#3: A generation of self-starters

Inspiration, motivation, and action.

Hi, I’m Erifili Gounari, and this is issue #3 of The Digital Native. This newsletter is aimed at driven, curious and inspired Gen Zers, interested in mindset, entrepreneurship, business, marketing, and more!

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In this issue, I wanted to discuss the fact that for the past couple of years, studies have been demonstrating that Gen Z is the most entrepreneurial generation to date, defining us as ‘self-starters’. If, like me, you’re someone who tends to spend a bit too much time browsing social media to find interesting projects that cool people from my generation are working on, that probably doesn’t sound too surprising to you. And it’s true- once you dive into the corner of the internet where the algorithm of every social media platform just suggests more and more active and high-achieving Gen Zs for you to follow, you never go back. ☕️

If, on the other hand, you use your time wisely and haven’t really spent too much time LinkedIn-stalking, then the stats might surprise you. A study from 2020, showed that 91 per cent of Gen Zers plan to start their own business sometime in the future, with 61% of them planning to do that online. Personally, I think this is a very positive fact. Social media has allowed me to meet and form friendships with dozens of talented and driven people from my generation, and almost all of them were at some point working on a side-project, a side-hustle or business, or planning on doing something similar in the near future. Being exposed to people like that through social media from quite a young age, has always inspired me and allowed me to think of ‘creating your own thing’ as something very feasible, exciting and rewarding.

All of this has often led me to wonder whether we can attribute this Gen Z characteristic to some intrinsic element of our generation, or if it is just the result of our lifelong access to the internet and information. I mainly tend towards the latter.

Never before in history has it been so easy to just create your own opportunities if the ones that already exist don’t work out for you or satisfy you. Not only does the internet increasingly expose us to things and people that are likely to inspire us, it also makes the execution of ideas easier than ever.

I recently had a chat on Clubhouse with a few other Gen Z entrepreneurs and creatives, and discussed this issue of starting your own projects and feeling driven. Inspiration and motivation seemed to come from various different places for each person, but I want to highlight the common points that were brought up. In many cases, people were led to start a project or business after being exposed to cool initiatives, having interesting conversations, or stumbling upon particularly thought-provoking types of content. My own personal experience matches that too, as starting The Z Link was the result of stumbling upon a piece of content that led me to think about the gap between Gen Z and marketers/brands, which then led to market research… and so on. In almost every case, that happened through the internet.

Growing up as digital natives has equipped us with the advantage of being used to the fact that we can instantly research a topic, get live feedback, and seek further inspiration, thus immediately making use of the sense of inspiration or motivation that we might feel, before ‘losing it’.

However, that constant exposure to information and to ‘what other people are doing’ can end up overwhelming. Interestingly, I ran a poll on Twitter, where over 90% of my audience of 8,900 people is Gen Z. I wanted to see if this ease of knowing what everyone else is working on, made people feel stressed out and consequently acted as a form of drive, or motivation through FOMO. Indeed, over 75% of respondents (at the time of writing this) said that they had at some point been led to start a project or take initiative due to FOMO.

So, the internet is the main thing that has enabled us, as Gen Z, to be the way we are in terms of self-starting. But there’s a balance that needs to be found, between doing something because it’s fulfilling and genuinely motivates you, and feeling driven because there is just too much going on and you feel like you need to be doing something! Finally, as the ✨positive Pinterest graphics✨ love to remind us, and because I think that as a generation we might need to hear this: “Do not work more than you live”.

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This week’s bookmark is just a book that I read recently and loved, called Solve for Happy by Mo Gawdat. Yes, I do love self-development books, and this is a judgement-free zone. The author is the ex-Chief Business Officer at Google X, and in this book he attempts to apply his skills of logic and problem solving to the issue of happiness.

These are two of the highlights I made, that can serve as useful reminders:

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Thanks for reading this issue of The Digital Native! I hope you enjoyed it and learned something new. ☺️

Stay connected with me!

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If you’d like some Gen Z insights…

Stay up to date with my Gen Z social media agency, The Z Link. We post a lot of marketing-related content on Instagram!

Reach out to me for a chat about this newsletter issue, work, or anything else.

Drop me a note on erifiligounari@gmail.com. 💌