Raising Entrepreneurs

Welcome back!

“It is not the brightest who succeed,” Malcolm Gladwell writes in his new book, Outliers. “Nor is success simply the sum of the decisions and efforts we make on our own behalf. It is, rather, a gift. Outliers are those who have been given opportunities — and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.”

Bill Gates is introduced as a young computer programmer from Seattle whose brilliance and ambition outshine the brilliance and ambition of the thousands of other young programmers. But then Gladwell takes us back to Seattle, and we discover that Gates’s high school happened to have a computer club when almost no other high schools did. He then lucked into the opportunity to use the computers at the University of Washington, for hours on end. By the time he turned 20, he had spent well more than 10,000 hours as a programmer.

At the end of this revisionist tale, Gladwell asks Gates himself how many other teenagers in the world had as much experience as he had by the early 1970s. “If there were 50 in the world, I’d be stunned,” Gates says. “I had a better exposure to software development at a young age than I think anyone did in that period of time, and all because of an incredibly lucky series of events.” Gates’s talent and drive were surely unusual. But Gladwell suggests that his opportunities may have been even more so.

“We look at the young Bill Gates and marvel that our world allowed that 13-year-old to become a fabulously successful entrepreneur,” he writes at the end. “But that’s the wrong lesson. Our world only allowed one 13-year-old unlimited access to a time-sharing terminal in 1968. If a million teenagers had been given the same opportunity, how many more Microsofts would we have today?”

Read the full book review in The New York Times.

Back in sunny Sydney (although San Francisco and Washington were pretty sunny, too) – tired but still buzzing from all the great people I have met and the exciting business discussions we had.

I visited the offices of HubPages.com in San Francisco, which was a lot of fun. There are some great new developments happening there.

In Washington, I met Shonika Proctor – watch for more blog posts from her, and videos of her young Renegade Entrepreneurs! I also had a great time at the Focus Marketing Seminar – and I won a cruise! So it will be back to the US with us some time next year to enjoy that bonus.

But what I really wanted to talk about today is something that happened just a few days ago. Chris told me over Skype just before I left San Francisco that Erin and a friend had started a new business. The first he knew of it was when a woman rang him and said “I have just booked your daughter to babysit for us, I hope that’s OK with you?”

Apparently Erin and her friend had printed up some flyers, walked around the nearby streets and distributed them, had their first enquiry call, and made their first booking, completely without adult involvement. She’s still only twelve!

After that, she and Chris had a good chat about the difference between having a job and having a business, and she’s already thinking about how she can outsource the actual babysitting to other kids and take a percentage for making the bookings.

Meanwhile, she and her friend are meeting these kids this weekend, and babysitting them next weekend.

I was just so happy – clearly all the teaching we have done over the years has sunk in and stuck firmly. Already, at twelve, she’s self-reliant and enterpreneurial.

But that’s not the only piece of news.

Our place is a bit of a gathering point – we’re quite close to the school, so lots of their friends come into our place before school. Some even have breakfast. One – the partner in the babysitting business – wanders in without knocking and heads straight for the fridge!

Yesterday morning, I had just got back from the airport, so I got to observe the milling crowds. I noticed another one of their friends gathering up a pile of printed pages from the printer. Not only the fridge – they also use the computers. At least this time it looked like homework instead of playing computer games. She and Rachael headed off about half an hour early.

Just out of curiosity, I wandered over to the computer, and lo and behold, Rachael and this friend are starting their own business, too – in pet care. The flyer had prices for washing, walking and feeding (including discounts for purchasing two or more services), and their contact details, and was decorated with animal footprints.

They came back about 20 minutes later to print out a few more, and were off again. They are both twelve, as well.

Rachael still has money coming in from her online businesses – she made another sale this week of her information product at thatinternetgirl.com, and she has made a few dollars in Adsense revenue on her witchcraft site this week, too, making it a profit centre even though the e-book is still not ready for release.

