Navigating personal growth today involves choosing between cognitive enhancers and extended adolescence. Historically, adolescence was brief, leading to stable adulthood. Now, with rapid tech changes, more extended education delays adulthood but narrows potential. Drugs like Adderall offer an edge but are risky while staying home might not guarantee success. A balanced approach is mentorship, where seasoned wisdom meets youthful potential, fostering development while addressing societal skill shortages, particularly in places like South Africa. Lee Blake’s piece was first published on FirstRand Perspectives.
Mentorship and mastery: the middle way to self-development
By Lee Blake
With pharmaceutical cognitive enhancements on the one side and delayed or deferred adulthood on the other, is there a better way to develop to your full potential?
“In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s, there are few”. − Shunryū Suzuki
A brief history of adolescence
Over the last century, in much of the West, adolescence was just a short, neat phase of life demarcated by society for some gentle self-exploration and development. In those days, it was shared, and indeed possible, to lead a reasonably comfortable life, occupying the same job until you received your watch and pension. Life was pleasantly predictable: technology developed at a slower pace, and − more or less − what you put in, you got out. Nowadays, for various reasons, this trend has transformed towards delaying or even deferring adulthood entirely, one way being through extending time spent in formal education.
This choice has something going for it; employers expect deeper specialisation from their employees to meet today’s rapid development of new technological breakthroughs. One-third of individuals between the ages of 24 and 32 in the US have acquired at least a bachelor’s degree Correspondingly, those who skip tertiary education often pay a higher penalty by generating lower wages. Although the South African context is, understandably, quite different, the rise in the number of youth entering tertiary education is impressive. When comparing the years 2000 and 2011, the number of tertiary graduates produced in the South African education system increased from 65,000 to approximately 105,000 within a year. Tertiary education may no longer be separating the herd. Combine this with the market uncertainty in a post-2008 world, and those entering the labour market have had to develop a wider array of skills, as the now more frequent labour market transitions are not just to new jobs but to entirely new industries. Data from the US shows that millennials are 16% more likely to switch industries for a new job than non-millennials.
The necessary trade-off of potential for expertise
With hindsight, of course, being twenty-twenty, many of us are acutely aware of how much of our young lives we wasted in a state of arrested development. In the same way that we cannot go back in time (let alone know what we know now − as is often the proviso), we cannot gain expertise and maintain all our potential sustainably. We must trade off the potential to become a renowned concert pianist when we become an accountant, marry, and have children. Doing away with the one to have the other/s is a necessary exchange. But, more than this, we need to be aware that our potential has an expiration date. From the figure below, it is clear that between the ages of 30 and 40, we begin to lose the ability to develop potential in any meaningful way. Millennials seem to be onto something then, finding good use, more so than generations past, for this peak time in their 20s and 30s to gain vast swaths of knowledge and skill. This gets us to the crux of the matter: what is the best strategy for developing and maintaining potential? Unsurprisingly, given what we know now, a Canadian study investigating career development in those born after 1980 found that they “were seeking rapid career advancement and the development of new skills, while also ensuring a meaningful and satisfying life outside of work” (emphasis my own) . These are ambitious goals, and one must recognise that in venturing to attain them in today’s fast-changing world, new and interesting, and perhaps even risky, methods must be deployed.
Taking the safer − and perhaps indefinite – route, many choose to stay at home longer (or indefinitely) to afford to explore and develop their potential more thoroughly. Conversely, Take Your Pills, a Netflix documentary details the riskier way: a rising epidemic of those in high-demand jobs taking pharmaceutical drugs such as Adderall to give them a competitive edge. The somewhat terrifying part of this trend is the fact that Adderall, an amphetamine-based substance, is said to produce similar effects to the street drug Crystal Meth. Related trends include microdosing (taking small doses of hallucinogens like LSD or mushrooms) and taking cognitive enhancement supplements − a bustling new industry in Silicon Valley. Although this is excessive, we must remember that financial advisers often advise those young enough to bounce back from setbacks to take an aggressive strategy towards developing their market investments. And, so, a similar logic could be playing out here.
As far as recent memory can recall, today’s youth are under the most immense pressure to become that which young adults have only ever felt. Staying at home longer is not an option for everyone, and even if it were, it is not a solution in and of itself. It will buy you time, but time with which to do what? The parent-child relationship will probably eventually start to take strain. On the flip side, the risks of taking drugs are well-documented and unambiguous. There is, however, a middle way − a balanced fund, if you will.
The middle way: choosing to stay home indefinitely or take potentially addictive drugs aren’t the only options Something we haven’t yet considered is that knowledge and skill must come from somewhere. Although cognitive studies of fluid and crystallised intelligence confirm that while younger adults score relatively higher on measures of fluid intelligence (the ability to solve new and novel problems as well as identify patterns), they also find that crystallised intelligence (the ability to retrieve and use information that has been acquired throughout a lifetime) is on average higher for older adults. More importantly, the decline of crystallised intelligence is said only to occur late in life (in one’s 60s and 70s) and is often just slight. Note that, although intelligence declines only slightly with age, information processing often slows considerably − mainly because the massive quantities of acquired knowledge require more attentional resources than any physical degradation.
With unbridled potential on the one hand and distracted expertise on the other, mentorship can bridge the needs of both the developing mentee and the developed mentor.
This relationship is as symbiotic as it gets: for those requiring guidance, collaborating with someone who can scaffold your development in a particular domain and keep you from pitfalls (using 20-20 hindsight) is invaluable. For many entering the middle to later parts of their lives and arriving at one of the last developmental hurdles known as the generativity versus stagnation crisis, becoming a mentor can help navigate this crisis by provoking feelings of connection and involvement.
This is particularly pertinent in South Africa, where youth have a severe skills shortage. Under circumstances of poor socio-economic conditions that contribute to high levels of home-based toxic stress, responsive and stimulating parenting is often not at a level adequate for positive child development. A long history of underdevelopment in early childhood, coupled with poor policy implementation amongst the lower quintiles of the public school system, leaves much to be desired. These two factors have and will continue to create a vacuum of hopelessness and demotivation amongst the youth that mentoring could very well curb.
This brings us to the natural solution: have more conversations with those around you. Attempt to find some overlap of interest. Networking events would be the perfect environment for this (where the trend for price discrimination is not such a common issue). However, many well-established agencies, NGOs, and government programmes have been developed to fill these gaps by creating mentor-mentee relationships.
Another way to think of this is that it’s not the millennials breaking the trend but every other generation of the past hundred or so years. Only since the turn of the nineteenth century can young people afford to move out and start up independently. Similarly, far more apprenticeships were available in the not-too-distant past, as artisans and tradesmen passed on valuable knowledge and skills through mentorship-like relationships. This more informal yet enriching system of knowledge transfer has all but been abandoned for a narrower, production-line approach to schooling. It seems history is not so much a straight line but a circle − if you go far back enough.
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