Intergenerational success is a possibility with innovation, experience
Opinion
By
XN Iraki
| Jul 30, 2025
Have you ever been requested to write a letter on behalf of someone else?
That was common as we grew up, a neighbour or even a parent would request you to write a letter for them as they dictated, mostly in our mother tongue.
It was considered a great honour to do that for someone. Why go back that far in time? We fail to enjoy the fruits of innovations, not necessarily monetary, because we lack benchmarks and prior experience.
If someone has never dictated a letter to you or asked you to read out loudly a letter for him or her, it’s hard to appreciate literacy.
If you found a phone at home and a car as you grew up, there is nothing special about the two! But if you called home and left a message with the only neighbour who owned a “land line“, then owning a phone means something!
If your parents were employed, you would see nothing special about jobs. You can work smart, skive, skip or easily quit. Lack of prior experience or benchmarks can easily make you take things for granted or feel entitled.
How do we ensure the next generation does not take things for granted or “suffer” to learn?
We can leverage family history. Do you share it by the fireside with children? What did your grandparents do? What were their success stories?
Failures? What changes have the families gone through? Told in a relatable language, family history can be a great inspiration to the next generation.
A good example, our extended family boast of two veterans of the Second World War (WWII).
We didn’t get a graduate until a quarter of a century after uhuru. We owned a car just at the turn of the 21st century. We have some relatives across the national borders.
The oldest document in our family is my grandfather’s baptism card dated 1921. How much family history do you know? How inspirational is it? Having WWII veterans means we can’t be cowards.
Inspirational family history can caution the next generation against repeating mistakes and too much “comfort.” It’s for the same reason national history is taught: to inspire and guide the next generation.
I keep wondering how the story of early man, starring Zinjanthropus, inspires us. Should we not be talking about the evolution of AI, how empires rise and fall and the possibility of one day hosting aliens?