She doesn’t need to start another business, but she has obviously decided that this would be fun. Or maybe the attraction is doing it together with a friend, or just that she likes animals. Whatever the reason, it’s something she is doing because she wants to, not because she has no money coming in from anywhere else.

It’s a nice feeling, knowing that no matter what happens in the future, they already have the skills they need to succeed financially, whatever the economy is doing.

Image: The Jamoker

It’s incredibly hard work to get good grades in school.

No, really. We all look back at school through rose-colored spectacles, and remember the fun we had with our friends, or how nice it was not to have a mortgage and a car payment. We forget the grinding pressure to perform.

My 12-year-old twins had five assignments due in a two-week period, recently, and what the household went through to get all those assignments completed was like running a marathon! We had scheduling rosters for computer time, meals planned around the times when the dining table would be covered in cardboard, and a couple of late night pushes to get the finishing touches put on them.

And these kids are only twelve!

The pressure mounts, year by year, until they are doing several hours a night of assignments and study. Some of the curriculum content is of questionable value (and I am being generous when I say “some”, here) – I doubt that they will find much of it useful for earning money, developing relationships, or remaining healthy throughout their lives, for example.

However, you have to do what the school system says you have to do, because that’s the only way to get to college. And college is the only way to get a professional job or occupation. And a professional job or occupation is the only way to … what, exactly?

Why are we pressing our kids so hard in academia?

Once upon a time, a good job was your passport to a good life. Study hard, get a good education, get a good job, and you were set.

These days, that guarantee no longer exists. So why do we still push kids down the academic path?

Old habits die hard.

Instead of running our kids ragged on this treadmill to nowhere, we should be focusing on teaching them the life skills they really need.

To be healthy, wealthy and happy, all our kids really need to know is:

- how to take care of their physical, mental and emotional health

- how to make, save and invest money

- how to communicate and manage relationships

- how to go and look up information about everything else that might interest them

Doesn’t that sound like a much more humane curriculum than the one we are currently trying to drive our kids through? And one with a much greater likelihood of having their lives turn out?

Today we have another newsflash from the effervescent Amanda van der Gulik:

Last Friday, on our last day of our family vacation to PEI and New Brunswick, Canada, our credit and debit cards were stolen.

Not the most desired way to end a family vacation.

This is what happened:

We decided to go swimming at the local swimming pool in St. Stephen, New Brunswick.

In my husband’s haste to get our son ready to go swimming he completely forgot that he had
put his wallet in the pocket of his shorts which he had left in the change room.

We had a fabulous hour and a half of amazing swimming with our two young children.

We just really enjoyed ourselves.

Our little girl, 6 years, was able to swim all by herself in the deep end with no water wings!
It was incredible and she was so proud.

Our little boy, 4 years, was excitedly showing off how he could now look under the water with his eyes open!
He was thrilled.

It was a gorgeous sunny day with enough cloud cover to not get ourselves burned.

Then it was time to get dressed and start our long journey back home.

While I was getting myself and our daughter dressed, I heard my husband call into our changeroom,
“somebody stole our bank card!”

I was shocked that someone would do that. But other than that initial shock, I felt an incredible calm come over me.

I knew that all would be right.

What they did was awful, not only did they throw all of my husband’s wallet cards all over the changeroom, they also grabbed our 4 year old son’s underwear and threw that in one of the toilets!

We finished getting dressed, and then went to my aunt’s store and used her phone to cancel the bank card. By this time we also noticed that the credit card had been stolen as well, so we cancelled that one too.

Then we filed a report with the local police and then continued on with our journey home.

Now this event could have ruined our beautiful day, but we didn’t let it.

I had felt quite confident that they would not be able to access our bank card and we were able to cut off the cards before any money had been stolen.

We knew all would be just fine. A replacement card was on it’s way and we were safe once again.

Our son even learned a valuable lesson:

Never throw anyone’s underwear in the toilet! It’s not a nice thing to do!

