Lately my lifestyle has been a demanding one. Sleeping odd hours, waking up and working more than full time hours almost every week at my job, meeting and getting to know new people, and working on businesses as usual. An ironic keynote I share with many others is the fact that I’m generating more money than I ever have before, but somehow have some of the lowest numbers in the bank I have ever had at the same time. At the time of my writing this, I’m struck with something that resembles a cold or perhaps just some kind of bacterial infection. So, in other words, I’m sick. And under my belief, this illness was likely caused by my own heavy physical activity. The heavy physical activity is based on a symbolic abundance of physical holdings, but without the fuel to power it(money). While my physical traits are constantly changing and growing, my spiritual state has remained fundamentally the same for the past year or more.

And what determines personality? I would say it leans more toward the spiritual state, because your spiritual beliefs are often one of the key factors in driving your decision making behavior. People have differing opinions of my goals and what I’ve been doing to achieve them. Outlook, or perspective, has been a major influence under the scope of my own model of the subjective reality in which I live. While I do not have enough to give up a day job or give up college, it can be said that my businesses are profitable. Profitable, by definition, that is. Are my personal finances profitable when taking into account my expenses and potential expenses? Well, no.

But I think that some important first steps have been made, and anyone attempting the same things I am I would suggest that they gain a similar perspective, because optimism has been proven essential for the “big win” in your own personal finances and simply your personal goals. A lot of the people out there starting these personal development blogs seem to be following a common trend – they get inspired by a single item of personal development and then attempt to emulate that item’s interest for their own success. Some people choose the Law of Attraction, some people choose some particular dieting lifestyle, it is different for everyone. But even the very teachers in which people are attempting to copy are telling people to be original themselves. For instance, Joe Vitale has said that the people to benefit most from an idea are those who are the first to come up with that idea. A group of people may utilize it afterward, and they might get some level of success, but the success people experience will likely follow a sort of pyramid structure.

With that in mind, you might imagine how much people are earning off of their personal development blogs these days. Now, I have no one telling me their numbers in order to back up the claim, but my guess would be: not much, because many of them are recycling the same material and repeating themselves over and over again. In my writing, I’ve made it a specific goal during my first 6 months to lay down the basics I already have knowledge, but make sure I do not repeat myself if it is not necessary.

Steve Pavlina is probably one of the top people on the PD blog pyramid structure, earning more than $200 a day, and has been for a long time, off of his personal development business. There are few dedicated bloggers who have not at least heard of him by now, and his website gets millions of visitors each year now. But what about all those others, including myself? We’re mostly getting dollars and pennies, not thousands, yet much of the content we have could be deemed just as valuable as Pavlina – we simply were not the first.

But enough about this whole “setting yourself apart,” in business. A lot of that can easily be seen by many as common sense. The real thing that needs to be focused on here is your own personal choices. Business is interesting, because as business ties in with the economy and the rest of the world, it shows a reflective, and more simplified model of common daily life. While money’s benefit can be quantified and measured, life’s common daily benefits can be harder to gauge. This is one of the main reasons why it is so critically important to keep trying new things, to keep learning, to keep experimenting. Many people can find one thing that is successful and then they’re caught in a routine.

Imagine if some of these successful people were to keep searching for those gold nuggets of opportunity while carrying on those routines. But if one is rich and wealthy in all areas of their life, the motivation to search for these new opportunities of change can often go limp, because what motivation do you have once your own personal success is achieved?

There is a simple lesson I have been trying to teach my readers for a while now, even through all of these goofy veils of self promotion and self advertising – we are all connected. The influence that one person has on the world, and on other people, can simply not be expressed in words, nor can it be quantified as I said money could be. By simply continuing to interact with the world you, as a single individual, are making a difference, whether you realize it or not. Your affect on other people and on your surrounding environment is much greater than you think – this is something I have experienced myself throughout the short while I’ve been alive on this Earth.

If you must have illness, as I do on this very day that I write this, do not have it for long. If you must be sick, do not be miserable. If you must be a victim at first, accept responsibility and be a victor shortly thereafter. If you must be apathetic, be apathetic about failure. I am not yet the success I have envisioned for months on end, now. You must acknowledge your firt steps, but always, always ask: what is the next step? Where do I go from here? What exists that can give me aid that I am not currently aware of? Keep your eyes, ears, and most of all your heart, open.

Recently in the April/May issue of Scientific American Mind, I encountered something startling. But before I go into exactly what it was, I first want to talk about a concept I created years ago on an old website of mine called YoungPRer.com. The concept was called Evolving Youth. It began as an article that I had written describing how the mind of youth works. And when I say the mind of youth, I am not just referring to any individual mind, I am referring to the collective Mind, as well. Or in other words, the mind of youth is youth acting as a whole within society. Teenagers today are commonly finding themselves trapped in a separate world from adults, but what is also pointed out from a number of sources – the United States and other Westernized cultures have very particular sorts of teen problems and issues.

In the U.S., teenagers have commonly been labeled as misfits, delinquents, and irresponsible. In the article I read entitled The Myth of the Teen Brain, writer Robert Epstein has written to claim that behind the growing number of laws that limit teen behavior, the invention and introduction of television, and poorly understood brain activity charts – there lies a fully functional, and even a potentially superior, human being.

