We millennials have heard it all.
“You’re lazy.”
“You’re full of yourself.”
“You think you’re too good for hard work.”
The truth is, we’re en route to become the most educated generation in American history, according to the Pew Research Center. Pew also says we’re confident, upbeat and we take change well. We’re the most ethnically and racially diverse generation. We also vote at a higher rate than other generations when they were our age. That’s all statistical fact.
If that’s not enough proof that we’re not lazy time- and space-wasters, let me speak from personal experience—we’re graduating from college with usually more than one internship under our belt. We’re also getting the highest scores on advanced placement exams, SATs and equivalent exams. We’re graduating with honors. We’re working six jobs while still being full-time students. We’re also the most environmentally conscious generation of all time, and, obviously, the most technologically savvy.
Keep calling us lazy—you’re simply wrong.
You can also keep calling us narcissistic—if you consider knowing what we deserve based on our own hard work and expecting nothing less than what we’ve put into our futures as narcissistic.
According to the Harvard Business Review, in four years millennials will account for nearly half of the workforce worldwide. But never fear, Gen-Xers and Baby Boomers—some of us will be working those blue collar jobs. Not all of us are college educated. Those of us who are educated are crippled by student loan debt and we can’t find jobs in the industries of our choice, so we settle for less—and which generation is at fault for that, Congress?
The cool thing about millennials is that we’re fearless and creative. We’ll walk up to the company CEO and ask him or her to listen to our brilliant idea, because, yeah, we’re narcissistic and we think we’re worth your time. That’s because we are. It’s the way we were raised—our parents raised us as their peers rather than their inferiors, and we’re better for it.
Within the next four to 10 to 20 years, we’ll be changing the face of the workforce. We won’t adapt to our jobs, we’ll make our jobs adapt to us, whether our collars are blue or white or whether we’re not wearing collars at all (because, let’s face it, we’ll change business casual to be way more “casual” and way less “business”). Sure, millennials are the “selfie” generation—but we’re also the generation that’s going to change the world.
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