The Courage to Be “Under Construction”

George Bernard Shaw famously said, “Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself”.

It’s a classic sentiment, but in today’s world, it rings a bit hollow—or at least, a lot more complicated.

As a recently retired guy who spent years managing teams the same age as my three kids, I’ve seen the struggle firsthand. My generation had it easy; we were allowed to be “under construction” in private. We didn’t have to “find” ourselves because every day provided the opportunity to build ourselves through trial, error, and real-world friction.

Today, the current generation is “artificially connected” but terribly alone. They are forced to perform their identity for 500 Instagram followers before they’ve even finished the foundation. It becomes hard to create anything other than a fake “content creator” persona when you’re terrified of being irrelevant or, worse, “deleted”.

This is where Mark Twain’s wisdom hits home: “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not absence of fear”.

My parents don’t get it. They think it’s still 1980 and these kids just need to “get a job and meet people”. But the world they knew exists only in fragments now. In a world where AI is making college majors feel useless and social isolation is at an all-time high, the “fear” has changed. It isn’t just the fear of failing; it’s the fear of being seen as “unpolished” in a world of filters.

Real courage today isn’t about being fearless on a stage; it’s the mastery of the fear of being disconnected. It’s the resistance to the urge to just “sit in a room creating content” and instead, going out to actually live. The struggle Is where, how, what to do.

I’m glad I don’t have to navigate this environment today. But I know this: you can’t create yourself behind a screen. You create yourself in the mastery of the fear that comes when you finally put the phone down and start building something that doesn’t have a “Delete” button.

That is what my generation could do and every generation before me. Today that is muddled, not straight forward and complicated, more than it has to be or should be.

What has the technical age really done? The original quote is backward, antiquated. Young people do need help finding that path so they can find themselves.