Advice to my university-student self

We graduated over 80 university-age students from our campus edition financial course last week.

We invited some speakers to the occasion, who imparted invaluable lessons that I want to share. I was among the speakers, and because many of us were older than our graduates, we shared our money mistakes and lessons.

The lessons I share today may be targeted at university-age students, but they apply to anyone no matter what stage you are in your financial journey.

Time is your biggest resource.

We had a speaker who started working when she was 17 years old who told us that because of this, she had been handling money from a young age. We also had a student who was graduating; he had read five books in the first quarter of the year that had empowered him with skills. I met a student who learnt to make bracelets through YouTube, and earns money selling them.

The biggest advantage you have when young is time. You can take risks. What are you doing when you are not in class? How will those skills help you when applying for a job or starting a business?

Too many people are wasting this time. You can lose money and earn it back but you can never earn back time.

What’s cool is not always valuable.

Young people are prone to be and do what is cool. And in today’s world, they are inundated with evolving standards of what is cool so they constantly feel that they fall short. Social pressure to conform to what people have is at an all-time high.

We have people who may even be older who do not know themselves because they have conformed to the standards of coolness. Take a moment or 20 and really find out what has value to you.

A certain phone may be cool now but travelling to a new place or taking a course may be more valuable to you. A cool phone today is cool for a short period and then the standards of coolness will change as new versions hit the market. However, the experiences of travel or skills gained from a course stay with you always.

The company you keep:

I wrote an article a while ago about the poverty support group. You need to be around people who are going where you are going. Your ‘squad’ needs to have the same values. There are people who hold you back because of their own fears about what will happen to them if you succeed. The company you keep will dictate the conversations you have.

Those conversations will become what you see. What you see is what you will do. If you talk negativity, that’s what you will see. There’s really no room to notice that the glass is half full if you have filled your head with that noise.

What you want to happen in your life, how you think, talk and act must speak the same language. Ditch the poverty support squad.

Entrepreneurship:

There are more people coming out of university than there are jobs available. We need a lot more entrepreneurs out there creating jobs. There are problems that need solutions. We will solve these problems by either starting businesses that offer the solution or we can go into existing organisations and be problem solvers. To be an entrepreneur, prepare to fail. Failure is a very necessary part of life. It’s how we learn. When you are young you have time to fail, get up, try again, fail again, and try again until you get it right.

Save: Start saving now and save whatever you can. One hundred bob a day is Sh36, 500 a year. That’s all it takes to get some businesses started. Even Sh10 million shilling is Sh2,700 a day and even much less if you make your money earn interest. Every million is a consequence of a series of actions.