It’s the classic question every kid gets asked by (almost) every adult: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” These days, more young people than ever before answer with some version of “I want to be an entrepreneur.”
Entrepreneurs are not only the new doctors and lawyers; they are the new pro athletes and pop stars. Doing your own thing seems both possible and desirable. In survey after survey, those who have entered the workforce during both a deep recession and the golden age of the start-up—and those coming behind them—say something like:
Many of today’s bright kids look to the self-made self-starters who shatter the rules and come out on top. They want to be the kind of independent people who don’t need to find jobs, because they create their own. And this is their time.
For parents, these ambitions can sound both compelling and unrealistic. Does “I want to do what I love” mean “I’m going to start a niche design company with my friend” or “I’m going to play video games for a living”? (Spoiler alert: it could mean both.) Not everyone can be Mark Zuckerberg, we parents reason. Wouldn’t it be better to choose a career with a safe, clear path? To earn a degree that will get you a job in an established company—or even at Facebook, for that matter?
It might be. Not everyone can tolerate—much less thrive on—the risks and uncertainties of an entrepreneurial life. But for some of our kids, it’s the ideal path to success, fulfillment, growth, and joy in their lives. This is true whether they are destined to be the next Zuckerberg or to start a small local business, build a sustainable career in the performing arts, or found a nonprofit. All of these are entrepreneurial paths.
You may not know if your child will be drawn to the entrepreneurial life—to the freedom and excitement of starting something all her own. Yet there’s plenty you can know and do, right now, to help her develop her qualities and reach her potential. This book will help you get a picture of what your role in raising an entrepreneur might be. What matters? What doesn’t?
Though I am the mom of two happy and driven entrepreneurial sons, these are questions I never thought to ask. When our kids were young, my husband and I could not have foreseen the career paths they would follow—we had no clue.
Looking back, I would have loved to have read real-life stories about how entrepreneurs had grown up—not just Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, but people who would have been easier for us and our kids to identify with. People like the ones in this book. It would have given my husband and me an idea of what our boys might be working toward: a lifelong pursuit they find meaningful.
Not knowing how this most of important of all stories—our child’s growing up—will turn out can be nerve-wracking for parents. It can fill us with some very understandable doubts and fears. The world is changing so much, and so quickly. How can we make sure they’re successful and, ideally, happy, over the long run? The uncertainty, and the high stakes, can make us want to play it safe.
When I talk to others about entrepreneurship, the dreaded M-word often comes up. I found two common misconceptions about entrepreneurs and money.
The first is the fear that if your 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 college-age son or daughter to take certain types of courses, stay enrolled in college until graduation, and maybe study for an advanced degree, even though their reluctant collegian has zero interest in following that advice.
I have nothing against academic and professional degrees—my husband and I both have graduate degrees and it’s worked for us. But a degree may represent an expensive waste of your child’s time if it has no connection to his interests, and if his only reason for being in school is to get the piece of paper or make the contacts needed to land a high-paying job. And 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 in that field.
More importantly, they’ll be happier than if they were plugging away at something they don’t enjoy. And I also believe they will never be great at something if they don’t work nonstop at it, and they will never work nonstop if they don’t love it.
Michael Mulligan, head of the Thacher School in Ojai, California, cites research showing that many Millennials are depressed because they’ve had to work so hard to succeed in areas of their parents’ choosing. “We can do better,” he writes. “The truth is that we are all going to have to work hard to succeed in life, and if that is the case, let’s…at least try to work hard on things that matter and that we care about.”
A second misconception about money is that it’s what drives entrepreneurs. I don’t buy it. To the contrary, everyone I talked to insists they pour their passions into their business to make a better product or service, or to make a difference in the world. Even if you don’t take their word for it, it’s hard to imagine anyone sustaining the energy cheerfully to survive eighteen-hour days, nonstop funding worries, and the vagaries of the marketplace if their only motivation is a wildly speculative and (at best) long-delayed pot of gold.
Duke Business School Dean Bill Boulding says tomorrow’s leaders should care about making the world a better place, not making money. He says what they are looking for are “people who care about others, who see that the success of others is what makes them successful, and who have a sense of purpose and want to make a difference in the world” (Cunningham 2015).
As I researched, interviewed, and wrote this book, my idea of what an “entrepreneur” is evolved. For the purposes of this book, an entrepreneur is anyone who starts something, who comes up with an idea and makes it real, who translates a passion into a project. This means that entrepreneurs, in my view, are not just founders of for-profit businesses, but also people who start the nonprofit organizations and “profits for purpose” that are changing lives. Entrepreneurs are actors who organize their own production crews. They’re musicians who put together a band and find a manager and a music publisher and an agent. They’re activists working to create a better world.
How can you tell if your child has an entrepreneurial mind-set? There’s no sure giveaway, but there are some signs:
Even if you don’t think you have a budding entrepreneur sitting at the breakfast table, you might be surprised. Most of the people profiled in this book weren’t obvious future entrepreneurs. And that’s another reason it’s so important to keep the path open for your child. In most cases, you won’t know which way they’ll want to go until they’re older.
It can be hard not to try to direct your child’s professional future, at least in general terms. Won’t making sure he succeeds at what he attempts encourage him and build his self-esteem, leading to future success? Actually, the opposite may be more likely (see rule 2). Shouldn’t she be pushed to excel in school? Not necessarily (see rule 3).
