Our last letter was about how real learning happens - through experience, with real stakes and real consequences.
Let's push that further now. Let's move beyond projects done for learning toward real contribution - creative work, a venture, social leadership. Producing something that matters, on whatever you're passionate about.
And there's a group we hold back from this more than anyone: Teenagers.
We tell them to wait for a very long time, and I think we're wrong.
Michael Strong, who has spent years working with young builders, challenged me to look into this in a conversation several months ago. I'm grateful he did.
We pacify teenagers
The deal we offer them is to sit still. Set aside whatever excites you, whatever pulls at your curiosity, and learn to sit still.
Pile up external credentials - preferably the most prestigious ones, the kinds that demand you focus on nothing but acquiring them.
Finish high school. Then college. Then, somewhere around 22 or 23, you'll be allowed to do something that matters. Maybe.
Until then, wait.
The waiting doesn't pay off
The old deal was: wait, collect the credentials, get the job.
That deal seems to be broken.
A young person follows the path, finishes college with nothing they've actually made, and lands in an entry-level role. Exactly the kind of role AI is absorbing first.
We're preparing young people for a deal that may have already expired.
Real AI skills: Building has never been within such easy reach
We all talk about "AI skills." Most of what gets offered to a young person is research homework, a prompt course or a tool tutorial.
Real AI skills come from using AI to make something that works. This means using AI agents, learning to provide the right context, and shipping a product that people actually use. Producing creative work that reaches an audience. Working around obstacles to solve a problem someone really has. Maybe even running a small venture.
A motivated teenager can now build with a laptop and the right tools what used to take an entire team and serious money. The cost of building has shrunk.
That's the real opportunity. Not "learning AI" in an abstract way, but building tangible things with it. Integrating AI into your workflows in ways that augment your capacities and genuinely amplify what you can do.
And these capacities do not expire as tools evolve.
Teenagers building early isn't new
For most of history, young people learned by doing real work early. Apprentices started around 12 or 13, living alongside a master, producing actual goods their community depended on. Apprenticeship was the main path into most trades until the 19th century, when industrial schooling pulled young people out of the workshop and sat them in rows.
Contribution came first for centuries. Pacification is a recent invention that is quickly becoming obsolete.
Some break through anyway - it shouldn't require being the exception
We have already started seeing them. Teen founders, creators, changemakers. Young people who build before anyone hands them permission.
But we treat them as anomalies, the rare ones who somehow forced their way through. And they mostly get there alone, without mentors who've done it or a community that understands the work.
It shouldn't take being exceptional or remarkable to build something at seventeen.
Real projects, real mentors, real audiences change young people
I saw this up close with younger teens.
There's an organization in Richmond, Virginia called Art 180. More than twenty years ago, I had the privilege of serving on its board - thanks to Marlene Paul, the remarkable founder who recently stepped down.
Art 180 works with young people growing up in challenging circumstances. Groups of teenagers get paired with a professional artist. Over the course of a term, they work around a theme and produce real artwork that eventually goes out into the world. And it goes out into the world, loudly. Murals rising on neighborhood walls, buses clothed in posters, parks decorated with painted benches, a hip-hop album recorded in a real studio, a published poetry book.
The whole community sees them. The young people stand next to what they made to get recognized and celebrated by the wider community during a launch event.
Along the way, the work does something quieter. They explore what they're capable of, improvise and discover their boundaries. They come to understand themselves a little better - in relation to their own work, and to the people alongside them.
The transformation is not about the art skills. It is about being treated as someone whose work belongs in the world. Making something real, and having it seen.
That pattern - real project, real mentor, real audience - changes how young people see themselves.
What the best colleges should look for
I'm not arguing against college and not trying to offer an escape from it.
The irony is that the best schools are already moving this way. They look past the polished resume for the applicant who built something authentic, led something, finished something real.
So building now isn't a rebellion against the system. It's the better education, and increasingly the better path through the old one too.
Maybe "my kid got into Stanford" gives way to "my kid already runs a business at 18." Or maybe admissions should be actively searching for exactly these young people.
Let them build. We need what they'd make
One thing to be clear about - let's not create another box to tick. Not another forced project pushed down a teenager's throat or another credential to collect.
Not every young person will do this. Not every young person should do this. This only works when it grows from their own curiosity, on their own timeline, as they come to sense what's right for them and what they're drawn to. The point isn't to push. It's to inspire, to open the way, and to build the support for those who are ready.
Because when we make a capable young person wait, we also lose what could come out of that fresh, creative capacity. We lose the work that never gets shipped.
This is what we're slowly laying the groundwork for at LearnButWhy, through the Teen Builders Network.
Let them build. We need what they'd make.
