Don’t Worry About Straight A’s
Many kids, even though they’re smart, don’t do well in school because they have learning styles or interests or temperaments that are not a good fit with teachers’ expectations. These issues can persist from kindergarten all the way through college. If a college student is smart but not in the right learning environment to succeed, the parents may exert pressure for the student to stay enrolled—and stay miserable. But as we’ll see, parents can make different choices, and their child can find a different path.
Let me tell you about conversations I had with three loving moms who meant well.
The first mother’s son had dropped out of college, but then, under pressure from his parents, had reenrolled and was studying history. His mother admitted that her son didn’t even like history, but he’d needed to pick something.
“Nothing really motivates him,” she told me. Her distress was clear.
“Nothing? There isn’t anything he loves?”
“Only one thing,” she said, reluctantly and with a hint of sarcasm. “Video games. He plays video games every second of his spare time.” And then she added, “He’s really, really good.”
“So maybe he should pursue a career in video gaming,” I said.
She looked at me as though I were speaking a foreign language—because, to her, it was.
This mother was trying, with good intentions, to get her son to walk the safe path of earning a college degree, but it never occurred to her that gaming is a multibillion-dollar global industry that employs people like her son in high-salary jobs. There are opportunities in game design, graphics, coding, software engineering, and other areas.
I tried again. “Would you consider taking the money you’re spending on tuition and using it to support him while he works at Electronic Arts or Sony as an unpaid intern for a year?”
She had no idea that gaming technology has applications in traditional fields. She didn’t realize that people her son’s age have started their own companies on the basis of their passion for and expertise in gaming science and technology. She didn’t know that many of these young people have become quite successful. She thought her son would be better off if he got a college degree in a subject he didn’t care about.
The second mother’s son had also dropped out of college, and he too had reenrolled under pressure from his parents. He had chosen Japanese as his major.
“Why Japanese?” I asked her.
She told me that their family had lived in Japan when her son was young, so he was already bilingual. Besides, she said, he couldn’t think of anything else.
“But isn’t there anything that he loves?”
“He loves cars. He tinkers with them every day in his free time.”
“Then why is he studying Japanese instead of pursuing a career in the automotive industry?”
But I already knew the answer—we reward our children for conforming, even when they’re failing, and even when their failure is making them unhappy.
“Tinkering with cars isn’t a college major,” his mother pointed out.
“But automotive and mechanical engineering and automotive design are often college majors,” I countered. “What if your son contacted all the Japanese car companies in the U.S. to see if they have internships or programs for career development? Or what if he applied to colleges that offer a degree in automotive design?”
I hoped his mom would try to imagine what could happen if she encouraged her son to walk away and tinker with cars. The alternative was to force him into conforming to a standard that might look good on paper but would ultimately lead him to fail. What if, instead, she helped him find a life that he could love and excel in?
The third mom had a daughter in high school. The girl was a passionate and accomplished musician, and she was about to start applying to colleges. Her parents had been very supportive of her interest in music, giving her music lessons and sending her to music camps.
“So will your daughter major in music?” I asked.
“No,” the girl’s mom replied. “I told her she has to major in something real so she can get a job and support herself.”
This mother wasn’t trying to be mean. She wanted to protect her daughter from the cold realities of the job market. And that’s perfectly understandable. But I think it’s misguided. We all want our kids to have financial security, but why send them the message that they need to be protected rather than inspired? That they’re not good enough to make a living doing what they love? That they have to settle?
Many future entrepreneurs grow up learning to pursue their passions and follow their dreams. This mom—again, with every good intention—was teaching her daughter a very different lesson.
These three moms wanted their kids to follow a conventional academic path. That’s fine for some, but their kids weren’t thriving. They thought their kids should major in subjects they didn’t care about and had no aptitude in. They thought their kids should prepare themselves for a traditional career they probably wouldn’t be very good at. There is another way.
Some children who grow up to become entrepreneurs have habits that most schools don’t value. They question the rules and challenge authority. They want to do things their own way. They get bored and lose focus when the task at hand doesn’t interest them. And what does that mean?
- It means they often aren’t happy in school.
- It means some teachers may not like them very much.
- It means nobody at school is mentoring them, because they don’t see how special they are.
- It means they aren’t getting a lot of positive feedback at school.
Schools, of course, teach necessary academic and social skills, but to some extent they also reward behavior that is diametrically opposed to what’s needed for entrepreneurial success. And, as one mom I talked with pointed out, schools often put more emphasis on remediating kids’ weaknesses than they do on finding and supporting kids’ strengths. That approach can be devastating to a youngster with an entrepreneurial mind-set: a kid who learns in ways that are determined by her passions, rather than by an academic schedule, a teacher’s checklist, or a standardized test.
Some children do have serious learning issues. They may need medical attention or even a special type of school. But other kids, particularly boys, may simply have a lot of energy. After all, five-year-olds haven’t always been labeled “hyperactive” or been medicated with Ritalin or made to feel there was something wrong with them just because they didn’t feel like sitting still in a circle and hanging on their teacher’s every word.
Benny Blanco, whose given name is Benjamin Levin, is one of the top pop songwriters and music producers in America. He was one of three people named Songwriter of the Year at the 2013 BMI Pop Music Awards. He’s a multiplatinum songwriter who has written and produced over twenty number-one hits, such as “Moves Like Jagger.”
Benny and his older brother Jeremy, who now manages songwriters, producers, and artists with Benny, were born in Plano, Texas, and moved with their parents to L.A., where Benny went to a Montessori preschool. Then the family moved to Reston, Virginia, outside D.C., where Benny, by then a kindergartner, enrolled in public school. Their mother, Sandy, a social worker, is the admissions director at a senior assisted living facility.