So do you have any influence over what your son or daughter will become? Over the course of my interviews with over sixty thriving entrepreneurs and/or their moms, I found that the answer is a resounding yes. You do have that power, just maybe not in the ways you expect.
As I talked with entrepreneurs and their moms and thought about what they told me, I became aware of a single rule that holds together the ten raising-an-entrepreneur rules I discovered: 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, 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. 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; I believe most every parent does. It’s not about wanting to help your child succeed; again, I think parents do want that. It’s about believing in your child’s strength, and letting him know you have confidence that he can succeed in doing what he loves.
That’s the baseline condition for raising an entrepreneurial child: unwavering belief in your child’s abilities, and a mind-set of supporting her in developing them. Simple, but not always easy.
Raising a child to be proud of his skills, to be confident, to be fearless, and to have a strong work ethic seems to me like a fine approach with any child. But I’ve become convinced it’s essential to nurture these traits in a future entrepreneur. If they have these traits, your kids may not become entrepreneurs. But if they don’t, they definitely won’t. Successful entrepreneurs need a level of confidence, drive, resilience, and courage that’s different from that needed to be successful in someone else’s organization, whether that’s a big corporation or a start-up.
In certain ways, the things you do to nurture the entrepreneurial mind-set look similar to the things you do to support any child. But raising an entrepreneur can call for approaches and attitudes toward parenting that may be somewhat different from the ones you’re used to. And that’s where this book comes in.
In writing this book, I took the point of view of a mom—which is what I am—rather than the perspective a sociologist, an academic, a psychologist, or family therapist might bring. I wanted to find and share the stories of dozens of families, to discover and distill the parenting secrets that launched a group of creative, confident entrepreneurs on their paths.
A young person today can make a career out of almost anything. The world has changed so much over the last twenty years that someone who wants to start an enterprise doesn’t need an office, employees, a battery of attorneys and accountants, professional investment advice, or a bank of phones. Today there are only three requirements for becoming an entrepreneur:
Actually, make that four things: you probably also need a mom who provided the kind of support we’ll explore in this book.
This book will tell you how dozens of moms in dozens of different situations, whose kids’ interests were all over the map, raised super-successful sons and daughters—even if the road they were traveling didn’t always look so promising.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Dads are critically important. Many entrepreneurs credit their fathers, grandparents, stepparents, and others with having influenced their development. The rules I discovered apply to anyone nurturing a young entrepreneur-to-be.
In my exploration of the subject, though, it’s moms, rather than dads or others, who were identified as the secret ingredient in fostering their children’s self-confidence and tolerance for risk, two important traits for an entrepreneur.
So how did I zero in on the moms? It was an organic process, and it started before I had any idea that I might write a book on raising an entrepreneur.
It started with my meeting scores of successful young entrepreneurs—mostly through my older son, Elliott, who founded the Summit Series, a conference for young leaders in a wide range of fields. When I met these remarkable young people, I usually asked them the same basic questions:
They all told me a version of the same thing: “I couldn’t have done it without my mom. She believed in me. She supported my passion. She’s the reason I turned out this way.”
That really struck me. And it moved me. I know that the moms of other teenagers and young adults, some of whom seem to be floundering, must love their kids as much as these entrepreneurs’ moms love theirs. So I decided to interview the entrepreneurs’ moms, to try to learn what they had done right. I thought I might find something significant.
I cast a wide net: I chose several dozen young men and women with a variety of interests and skills—creators and innovators from different ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds, geographic settings, religious traditions, and family structures. It was as I interviewed mom after mom that I started to see more and more clearly that, while in some ways each person’s upbringing had been different, in a handful of key areas they all had been raised the same.
I was astonished to discover that all of these entrepreneurs’ moms—without consciously realizing it, without knowing one another, and without having a common background—had followed most or all of the ten rules you’ll find in this book: rules that emerged and became clear to me over the course of my interviews. I had to share what I was finding, and I decided to write this book.
For the purposes of researching the book, I interviewed either the entrepreneur or his or her mom, or both. Half the entrepreneurs profiled are men, half are women; they have vastly different interests and skills and come from different backgrounds. Some grew up well off, some struggled financially. Some came from big families, some from small families, some from blended families. They came from big cities and small towns, from across the U.S. and from other countries. They have many different ethnic backgrounds. They came from many religious backgrounds. Some have parents who are still married; some have parents who were divorced; some were raised by single moms. Some had parents who died.
Here are a few of the people you’ll meet:
Are you noticing a theme?
When I started interviewing entrepreneurs and their moms for this book, I thought I knew what I’d find. But what I learned was completely different. I was astonished to learn what mattered in raising an entrepreneur—and what didn’t. Even more than that, I was amazed by how similarly all the entrepreneurs were raised, despite the fact that their backgrounds differed wildly. These unmistakable common threads make up the ten rules you’ll learn about—and that you and your child can benefit from.
This book 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, as you’ll see when you read these stories, personal fulfillment is essential to an entrepreneur’s life. What I hope this book will inspire you to do is to keep the road open for your child to choose—whether a broad, straight, clearly marked road or a twisty, surprising, unique one.
If your kids have the entrepreneurial spirit and a taste for the road less traveled, this book will show you how to nurture it. You’ll learn how to support them as they pursue their passion and their purpose, and as they make fearless and fulfilling choices. I’m so excited for your journey.