The stay/go spectrum of smart young people
Focusing on the marginal future smart young person
On hearing a smart young person is leaving, my friends sometimes joke to me “what about Smart Young BC?” The loss of a smart young person here is a failure to give them the future they desire and it’s a loss for BC.
My response is always “good for them” (unironically). I want people to flourish and thrive more than I want them to stay in BC. I hope BC can become a place where they can do that, but for many people, it currently isn’t that.
BC has a long way to go to turn its potential into reality. Other places, like SF, provide the reality of opportunity for smart young people. No wonder it attracts so many of them.
Smart Young BC is an attempt to help BC turn its potential into a reality, but it requires a long-term view. A lot more people will leave before this change will happen, we cannot let it discourage us from trying.
The stay/go spectrum
All smart young people are on a spectrum between staying and leaving. Some are 100% staying in BC, others are always going to be attracted by the opportunities elsewhere and leave as soon as they can. In between are a bunch of people who could stay or go depending on where their life and the world takes them.
Somewhere between stay and go is the line where people take action and actually leave. This line is where the draw to leave becomes stronger than the draw to stay and they make the jump.
Based on how humans work, you’re never getting the deciding line all the way to one side or the other. You will never completely stop brain drain, but everyone isn’t going to leave either. People are both shockingly restless and resilient.
In this deterministic view, you can’t convince any specific person to stay or go. Their decision was made up already. What you can do is help shift the line slightly. This means the future generation of people in the middle, who would leave now, instead decide to stay. The slightest impact can make all the difference for people on the edge, and neither you nor they will be able to notice it.
This is the goal of Smart Young BC: to help attract and retain more smart young people here. This means moving the line so future generations want to stay. Rather than focusing on the people at either end of the spectrum now, we care about the marginal smart young person making the decision in the future.
This change happens not by forcing people to stay now, but by creating a place where they see a future, connecting them, and creating more opportunity. While you might not be able to persuade someone at the last minute to stay, you can connect the people who are here, help them build roots, promote the people and organizations doing great work here, and create abundance that everyone benefits from. We want to create win-wins.
The work we do now might not pay off now. Smart young people you know will continue to move away, but if we take the right actions now, we can create a place where smart young people of the future want to stay.