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Soft skills like handling feedback and navigating conflict are learnable, not fixed personality traits.

A "positivity bias" in memory makes older adults forget how lost they felt when they were starting out.

Building from your strengths helps you grow faster than obsessing over what you lack.

If you're finishing college this spring—or recently did—this one's for you.

I keep coming back to something that happened about a decade ago. I was at a workplace event, listening to a speaker talk about the "millennial problem." The room was full of managers nodding along as popular authors warned that millennials lacked work ethic, couldn't handle feedback, and were going to ruin professional life as we knew it. These were good people, genuinely worried.

Then the speaker paused, smiled, and said something I've never forgotten: "Relax. They said the same thing about my generation when we were hippies."

The room laughed. And the tension broke, at least a little—because he was right.

The Oldest Complaint in the World

There's a quote that floats around the internet, usually attributed to Socrates, about how the youth love luxury, have bad manners, and disrespect their elders. The attribution is almost certainly wrong—scholars haven't traced those words back to Socrates. But the quote survives because it feels ancient and true. People have been complaining about young people for as long as there have been old people to do the complaining.

Every generation gets the same treatment on arrival. Boomers were self-indulgent. Gen X was aimless. Millennials were fragile. Now it's your turn. The specifics change; the script doesn't.

I say this not to dismiss the critiques but to put them in context. In a prior article for this column, I explored the soft-skill gaps that employers cite when hiring young workers—navigating conflict, regulating emotions under pressure, communicating in professional settings, understanding unwritten workplace norms. Those gaps are real, and I........

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