The other evening I asked a fourteen year old kid from our neighborhood, call him Steve, if he could come over and mow the grass. It's not a big yard, and I normally mow it myself, but I had the flu. When he arrived, I asked him if he wanted to work by the hour or quote me a flat rate for the yard. He said it wouldn't take him an hour and that he'd charge me $10 for the the whole thing. I told him, "Let's make it $15 and you pick up the big sticks?" to which he agreed and then got to work. About an hour later he came to tell me he was finished, and I said, "Okay then, let's go take a look." He had missed several small areas, so he had to get the trimmer and fix each one as I pointed them out. Finally he was done but as we were walking back to the tool shed, I noticed that there was a large pile of sticks which he didn't put into the can, but I didn't say anything.

Back in the house, I asked my wife to get some money to pay him. She asked how much and I told her fifteen dollars. Then Steve blurted out, "make it twenty" to which we both just raised our eyebrows. We were talking with some family on the back deck, so it took a few more minutes to get his money. During this interval, he found time to make another rude, half-joking request for $20 instead of the agreed upon $15. The problem with Steve is not that he's averse to hard work. No, he did some yard work for me before and didn't slack; he enjoyed the labor. His problem is twofold: He hasn't yet figured out how to take pride in his work and he doesn't know how to give people what they want.

Taking Pride in Your Work

I think both of Steve's problems affect most young people. Let's look at taking pride in one's work first. Where would a teenager have learned this concept? From an early age children learn that adults want them to do things: clean your room, don't make a mess while you're eating, pick up your shoes, your bike, your clothes, feed the dog and so on. Generally children don't, on their own, want to do these things. Even when parents give an allowance for performing chores around the house, the arrangement is contrived and it gives children little experience in making service agreements and satisfying customers. Now, among artificial situations, one stands alone in a child's life as a monument to the contrived scenario: school. The teacher tells the child, do as I say and you'll get a smiley face stamp on your worksheet. Children spend years doing worksheets and answering questions in the back of a chapter without understanding the reasons why, other than that's what they have to do. Tell me something: what's the last New York Times best seller with questions at the end of every chapter? Do your customers stamp a smiley face on their checks when they pay an invoice?

The point of work for young people is almost always to satisfy someone in a position of authority, and rarely to satisfy one's self. Schools probably have their own reasons for this. Teaching kids to provide internal motivation for their work could have some seriously adverse consequences for the schools. Once a child realized that it was impossible to get motivated for yet another worksheet, the wheels would fall off the whole school operation. The compulsory school movement started shortly after the industrial revolution. There was a "production problem" in America. Too many folks had their own workshops and made their own things. Activities which were ill-suited for the new top-down industrial economy. People needed to specialize in one task, and learn to be consumers. Also, all the new factories needed workers, and the current crop were just too darn independent -- poor at following orders without asking questions. They disliked standing in one place all day fastening two pieces of metal together. They were used to taking pride in their work, but the repetitive and imbecilic tasks of the assembly line were impossible to take pride in. Over the ensuing years, community and one-room schools were replaced by modern factory schools which fixed this problem by teaching kids to do stupid, boring work and having them blindly follow authority. [1]

Getting back to Steve, here is the attitude he should have taken:  

I do great work! When I mow a yard, I don't just mow the grass. I pick up all the sticks and large pine cones, I edge around obstacles with a trimmer, I sweep the sidewalk off. It looks damn nice when I'm done! That's just the way I operate. Some people can't afford it; that's their problem. If they want a cheap job, I know a slacker down the street, but you have to tell him every thing to do, and his work never looks as good as mine.

If Steve had simply made my yard look nice instead of doing the bare minimum to get the job done, I would have gladly paid him the $20. But where would Steve have learned to think like this?

Giving People What They Want

Sadly, I don't think teenagers have much experience putting themselves into other people's shoes. When I was Steve's age I mowed grass too and I didn't have any more of a clue than he did. To me, if I technically completed the job, I was going to get paid, end of story. What I was missing was the beginning of the story, which in the case of mowing grass, isn't simply an overgrown yard, but instead it's a home that needs to look better. If long grass was attractive, the home owner wouldn't have their grass cut. What I didn't understand and what Steve doesn't understand is that if only 90% of the grass is cut, or the driveway isn't swept, or there's a pile of sticks left in the yard, the job is a failure -- the home doesn't look good.

Why do teenagers have such a hard time grasping the totality of what a job entails? One reason I think is advertising. Every day young people are bombarded with advertisements asking them to think about what they want. The ads tell them: You want this movie, video game or toy. It's the same for adults: You want this car, clothes or beverages. [2] Another major reason is that they've simply been told what to do too many times. I think this happens in school, not because teachers don't see the value of letting kids figure it out for themselves, but because letting kids figure it out is too hard on the system. In school, when a kid has to write a paper, she is rarely trying to make it entertaining or informational for the teacher and her fellow students, instead she is just trying to answer the questions: What do I have to do to get a good grade? What is expected of me?

What Can Be Done

In order to have kids understand the full spectrum of a business relationship, we first need to stop putting them in so many contrived situations. Parents should encourage their children to engage the economy at an early age. Instead of giving them an allowance for chores, they should ask them to observe, every day, what goods and services people are willing to pay money for -- always asking themselves the following questions:

"Could I do that?"

"Could I make that?"

"How could I do that better?"

Eventually the child will find a service to perform or a good to produce, which someone unrelated to them, will actually purchase. Soon after a kid starts making some money, I think they should figure out a way to hire somebody. It could be another younger kid to squeeze lemon for their lemon-aid stand, it doesn't matter, so long as the work is valuable and profitable to the child's endeavor, because the last thing the hiring should do is to create the type of contrived scenario I referenced above.

[1] For an encyclopedia history of compulsory schooling in America, check out The Underground History of American Education, free to read online.

[2] Adults are at least occasionally asked by advertisers to consider what someone else wants, like on Mother's or Father's Day, but the answer is provided for them: a dinner at Outback Steakhouse, a pajama-gram, flowers or jewelry.