Raising Entrepreneurs

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Years ago, when our oldest was a baby, we started a network marketing business. As you do, when you have a network marketing business, we used to play tapes in the car. As the kids got older, we had to negotiate alternating nursery rhyme tapes with the motivational speakers on long trips, because they complained the speakers were boring.

Certain speakers were real favourites of ours - mostly the ones that were funny, because the content followed a predictable pattern. Speakers would either give us aspirational stories about the huge new house with all new furniture, sheets and towels, where “the cleaner comes three times a week so it always looks like a hotel”, or how-to advice on techniques for building the business. A bit of humor made it more fun to listen.

We did our Kiyosaki-prescribed “five or more years”, and I thoroughly endorse his recommendation. Network marketing is a brilliant way to get your millionaire mindset without outlaying a fortune on hyped-up speakers with $3000 “sure fire” packs containing seventeen home-made DVDs and a manual full of spelling mistakes (valued at $12,345!).

But it must have been eight years or so since we were playing those tapes in the car, and I’d just finished a sabbatical year (that’s a year when you don’t do any work at all - I highly recommend that practice, as well!). Although, to be entirely accurate, I did do some work because we said goodbye to the live-in nanny at the beginning of that year, and I got reacquainted with cooking every night and cleaning every week (well, every week or two …)

Anyway, I had just got excited about a new business idea, and decided to put some serious time into it, so I thought this would be a good moment to point out to my girls that they were all just as capable as me, and perhaps the housework load should be shared more evenly in future.

Of course, they thought it would be better just to get a cleaner in. I want them to learn how to be domestically responsible, so I do want them to do it for a while, but I agreed that at some point we would have a cleaner coming in.

“Can they come three times a week?” asked the oldest, “So it always looks like a hotel?”

“Maybe later,” I said, “but in the beginning it will probably be once a week.”

It was quite some time later that I realised why that set of words had sounded to eerily familiar. One of our favourite tapes from our network marketing days, something she had moaned and complained about and wanted us to switch off when she was three and four years old, had sunk in there into her subconscious programming.

I’ll have to make sure we do get the cleaner three times a week some time in the next three or four years, because fulfilling those small aspirations is an incredibly powerful way of programming her to believe that anything is possible. I’ll just have to figure out a goal to set with her, and get the cleaner three times a week once she achieves it. That way, she knows she is getting what she wants directly due to her own efforts.