saying it is important to do something constructive with your life even at an early point. However, the vast majority of these young people are probably thinking about the school or club positions they hold or the hospital volunteering they do, or the jobs they might have at a prestigous company. This is not building something. There were other student body presidents before, the hospital was built already, and that prestigous company will be hiring other people for the same job later.

Now that I’ve been a pesimist let me say that there is nothing wrong at all with any of these situations, in fact they are all quite useful, but they are very different from building something. Building something creates value for yourself and those around you. It literally involves you creating something from seemingly nothing. This should not be too daunting. If you are a student then you’ve been doing it for a while. Yes your GPA is something you have built. Your GPA is actually very important because it is the first thing you are able to build and show off to others. But that is it. It is just the first thing you have built in a line of other things you are building.

So your a junior in college. You are a good student, high up in a few school clubs, what now? What about all the time you would have to put into building something? Well the good thing is building something actually has a lot of weight behind it with other people. What’s more impressive, an internship at a very prominent publishing house or self-publishing your own successful collection of short stories during college? Even if you don’t actually want to depend on the things you build, such as wanting to be an author, building something still has the best time to benefit ratio for your career. An employer will greatly value a PROVEN self starter.

Now that you have decided to build something, what should you build? Well a lot of people will be self selected at this part, biology, english, art majors, etc.. What about for others who can not write a book or doing biology research or paint? It is true that while you are young it is tough to build certain things that might take more time and knowledge (tough but not impossible). I have found that the most prominent skills young people can use just as effectively as anyone else are writing, programming, and entrepreneurship. There probably are more and I’d love to know them. Luckily it almost doesn’t matter what your inclinations or passions are, you can probably fit it into one of those three skills.

You have an interest in hip hop dance. Let’s look at this interest from all three skills. Since you have this knowledge you could easily write down directions for all of the different moves with pictures and make a usefull collection. Now you want to make this collection public and easily accessable, so you could create a website with pages for each move. You could even include movies and anything else usefull. You might have to take an HTML class or get a friend to do it for you. Subsequently, you find out people like what you have written and put on the internet and your site is now one of the top hip hop dance sites on the net. You decide you could probably make some money off this now. So you get a camera and make a DVD, which you sell through your website, Amazon, and Google.

Now when you go in for an interview at a company, you don’t have to prove you can handle the operations through your words; you have already proven it through what you have built. The example above is one of first things I built. So I implore others to go out and actually build something. Everybody has the power to do nothing, some people have the power something, and few people actually do anything, who are you going to be?