Everything old is new again, and millennials are the new baby boomers. It’s allabout them. It’s about what they do. It’s about what we want themto do.

Perhaps the best way to reach millennials is to follow the leadof a millennial. Tara Falcone offers a great example.

After suffering a terrible tragedy as a youngster, she wasthrust into the economic reality of everyday financial decisionsbefore she graduated from high school.

Following her graduation from Yale, she did an aboutface fromher pre-med studies and decided to use her real-world education tohelp her classmates and friends face the financial realities she knew their formalschooling never trained them for. If you want to know how to talkto a millennial, you must first listen to a millennial (see“Exclusive Interview with Tara Falcone: How to TalkFinancial to Millennials,” FiduciaryNews.com, November15, 2016).

We all know if high schools and colleges made financial literacya requirement for education, we’d be an “uneducated” nation ofnon-graduates. This applies to all schools, including the esteemedIvy League.

We also know, if graduates a generation or two ago possessed asmidgeon of financial literacy, they’d all be looking forward to aretirement awash with barrels of money. Thisisn’t because they’d have started their own businesses, but becausethey would have known the power of time.

They would have known to maximize their retirement savingsimmediately upon entering the workforce (if not before – seeThe ChildIRA).

Falcone can’t emphasize this enough. She’s been producingfinancial literacy videos for millennials. In the process, besideshoning both the message and the content delivery for optimalengagement with the audience, she takes every opportunity totrumpet the glory that is compounding.

She realized long ago the greatest advantage offered to theyoung is time. Many of us have to wait until we’re much older tosee this.

So, what’s the secret to convincing millennials to realize thepotential value of time? Simple, just listen to them.

Millennials don’t want advice. They want to do itthemselves.

So let them. Enable them. Guide them. But don’t lecture them.Don’t tell them what to do. They need to make their ownmistakes.

Perhaps the best we could hope for is to nudge them towardsmistakes with lower downside risk. Nonetheless, only then candecide when the greatest knowledge they could have is to realizethey don’t possess the knowledge they think they do.

Remember what it was like when you were young: You never thoughtof time as a limited resource. Indeed, you probably considered it anever-ending fountain.

You could easily justify putting off until tomorrow so you couldimmerse yourself in the joys of today. Then, just as soon as youthought those joys would last forever, you find yourself underpressure to add more value at work, buying (and paying for) a newhome as a result of that sweet budding romance, and, finally,experiencing the wear and tear of children. Now you’re lookingforward to tomorrow for relief, but still you’re too busy to doanything more.

But you know you must do more. You just don’t trust anyone. Andyou think you can do it yourself. So you ask questions.

According to Falcone, other than “What is a fiduciary?”millennials want to know more about employer matching (free money)and whether to use a traditional retirement plan or a Roth(deferring taxes today vs. eliminating taxes forever).

You might think these questions represent the crack in the doorthat allows you to sneak into the financial lives of millennials.But don’t think of this exercise as a deception – millennials willbe on to you quicker than you think. Consider it a service. Achance to listen. And learn.

If there’s one thing the Trump victory teaches us, it’s tolisten to the silence in others. Millennials may be giving thefinancial industry the silent treatment, but that doesn’t mean theydon’t want to talk.

The challenge of the adviser is to find the opportunity to beginthe discussion, hopefully before the job starts to become a career,before mortgage payments start, and before the nursery has anoccupant. Then it becomes a game of jujitsu.

Millennials aren’t the first generation to find glory in thesplendor of instant gratification, but it seems to strike a chord,so use it to your advantage. And listen. And get them to teach you,rather than you teaching them. They won’t listen to you until youlearn from them.*

*Surprise, this applies to all generations, not justmillennials.