He learned about the rule that says, “Do unto others as you would do unto yourself.”
I really don’t know if I would have been able to teach this lesson to him any better
than this incident did!

So all in all, it wasn’t so bad and we still had a wonderful trip home.

So my advice to all of you is: They can steal your wallet, but they can never steal your attitude!
That part’s up to you!

Here’s to your kids having an optimistically attitudical week!

Cheers…Amanda van der Gulik…Excited Life Enthusiast!
Founder of the “Kids and Money” DreamRichly Group.
Founder of www.TeachingChildrenAboutMoney.com

P.S. Teach your kid NEVER steal anyone else’s wallet and never throw someone else’s underwear in the toilet!

Remember the ‘law of attraction’ is always working so make sure it works FOR your children, never AGAINST them!

Click here to learn more ways to make the ‘law of attraction’ work FOR your child!

I read a great blog post yesterday from Dave Ramsay, which started:

Some people say, “Timmy’s so young. I want him to enjoy being happy and innocent.  Money is a worry for grown-ups, not kids.”

I say, “We’re raising a whole generation with ‘sucker’ stamped on their foreheads because we’re not teaching them.”

Your job as a parent is not just to keep your child happy. You’re raising a future grown-up who needs to be able to deal with grown-up matters. If you teach little Timmy how to handle money responsibly, then grown-up Timmy will be better equipped for a richer life.

Read the rest of Dave’s post at daveramsay.com.

I think Dave makes a very good point here – we are all questing for happiness, and we all operate on the assumption that is life is easy, we will be happy. Therefore, we try to make life easier for our kids, in the expectation that they will then be happier.

The truth about happiness, however, is that the ease or difficulty of life is not the issue. The issue is how we deal with life. Competence breeds happiness. The ability to handle one’s responsibilities breeds happiness. A sense of self-reliance and self-direction breeds happiness.

“Cotton wool kids”, who are sheltered from “harsh reality”, never have the opportunity to learn how to deal with life and manage responsibilities in a gradual manner, with parental support. They remain infantilised until the day that parental safety blanket is ripped away – by death, divorce, or the need to move away from home – and then they are suddenly, shockingly, exposed to situations for which they are woefully unprepared.

Needless to say, there are not happy at that point.

However, even during the “cocoon” phase, studies show that kids who have everything done for them suffer from anxiety and depression at a greater rate – and as the post-war generations have progressively shielded their kids from more and more of life’s harsh realities, the rates of depression in the population have soared.

Human beings instinctively know that life takes effort. We enjoy the moments of rest and freedom, but we enjoy them because of the contrast with “real life”. In the absence of major challenges from the outside, we hunt for “problems” amongst the minor ups and downs of daily life.

Kids as young as eight are worrying that they will have to support their parents financially when they grow up. These are comfortably middle-class American kids I am talking about. Suze Orman wrote an article for the Readers Digest in which she recounted the story of visiting a third grade class and asking them what their financial worries were. One child piped up with “I am worried that Mum and Dad will run out of money when they are too old to work and I will have to take care of them.”

Expecting this to be a rare thought, perhaps due to a particular family situation, Suze said “Does anyone else have that worry?” – and about half the class raised their hands.

Data shows that the greatest risk factor for bankruptcy is being middle-class and having children. These are some of the most pampered and protected children on the planet. These are the kids whose parents want them to “just be kids”.

These are the kids carrying huge financial worries – and unable ever to talk to anyone about it.

“Run along and play, don’t you worry about that” won’t cut it.

We need to prepare kids to deal with money from the day they first want to spend it. We need to talk openly with kids about financial issues – at an age-appropriate level. Most importantly, we need to recognise that they can and do think very responsible thoughts about money issues – but without the perspective or knowledge required to feel confident about that responsibility.

We don’t shield kids from problems when we tell ourselves “money is a worry for grown-ups, not kids” – we just isolate them from the solutions.

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… C: wait… SD: wait…