There is no question that since the 1950’s, teenagers have been changing, and no – not just puberty. But speaking of puberty, it has been occurring at an earlier and earlier age for decades now as time has gone on. The politics have changed, the sexual revolution has passed, the counter culture has been invented, and high school shootings have damaged the reputation and security of high schools nationwide. The food we are eating has changed, as agriculture experiments with cloning and injecting our farm animals with synthetic hormones. The particular events that have taken place, combined with the shift in technology and active media have managed to take youth in a serious turn. But to where?

Perhaps the best example of how things have changed can be found in just spending a single week going to your child’s local intermediate or high school. An excerpt from the article:

Prompted by a rash of deadly school shootings over the past decade, many American high schools now resemble prisons, with guards, metal detectors and video monitoring systems, and the high school dropout rate is nearly 50 percent among minorities in large U.S. cities.

But are such problems truly inevitable? If the turmoil-generating ‘teen brain’ were a universal developmental phenomenon, we would presumably find turmoil of this kind around the world. Do we?

In 1991 anthropologist Alice Schelegel of the University of Arizona and psychologist Herbert Barry III of the University of Pittsburgh reviewed research on teens in 186 preindustrial societies. Among the important conclusions they drew about these societies: about 60 percent had no word for ‘adolescence,’ teens spent almost all their time with adults, teens showed almost no signs of psychopathology, and antisocial behavior in young males was completely absent in more than half these cultures and extremely mild in cultures in which it did occur.

The core fact of the matter is – something is happening, and something has been happening on a mass scale for decades, possibly even the entire past century. With the advent of technology, with the shift in media, with the splitting movement in culture, we are seeing a brand new age, and a whole new generation of people that we will have never seen anywhere anytime in known history. Youth is evolving, and we can say that like new technology – the question of whether or not it takes a turn for the better or for the worse will be a matter of how this energy is directed.

When talking to my own parents about this, they remark that there is “nothing new under the sun,” and that there really is no original experience that kids today have, not really, over the experience that previous generations have had. But I am not the only one disagreeing, and that disagreement is apparently not coming from me simply because I am now 19 years old and was, or am, a teen myself quite recently.

In my book, The Island of Yellow, I tell a story from my perspective about young teen Cacee Kenner and her influence on the others around her in a social network. The book was written from a period in time between 1998 to 2002, during which time I was one of the few individuals in existence to witness, right in front of my eyes without any specific bias, a single girl and her rise or fall to adulthood, as well as the entire group of people that surrounded her. Throughout the events of the book, I was able to make many predictions, many of them seemingly impossible, purely based off of deductive reasoning and intuitive analysis. The story, which can be looked at many different ways, is something I have questioned myself about: did I really do that? Many days I look back at what I know, and say a very definitive, “yes.”

Western culture and the Western teenager are very exclusive to only a specific sort of environment and mood. Epstein also points out that “in many Western cultures, teens socialize almost exclusively with other teens.” Where as in other parts of the world, the phase of ‘adolescence,’ is not nearly so emphasized, and there is more of an even integration and functionality between adults and teenagers. This might explain why when I was in London, all the adults seemed so much more respectful(or that could just be the people of the UK for you).

Between 1850 and the year 2000, over 120 different laws have been passed that govern the legal behavior of teens in the United States. Both research and, in my view, common sense will tell you – infantilizing and isolating teenagers from responsibility and their common rights will make them act more like children than ever before. In just a few locations, teens are making an incredible difference, and while a teen mind is unable to gain information as quickly as an even younger child, teenagers also have a drastically improved learning ability beyond that of adults. The societal conditioning on teen behavior could use a facelift, and some teen credibility could be given some of what it’s worth. So for those of you reading Hayley Dimarco or listening to your child’s high school counselor, learn a hard pressed fact: teens can in fact take care of themselves, and can even know what is best for them in a higher number of situations than you might give them credit.

If I were to ever set out to look for proof that teenagers are capable of being highly capable individuals, I’d need look no further than myself. At age 18, I started my first company, and by age 17 I had written my first book. I was running my own class at my high school during my senior year, when no one else got that same sort of privilege. When the teacher had a question, she would ask me. I was the biggest rebel I knew, and when people were pressing me to do one thing with my life, I often did another during the heart of my teen years, following my intuition. My point is not to brag, my point is that perhaps you could say I was one of the few individuals who did not accept the effect of a society pressing down with one idea when in reality there is another more accurate.

The laws are not the only thing that has changed with the way teens have been treated over the past several decades. Psychologists are viewing the different age ranges with a new outlook, as well as a new sort of authority, that they had never done in the past. Part of this is also due in part to the fact that psychology is fairly new, and philosophy treated youth as a figurative state in metaphor. The amount of drugs in use to try to help the kids to fall in line with the currently existing educational system has been on an epidemic rise over the past 10 years. Prozac, Zoloft, Lexapro and more are being prescribed to new kids daily, and the scary part of it all is that we are not even sure how these medications are permanently affecting the brain, or other areas of the body. A number of heart-related deaths have already been linked to the use of Ritalin for children with ADD/ADHD.

Children are being conditioned to grow into teenagers with an emotional attitude that, in effect, could be described as a mass reaction to being science’s ongoing guinea pig. As technology and science advances, the experiments played on the public in an effort to improve a current situation will also affect the behavior and choices of a future generation.

From the number of problems that have been presented here, there is a single conclusion that can be reached. Suicide is the third largest cause of death in teens. Behavior altering medication such as anti-depressants has increased dramatically over the past decade. Right brain dominance is now recognized as the newly forming common trend of left brain dominance. The school system has a tendency not to change, but one day will be required to. Throughout the difficulty and the pain that the future generations will experience, we must remember one thing.

There is a choice.