No kid is dull. Publishing a book at 12 years old proves every kid is a genius at something. 

How do you find the kids with a high potential for excellence? How do you boost the chance that they will reach that potential? To a lot of parents, they are not interested in just knowing they have bright children; they want to nurture their intellect and enhance the odds that they would change the world. Other parents prefer to enhance ingenuity in their kids, more than intelligence, because well, Maya Angelou was right all along: “You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.”

In 2020, the World Economic Forum has predicted major disruptions in the world of work for the future, a huge reason why we, adults, want to help our children navigate a world developing and unfolding, almost right before our eyes.

Atua Mo’e’s parents embraced adaptation and flexed their ­creative muscles to prepare their son for whatever the future might hold. Aside from delivering hands-on experiences and sharing wonderful values with their child, they also allowed him access to the latest digital resources, while also keeping him safe. All such initiatives to support their son bore fruit when he figured out how to do more with less by publishing a book at 12 years old. Using ingenuity, collaboration, and persistence, it gave Atua the modern learning experiences he deserved.

“I made this book at the age of 12. I’ve always been to zombies, survival and stuff so me and my dad decided, ‘Hey, why don’t we make a book?’” Atua, author of NY Zombie Run, recounted in a 2016 vlog. Just like that and off they went writing a one-page outline of what they would like the book to be about and things they would want to happen in it.

Resigned to the fact that it was not in their expertise how to complete a book to the last detail, the father-and-son team went to the site Upwork and put in a job for someone to write a short story based on the outline they had written for a budget of $300. Immediately, they got about 50 people who said they were willing to do it.

Once they picked their chosen one, they discussed with that person their ideas about the book. This girl they picked had already written a few books about zombies and was happy to write another book about it for Atua and his dad.

He continued, “So me and my dad, we made a recording of all our ideas about the book, the characters, and the kind of stuff we would like to happen in the book. All the characters that we used were based on people we know like my friends and my family members. All the names of characters in the book are real names of people that I know. Once we finished the half-hour long recording, we sent it to the ghostwriter. It took her about two weeks to finish the book.”

So the story had been written and completed by a ghostwriter. It was now time to think about the aesthetics of their product. Again, they turned to crowdsourcing online. “We went to a website called DeviantArt and accessed a forum where we put up a post that we needed someone to make a cool cover for a zombie book. We got about 100 responses from people who wanted to do it,” the Costa Rican-born Atua said.

He added that although he and his dad did not know it when they came up with the idea to make a book, he realized later that the talent pool available online is almost endless.

“There are tons of people who are very much into writing books and designing covers and stuff. So we picked our cover guy and he made us a really awesome book cover for just about 40 or 50 bucks.”

Once they had the cover, they went back to Upwork “because we needed to find someone who could put the story into different formats” — meaning a book designer who could do the book’s interior layout. Atua simply thought: The ghost writer writes my book in Word, and then it goes to print. But as he was googling about book cover design, he realized that ‘book interior layout’ is also a thing. They paid the person who did the book’s interior design around 50 bucks, he said.

Young Atua Mo’e, at that time just hitting puberty, completed a book for just about $400, thanks to talented freelancers online. The gig economy continues to grow in 2021. In the US alone, 41% of the American workforce freelanced in 2020, up 13% since 2013 as 53% of Generation Z (18-22) chooses the freelancing route, driving its growth.

In previous years, experts may have questioned whether freelancing is just a fad but that question is no longer relevant. With the pandemic, remote flexibility and remote working is not only a perk but an essential part of safe and effective business. Atua was a client in need of good assistance for his book idea. What more flexible way of working was there than to solicit talents who were willing and able to help him reach his goal.

The main lesson Atua’s experience offers us is this: If you have a dream, chase it. Everyone is born with a potential to do extraordinary things in life. It does not matter if you do it alone, but there is no harm in trying to solicit other people’s help.

In Atua’s case success, through publishing his own book, came at a young age and with help from other people more skilled than he is. So what if he asked others to help him achieve his dream? He was wise enough to admit he could not do it alone, but his dream was bigger than any fears he had, so he went for it.