Alex Epstein Advises Young Activists | Alex Epstein

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Transcript

Question: What would you say to student activists who want to get their projects off the ground?

Epstein: Just don’t think that it’s so hard. I mean, it isn’t like everything that happen to create NY2NO, we’re baby steps but… and a lot of it was mistakes like I only went on that first trip because my parents force me to go and you know, here we are and then our schools stopped having trips and so it forced us to do this and then that started with making a name, making a website and then the next thing you know, we’re official nonprofit before we could blink you know. And so, I think when you feel the idea, when you hear about like creating an organization or getting involve with things like this it seems like such a big thing and it’s going to take over your whole life and you know, especially students, just something that students don’t do. You know, it really isn’t that difficult if you’re just willing to commit a good amount of time and energy to it and be devoted to it, you know you can do anything and you know, I’d say if you stay connected like have always be reevaluating yourself is a big thing because you can just as easily be led on the wrong path as you could be a right path and without really knowing it and so it’s really important to always becoming together with your group and sitting down and just discussing where you are, are you doing the things that you want to be doing, you know how are things going and so that you know, if you get kind of pulled in one direction that you don’t want to go, you have the oversight to say no, this isn’t where I want to go, this is. And so then you go back that way and we’ve faced that all over the place and as we get bigger, those distractions kind of come so much more frequently so we have to continuously reevaluate ourselves more and more and more but that just comes with size and numbers and that’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to build numbers, we’re trying to get more people so you know, it’s just all kind of part of the mix but I mean it’s a very important thing to do.