Editor’s note: This article was first published in October 2013, days after Shiller’s Nobel Prize in Economics was announced, when Morgan Housel was a Motley Fool columnist. Facebook has since become Meta, though Zuckerberg remains CEO.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Shiller has taught us to think about human emotions and not just numbers, and to look at markets over the long term instead of focusing on the short term.
Morgan Housel, a financial journalist and columnist at Fool.com, had the honour of interviewing Shiller in his office at Yale University, and from that interview we can draw a message for young students and for young people who don’t see a promising future ahead of them.
Robert Shiller’s advice for young people is this:
You should be respectful of history whenever it creates an opportunity, and this moment of great economic crisis is precisely an opportunity in which we need to think creatively.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking about the life cycle in terms of “at this age I have to study, at this age I have to find a partner, at this age I have to get married, now I have to do this and that…”
Recognise opportunities and jump in to seize them the moment they arise.
Shiller gives the example of Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, who dropped out and found Facebook, or found Facebook and that made him drop out. Whichever way it happened, the fact is that to throw himself into the Facebook project he had to leave university. In other words, he had to give up what for years he had believed he should be doing.
The Nobel laureate isn’t encouraging anyone to drop out of their studies, far from it. He is simply telling you that this is how life is. You have to keep an eye out for opportunities, and the truth is that opportunities rarely come when we’re expecting them or when we’re ready to welcome them with open arms.
Opportunities arrive and stop in front of you, waiting for you to get on board. Other times they don’t stop. They are hovering around, sometimes moving and sometimes in disguise, and we have to recognise them, seize them and commit to them.
This message is very common, almost standard, among the advice of great business leaders, and according to Shiller it is something most young people today don’t fully grasp, and others don’t even know.
What’s more, with markets moving as fast as they do today, if you come up with a business idea and are slow to act on it, another entrepreneur has probably already got it up and running.
Further reading
- 10 leaders give advice to university students and entrepreneurs
- Richard Branson’s tips for entrepreneurs
- Michael Dell: more craziness and less asking for advice
- If you want to succeed, stop going to the bathroom, by Michael Bloomberg
Featured image: Bengt Nyman from Vaxholm, Sweden, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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