You have sent the applications. You have fixed up the CV, asked the cousin who knows someone, refreshed the page where the unemployment numbers come out each quarter — and those numbers do not look like they were written with you in mind. There is a particular kind of quiet that settles over a young person who is ready to work and cannot find the door. If that quiet is sitting on your chest right now, I want to talk to you plainly, because there is something here worth knowing — and it is better news than it first appears.
Youth Month is not a memorial — it is an instruction
June belongs to the young people of this country. We mark it because, decades ago, young South Africans looked at a world that had been handed to them and refused to accept it as final. They did not wait for permission to change their reality. That is the real spirit of this month — not nostalgia, but agency. The most powerful place you can carry that spirit today is into the question of how you earn. Refuse, quietly and firmly, the idea that your income is fixed at whatever someone else is willing to offer you. That refusal is not arrogance. It is the starting line.
You don't make money — you earn it
Listen closely, because this one distinction will change how you see the next ten years of your life. You do not make money. You earn it. The only people that 'make' money work at the South African Mint in Johannesburg. Money is not something you chase down or trap — it is the harvest of service rendered. It comes back to you in direct proportion to the value you put out into the world. So the question that has been keeping you awake — "who will give me a job?" — is the wrong question. The better one, the one that actually opens doors, is: "whose problem can I solve?"
There is a story I think about often. In a hard season, when work was scarce and the queues outside the offices ran around the block, almost everyone said the same thing: "I'll do anything, just give me a job." One man refused to join that chorus. He chose a business he wanted to be part of, and he studied it — really studied it. He spoke to people in that line of work, learned what was breaking, what was being lost, what could be done better. Then he walked into the owner's office, and he did not ask for work. He said, "I can see several ways to grow what you have here, and I would like to show you." He was taken on at once, in a season when there was supposedly no work to be had. He had simply stopped being part of the problem and made himself part of the solution.
And here is the law underneath that story, the one no one teaches at school: what you earn rises with three things — how much people need what you do, how well you do it, and how hard you are to replace. You cannot always control the need. But the second one is entirely yours. Get a little better at something every single day, and you quietly become harder to replace. The young person who keeps learning keeps earning. The day you stop studying is the day your earning stops climbing.
There is no fixed number of jobs
Here is the belief I most want you to set down, gently and for good: the idea that there is a fixed pile of jobs in this country, and you are fighting the person next to you for whatever is left. That is competition thinking, and it is a trap. It makes you anxious, it makes you small, and it is not even true. You are not limited to the work that already exists. You can create your own economy.
Start seeing the world as a set of gaps. Somewhere near you is a person who has something good to sell and cannot reach the people who would want it. Somewhere else is a person who wants exactly that thing and cannot find it. Stand in that gap. Shorten the distance between them, and you have created value where there was none before — and value, by law, pays. It does not have to be grand at the start. One source of income might bring in R500 a month. Another might bring in R2,000. They flow into the same account, and they teach you the one lesson the system never did: that you are a person who can cause income to exist, rather than waiting for it to be handed over.
When everyone around you is asking the world for a job, choose to be the one who arrives with an answer. The world does not pay you for your need — it pays you for your usefulness. Become genuinely useful to a real problem, useful enough that solving it is worth paying for, and you will eat in any season, however hard.
The fear that whispers "not someone like me"
There is a fear that visits almost everyone who reads a page like this, and I want to name it out loud so it loses its grip. It whispers, "That is fine for other people — not for someone like me, not from where I come from." That voice is not the truth about you. It is a programme, installed early, often inherited from people who loved you and were themselves afraid. And just like computer programmes, these mental programmes can be rewritten.
Notice what this fear actually does. It tells you to wait for the right time — and the right time somehow never arrives. It dresses procrastination up as being sensible. It keeps you applying for the safe thing instead of building the real thing. You do not have to win an argument with it. You only have to act past it. And here is the quiet proof you can lean on whenever it speaks: the very fact that you want more is evidence that the power to create more is already in you. You would not feel the pull toward something you had no capacity to reach. The wanting is the signal that the ability is there, waiting to be developed. Trust it, and move.
Start where you are, this week
You do not need a perfect plan, a pile of startup capital, or anyone's blessing to begin. You need a decision and one problem worth solving. So this week, do something small and real. Look around your street, your campus, your church, your group chat, your neighbourhood — and find one problem that frustrates people enough that they would gladly pay to have it gone. Choose the one you could begin to serve with what is already in your hands. Then serve one person. Just one. Do it well enough that they would mention your name to a friend without being asked.
That is the whole secret, and it is not complicated: see how many people you can help. The more people you can genuinely help, the more you will earn — because earning is simply service coming back to you wearing a different coat. You are not waiting for an economy to make room for you. You are quietly building one of your own.
This Youth Month, let the courage we honour become a decision you make. Not a wish you enjoy on a Sunday afternoon — a decision, the kind that closes the door behind you so there is no drifting back. You are not too young, too late, or too far back to begin. The seat you have been waiting for someone to offer you is one you are fully allowed to build for yourself.
If a problem worth solving flickered in your mind while you read this, sign in and tell Sam what it is — bring it to him and let him help you shape it into a real plan. The Committed plan is here for the young person who has decided to back themselves, as the first investment you make in the person you are choosing to become.