I'm a 21-year-old college student. I want to change the world. What should I do to maximize my effort?
Where does a young person with big dreams begin?
This is part 3 of 8 of a series called, “From Nothing to Something.”
In case you missed it, here’s part 1 and 2.
I've had the same sentiment as you since I was 17 years old.
I started with the philosophy that if I want to change the world, I just have to start with changing 1 life.
If I could change 1 life, I had no idea who else they could influence or who they could become... so I started investing in the people around me who looked up to me.
That became the norm for me and eventually, I ended up going full time for the next 3 years to work with nonprofits to mentor/train organizations to make more of an impact.
I always welcomed random people that found me through Facebook, YouTube, Tumblr, or my blog and gave them a hand up if they genuinely needed help.
I have friends all over the world who I've invested quite a bit of time and energy in to help them forward in a meaningful way. Many of these people are now leaders in their own right, but at this point, I have no idea how far my influence has gone.
In 2013, I began to realize more and more that money -- as much as I felt I didn't 'need' it -- is what the world runs on. And often, the efforts and impact you have, directly correlate to the financial resources you have to amplify what you are doing (of course there are always exceptions).
So, I decided to study up on business and investing and spent a summer reading whatever books I knew of on those topics.
After that summer, I started a business around flipping houses. The conclusions I made from my summer studies were that:
I need to scale my efforts by building systems or a company
I need to learn how to have my money work for me instead of trading my time for money
So here I am, investing in real estate and building a company. My plan is to get to a point where I have $20-30,000 cashflow per month (very feasible in real estate) and then dedicate my life (again) to build systems to impact people for the better.
I don't plan to try to get into politics or try to get famous. I just know that if I invest myself into mentoring people, I can 'duplicate' myself by instilling a similar attitude, value, and vision in those around me.
Slowly but surely, the efforts I spend will affect more and more people and compound itself over and over again.
It's quite hard to change the world in a few years.. it's a lot more feasible to change it over 50 years by duplicating myself and see my efforts multiply over decades of investment.
But that's just my opinion.
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