I’ve interviewed many entrepreneurs — both when writing my book, Raising an Entrepreneur, and in many conversations since then as I’ve talked to parent groups across the country.
As I spoke with entrepreneurs and their parents, I became aware of the most important belief they embraced: Every child is unique in some way, so help your children figure out their gift, and then nurture it and support it.
That’s the secret to raising a successful entrepreneur, and it sounds simple. But it can actually be very difficult to sustain over the course of many years and through many small but pivotal moments. It means believing in your children’s strengths and letting them know you have confidence in their ability to succeed at what they love.
I believe all parents want their children to grow up to be happy and successful. But many kids are unhappy because they aren’t doing what they love; they may not even know yet what they love — there may not be any space and time to discover it for themselves. Instead, they’re doing what their parents think will make them successful and, by extension, happy.
So it’s not just about loving your child and desiring their happiness. It’s not about wanting to help your child succeed. It’s about believing in your child’s strengths and letting them know you have confidence that they can succeed in doing what they love — even if what they love changes over time.
That’s the baseline condition for raising an entrepreneurial child: unwavering belief in your child’s abilities, and a mindset of supporting your child while those abilities are developing. It’s simple advice, but not always easy to follow. And, increasingly, young people want to be entrepreneurs. A recent survey by Junior Achievement found that 60 percent of teenagers want to start their own business.
Follow your child’s lead
The goal is not about training your children to become entrepreneurs. Getting your kids to follow a path you’ve chosen for them is a sure way to stifle their fulfillment — and personal fulfillment is essential to an entrepreneur’s life. What I hope parents will do is keep the road open for their child to choose, whether it’s a broad, straight, clearly marked road or a twisty, surprising, unique one.
Almost all the successful entrepreneurs I interviewed have one experience in common — they had someone’s (almost always their parents’) support to pursue a passion. Generally, it was one they engaged in outside of school. Lots of parents didn’t understand the activities their kids were into. But they also knew that their own interest or understanding was beside the point. What they went out of their way to support wasn’t so much the activities themselves as the spark it brought to their children’s eyes.
Joel Holland, who founded VideoBlocks, had an early passion for selling things. It began when he went door to door selling gravel at age 3. At 13 he was a PowerSeller on eBay. Joel’s parents were always supportive because they saw how hard he was working and the joy he was getting. He grew up knowing that his parents would always be there for him, no matter what he tackled. He sold half of his first company five years after he graduated from college for $10 million, and went on to discover his next passion, proving wrong everyone who told his parents they were letting him waste his time on his various pursuits.
Your own children’s passions may not be the ones you would have chosen for them. Their passions may not even be something you understand. But that’s actually a great thing, even if it doesn’t always feel that way. It means your children are exploring their passions in ways that are most meaningful to them, rather than following in your footsteps or trying to please you.
Jon Chu started making videos in fourth grade. At first his immigrant parents were upset. But when they realized how much it meant to Jon, they became his biggest supporters. The hugely successful director of Crazy Rich Asians was nominated for best director for his film Wicked for Universalwith Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo.
Letting children run with their passions isn’t about helping them fulfill their childhood fantasies. The true benefit is that, even if a child’s passion doesn’t turn into a profession, they learn the joy of diving deeply into a pursuit, discovering all it has to offer, learning to work hard, and making connections with others who are also passionate about it. Kids learn that good things happen when they do the things they love. And if they keep exploring, they find ways to improve or add to or expand or reinvent or promote the things they love — and that’s often how companies and organizations get started.
It doesn’t matter what your child’s passion is as long as your child is passionate about something. Their passion may morph over time. That’s fine. The most important thing you can do is nurture that passion. If you do, your child will devote lots of time to it. That’s what it takes to become truly accomplished at something. If they devote lots of time, they will get really good at it. And because they have gotten good at something they chose they will develop confidence. They will learn that failure is how they grow. They will develop grit. They will develop resilience.
Compassion as a driver
Most of the entrepreneurs I talked with, competitive though they are, weren’t raised just to look out for number one, or to win at the expense of others. And they definitely weren’t raised to think only about money. They were raised to give back, to help others, to think about how they can contribute to their communities, and to be conscious of the positive impact they can have on the world. They were raised to have compassion and to let it fuel their work. Their parents nurtured that attitude with their words and their actions.
