Reflections Earned During the YLS

I came to the YLS and somehow went home carrying a lot of random observations about young people, leadership, attention, failure, and how we influence each other.

Some are small observations. Some made me question how we actually educate young people.

But I think all of them are worth writing down.

One lesson that keeps coming back to me:

Knowing someone can lower your guard.

Sometimes we don't verify information anymore because we recognize the person who gave it to us. But people can also be wrong, manipulated, hacked, misinformed, or simply unaware of what they're sharing.

Trust people, yes.

But still think independently.

Especially when something important is at stake.

Another thing I'm learning is not to overwhelm myself with guilt whenever I fuck something up.

Take responsibility.

Understand what happened.

Learn the lesson.

Then move.

There are still so many things we can do in life.

We can build something.

Meet people.

Help someone.

Explore.

Enjoy.

One mistake shouldn't consume the next hundred opportunities waiting for us.

Life continues whether we forgive ourselves or not, so we might as well carry the lesson instead of carrying unnecessary guilt.

Being surrounded by younger people during the YLS also made me happy about how far I've come.

I watched them compete.

Laugh.

Get excited.

Get bored.

Make friends.

Try to prove themselves.

And basically just figure life out while enjoying it at the same time.

I remember being somewhere around that stage too.

You don't really know what the fuck you're doing yet.

You're just experiencing things.

And that's okay.

It's fun to be young and free.

But at the same time, I kept thinking:

Not just activities.

Not just games.

Not just speeches.

Give them problems.

Give them difficult questions.

Make them disagree.

Make them defend ideas.

Make them work together.

Make them be part of the discussion and share their opinions.

Let them actually think.

Another thing I love about attending activities like this is meeting random people who are doing great things.

You meet someone and initially know nothing about them.

Then you start talking.

Suddenly you discover that they've been working on some cause for years.

Education.

Youth development.

Community work.

Government.

Peace.

Agriculture.

Whatever it is.

Then you see their eyes change when they start talking about the thing they genuinely care about.

I love meeting people like that.

Passion is interesting to watch.

Something else I noticed:

Some people can reach very high positions and still struggle to communicate their ideas in a charismatic or magnetic way.

They may have incredible experience.

They may know much more than everyone in the room.

They may have impressive titles.

But knowing something and making people want to listen to it are completely different skills.

That's important.

Because you can have the greatest idea in the room, but if everyone mentally disappears five minutes into your speech, then the idea doesn't travel very far.

I also noticed something about talking with teenagers.

First impressions matter.

When they initially perceive that you know what you're doing—or that there's something interesting, unusual, or valuable about you—they become curious.

And curiosity buys attention.

But I don't think the goal should be intimidating them or making them blindly admire someone.

The challenge is making them comfortable enough to participate while still making them slightly uncomfortable intellectually.

Comfortable enough to speak.

Challenged enough to think.

Make them laugh.

Then ask something serious.

Let them relax.

Then challenge an assumption.

Give them psychological safety without removing intellectual friction.

I think that's where interesting conversations happen.

I could see the tiredness on the organizers' faces.

Organizing something like YLS looks fucking exhausting.

Schedules.

Teens.

Food.

Activities.

Problems appearing from nowhere.

People asking questions.

Things not going according to plan.

Everything.

Watching them made me realize:

I don't think I would enjoy doing all of that operational work.

But I think I could lead.

And those aren't necessarily the same thing.

Leadership doesn't mean doing everything yourself.

Maybe leadership is understanding what needs to happen, finding people who are better than you at specific things, giving them responsibility, and keeping everyone moving toward the same destination.

Another funny observation.

We associate the military with discipline.

Straight posture.

Following instructions.

Focus.

Structure.

And yet even some of them get bored, bend their heads down, and disappear into their phones.

Social media doesn't give a shit about your profession.

Haha.

Attention is attention.

And everyone is competing for it.

That made me think again about how powerful these platforms have become.

You can train someone to be disciplined physically, but there is another battlefield happening inside their attention.

This might be one of my biggest observations from the YLS.

We spend so much time making young people listen.

Speaker.

Another speaker.

Another speech.

Another presentation.

Sit down.

Listen.

Clap.

Next.

But why aren't we giving young people more opportunities to learn from each other?

Put them together.

Give them a question.

Let them argue.

Let someone from one barangay explain their problem to someone from another.

Let them share something they experienced.

Let them propose solutions.

Let them question the speaker.

Let the speaker question them back.

Because I noticed that many teenagers simply stop listening during speeches.

You can see it.

Their bodies are there.

Their minds aren't.

Phones come out.

Side conversations begin.

Someone starts staring into nothing.

And sometimes even when the speaker tries to regain their attention, it doesn't work.

I don't necessarily blame the teenagers.

Attention needs a reason to exist.

There needs to be curiosity.

Intrigue.

Relatability.

Emotion.

Conflict.

Humor.

Something that makes their brain say:

That's a skill speakers need to master.

Especially when speaking to young people with an entire internet fighting for their attention.

Lastly, one speaker said something during his discussion about insurgency that stayed with me.

He described the mind of a young person like a blank piece of paper.

There are so many opportunities to write something on it.

Ideas.

Stories.

Beliefs.

Narratives.

Values.

Anger.

Hope.

Propaganda.

Truth.

Lies.

And even when something gets erased later, sometimes the mark remains.

That analogy bothered me—in a good way.

Because if that's true, then youth really is a double-edged sword for the future of a nation.

Everyone wants to write something on that paper.

Politicians.

Parents.

Teachers.

Religious organizations.

Activists.

Companies.

Influencers.

Algorithms.

Governments.

Friends.

And sometimes people don't even realize someone is writing on them.

That's where I think my brain belongs in this field.

Not because I want to be another person telling young people what to think.

Actually, I want the opposite.

I want to teach them to recognize when someone is trying to write something on that paper.

Maybe instead of competing to be the first person to write our ideology on the blank paper, we should teach young people how to hold the fucking pen themselves.

That's what I want.

More conscious people.

More aware people.

More critical thinkers.

People who can listen without automatically believing.

People who can question authority without automatically hating authority.

People who can change their minds without feeling humiliated.

People who understand that admitting you're wrong isn't weakness.

People who are difficult to manipulate.

That's probably my biggest reflection after the YLS.

I can't just keep observing these things.

At some point I need to bring my brain into this field and actually experiment with these ideas.

Maybe create activities.

Maybe conversations.

Maybe workshops.

Maybe something completely different.

I don't know yet.

But I want to help young people become more conscious and aware of their own lives and of the information they allow into their minds.

And I want to do it without turning myself into another authority figure demanding that they believe me.

Question me too.

Challenge my ideas too.

If I'm wrong, tell me.

Because if I'm serious about creating critical thinkers, I can't become angry when they eventually start critically thinking about me.

And whatever happens in the future—whether I get the opportunity, whether this becomes something bigger, whether I'm actually meant to pursue this—I know what the mission is.

I don't necessarily need a position.

I don't need everyone to know my name.

I don't need young people to follow me.

I would rather help create a generation capable of thinking for themselves.

And if someday they become smarter, kinder, more critical, more disciplined, and harder to manipulate than our generation was?

Good.

That's exactly the point.