If every young person did everything John Hope Bryant recommends in this book, America and the world would change. Human development would boom. We would see millions of new jobs, high well-being and, yes, fabulous credit scores coast to coast. We would all have more freedom.
What John recommends in this book is simple and doable. His solutions to many of America's problems don't cost anything. Actually, the solutions for you, me, and our cities and counties are free.
And we're not being asked to do the impossible. John is challenging us simply to be our best selves. And he is telling us exactly how to do it.
He tells us to live within our means because financial responsibility creates freedom. John tells us to get up and work hard because there are no limits when our hope is high. He tells us to own a home. He tells us to keep our promises.
What he speaks of most of all is building. He says we need to become “a Nation of Builders.”
John himself is a builder. He built Operation HOPE, which teaches financial literacy and has changed millions of lives. He himself has a very successful life and has become a famous, important American because he built something. In this book, he challenges us to build something.
During our young lives, our family, teachers, and friends ask us, “What do you want to do when you grow up?” or “What kind of job do you want to have?”
Literally no one ever asks us, “What do you want to build?”
What if we all read this book and then changed how we develop people? Rather than asking them, “Where will you work?” we would ask them, “What can you build?”
Dream and build anything. It could be a small- or mediumsized business. Or a huge business—one of $10 million or $10 billion in sales. They all count and add up to the sum total of America and the world. We need hundreds of thousands of small- and medium-sized businesses—any society needs them continuously starting up and shooting up—or our society can't develop.
Young people can also build a small, medium, or large nonprofit. Nonprofits create economic energy, too. They boost gross domestic product (GDP) and create real jobs and real city and state growth. So do megachurches, a new children's museum, a chain of day care centers, or home health nonprofits. Or charities to assist disadvantaged citizens.
All of these organizations or institutions require a business model and a gifted builder, or they never take off. They literally never create new economic energy in the absence of a born builder.
At some point in John's life, he decided to build a big nonprofit to make America and the world a better place. John gets up every day and builds. He tells us that entrepreneurship is the great American way and the only thing that will save America and our almighty middle class.
The greatest point of all is that you and I and the whole country must create a new future for America and the world. But that it must be done from the bottom up rather than the top down. I think that is the most profound thought I have heard in twenty years.
John is right, and this book is right.
Jim Clifton, Chairman and CEO of Gallup, author of The Coming Jobs War