Compassion may not be the first quality you associate with entrepreneurship, but I found it again and again in the entrepreneurs I talked with. The desire for wealth or power isn’t enough to sustain the effort it takes to forge your path and change the world — a genuine desire to better people’s lives can take an ambitious person much farther. And that desire doesn’t fade after the IPO or with the first million. It may even be the reason why many top entrepreneurs seem so urgently driven by the knowledge that there are always more people to help, more communities to improve, more lives to change. And for most of these entrepreneurs, that urgency was instilled in them when they were children.
When Blake Mycoskie went to Argentina, he saw children without shoes playing outside in an impoverished village, and it broke his heart. Others would have been sad and then gone about their lives. But Blake had been raised to be compassionate and to help those in need. He started TOMS, a shoe company that, for every pair of shoes sold, donated a pair of shoes to a person in need.
Before a child can develop a strong sense of compassion for the world, the child needs to be shown that there’s a world out there to begin with. If that sounds obvious, it’s also true that the daily pressure of protecting and nurturing their kids can cause parents to lose sight of the big picture. But parents can encourage a broader, more inclusive worldview in their children by exposing them to different cultures, circumstances, and concepts. They encourage their children to see themselves as capable, powerful, and able to do anything they set their minds to, but they also teach them that they belong to an interconnected whole.
Children whose parents show them how it feels to help others who are struggling, whether across the world or across the kitchen table, get a head start in developing a compassionate outlook. Early awareness of others’ problems can also encourage kids to start asking entrepreneurial questions: “Do things really have to be this way? How can I make them better?”
Fueling their curiosity
This ties into another important trait for parents who want to raise entrepreneurial children: curiosity. It’s more than wondering how something works. It’s also wanting to know whether they could improve it. Parents who raise curious children ask them lots of questions and persuade their children to ask questions. They teach their children to look for ways to fix things or to improve situations. They encourage their children to look for creative ways to solve problems.
Chef Nyesha Arrington was the L.A. Chef of the Year and is now one of the judges on Next Level Chef with Gordon Ramsey on Fox. She said her father gave her the tools to succeed in the high-stress environment of a restaurant and taught her always to strive to get it right. What makes someone one of the top chefs in the country? Never being satisfied with what you did last time. She says, I’m always asking, “How can I make this better?”
Parents often shelter their children from suffering out of fear of making them feel sad. That’s a natural impulse, but most of the families I talked to took a less fearful, more hopeful approach. By exposing children to real problems and showing them that they can affect those problems, they help their kids learn to embrace the world rather than fear it. It’s an affirmation of both reality and possibility. The lesson the child learns is: yes, there are things that aren’t great in the world, and yes, there’s plenty you can do about it.
These parents taught them to care about other people’s misfortunes. They taught them to want to make the world better. Whether it was feeding people in their community or helping people across the globe, they showed their children they could make a difference.
Some parents fear that if their children spend their life pursuing their passion, they won’t make enough money to live. Parents who witness a child’s total immersion in some favorite pursuit — making music, playing video games, taking things apart, building Lego sets, playing a sport — may feel it’s their duty to set limits on the activity for fear that if it takes too much of the child’s time and attention, the child will neglect serious pursuits and be unable to make a living as an adult. Or parents may urge a child in college to take certain types of courses, stay enrolled until graduation, and even study for an advanced degree even though their child wants to move on with their life.
A degree may represent an expensive waste of your child’s time if it has no connection to their interests, and if their only reason for being in school is to get the piece of paper or make the contacts needed to land a high-paying job. Someone who loves something enough and works hard enough at it will find a way to turn it into a living, even without a degree. And they won’t be afraid to tackle an opportunity that won’t pay anything for a few years as they might be if they had to pay off high student debt every month.
More importantly, they’ll be happier than if they were plugging away at something they don’t enjoy. And they will never be great at something if they don’t work nonstop at it, and they will never work non-stop if they don’t love it. Is it really your goal for your child to spend 40 years in a career they don’t like?
Unjoo Moon’s parents were initially upset when their daughter informed them that she didn’t want to follow a career in law — a path they chose for her. But when they realized how much she loved filmmaking, they told her they knew she’d be successful if she worked hard enough at it. She directed I Am Woman, a biopic about Australian singer Helen Reddy, which won three major awards. Recently she directed Original, a dance film, with her husband, cinematographer Dion Beebe. This is the most important thing I can say: Raising a child to be proud of their skills, to be confident, to be fearless, to be curious, to be compassionate, and to have a strong work ethic is a fine approach with any child. But it’s essential to nurture these traits in a future entrepreneur. If they have these traits, your children may not become entrepreneurs. But if they don’t have them, they definitely won’t. Give them a chance. Who knows where their journey may take them.
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