Sandy told me that his kindergarten teacher wasn’t happy with his inability to sit quietly in a circle. Sandy told me, “His teachers used to call me every day complaining that Benny couldn’t sit still.”
Sandy’s response was succinct: “So?”
This, of course, is not a normal parental response. Most parents who receive a single report like that, even for a child still in kindergarten, quickly fall into line and try to “fix” the “problem.” But Sandy didn’t mind that Benny was different, and her response to his kindergarten teacher is typical of how she raised her son for the next twenty years. When Benny couldn’t do something (and often he couldn’t), or when he didn’t conform to the expected norms, she said, “So?” And she meant it. Then she focused instead on what Benny was doing well.
Unsurprisingly, Benny was later diagnosed with ADHD. And so Sandy, who had been willing to stand up to Benny’s kindergarten teacher, also spent many hours trying to help him. She took him to doctors, to meetings for kids with ADHD, to meetings with his teachers and counselors in the hope of getting him more engaged in school, and to special meetings where she fought for kids with ADHD to be allowed extra time on standardized tests. And she kept trying to redirect his boundless energy—into the theater, into music lessons—even listening to the lyrics and music he was writing, including rap music, which she hated.
What do you think when you hear that a twenty-five-year-old has twenty-five pop hits under his belt? You may think he’s a musical prodigy, or that he has industry connections, or that something extraordinary must have catapulted him to the top of his field. But Benny was anything but a child prodigy, and he didn’t have an easy go of it. What was extraordinary was how his mom anchored him.
What Sandy did was assure Benny that there are more important things than mastering a specific skill by a specific deadline, and she didn’t question him for not conforming. In fact, she sent him a reassuring message when she reacted to the “problem” by saying “So?” It was clear that she really believed what she was saying, which meant that Benny believed it, too. How many careers require the skill of sitting quietly in a circle? How many careers require the fine-motor skills of coloring between the lines and writing neatly?
Sandy’s unwavering belief in Benny gave him permission to feel good about himself even when he came in for criticism at school. And later on, when she supported his songwriting talent, she sent him that important message again and again. Benny’s mom didn’t know it at the time, but even when he was five years old, she was laying the foundation for his future success by not letting him see his perceived deficits as problems. Incidentally, by the time Benny finished kindergarten, his teacher had come to recognize that he was a truly special kid. She told Sandy that she wouldn’t be surprised if he became president one day.
Today, even though Benny didn’t graduate from college, he’s a frequent guest lecturer at the Clive Davis Institute at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. As Sandy told me, Benny likes to say that he always knew he’d do something with music if he just kept at it and was annoying enough.
Dhani Jones was an All-American college football linebacker at the University of Michigan, earning All-Big Ten honors for three straight seasons, as he, Heisman trophy winner Charles Woodson, Brian Griese, and Tom Brady were an unstoppable combination for the Wolverines. After Michigan, Dhani went on to play in the NFL for eleven seasons, with the Giants, the Eagles, and finally the Cincinnati Bengals, where he made his permanent home.
When his football career ended, he started a series on the Travel Channel, Dhani Tackles the Globe, which followed him around the world as he learned to play various international sports while exploring the culture in each location. And as if that weren’t enough, he opened the Bow Tie Cafe in a historic Cincinnati neighborhood. He is also a founding partner of VMG Creative, a New York creative agency with clients like Michael Kors, Capital One, and Estée Lauder.
Impressive, right? So when I talked with Dhani’s mom, Nancy, an anesthesiologist, the first thing I wanted to know was whether Dhani had always been a superstar.
“No,” Nancy said. “There were so many talented kids in his class, he didn’t really stand out.”
I was stunned. Dhani Jones didn’t stand out in high school?
When Dhani was younger, Nancy explained, he’d mostly participated in individual sports like swimming, tennis, and wrestling. He didn’t play football until high school. He started on the varsity team as a sophomore, and he played steadily. His team reached the state championship twice, and Dhani himself was recruited by top college football teams.
“His high school coach must have loved him, right?” I asked.
Nancy said she didn’t know. A player could tell how much the coach valued him when the coach gave him the day’s “game ball,” she said, which meant that the coach recognized him as the day’s outstanding player. Dhani had always hoped to get the game ball, Nancy told me. It became an important symbol to him, but during three consistently great seasons, he never got it—until the last game of his senior year. According to Nancy, Dhani’s coach explained the oversight by saying, “He’s so consistently good, I guess I forgot to recognize him.”
But Dhani wasn’t just a good football player. He was a good student, too—good enough to be accepted at the University of Michigan on the strength of his academic performance alone. Was he a favorite of his teachers?
“No,” Nancy said, “not really. You see, he always asked a lot of questions. Sometimes you’re not a favorite of the teachers when you ask a lot of questions. You’d think that wouldn’t be a problem with teachers or coaches, to have a kid who always questions them.”
Looking at things differently, wanting to shake things up, may not make you a teacher’s pet, but it can help make you a great entrepreneur.
I want to reiterate that many successful entrepreneurs were also very successful students. Lots of the entrepreneurs in this book breezed through Ivy League schools and got advanced degrees. This is for the parents of the kids who aren’t doing well—or who are, but who aren’t happy.
None of this is to say that you shouldn’t help your children succeed in school—education is important. Many of the entrepreneurs in this book were great students, and didn’t need help, but for those who weren’t, I saw that there’s plenty you can do to compensate and help them grow up in a confident and fearless way. As we’ll see, a lot depends on why a child isn’t doing well in school, and on what parents are doing for them outside school. When moms get it right, their kids thrive.
Jeff Marx is the cowriter of Avenue Q, winner of the Tony Awards’ triple crown—best score, best book, and best musical. Years after it opened, Avenue Q is still playing in New York and around the world. A song that Jeff cowrote for the “It Gets Better” campaign was featured in an episode of Glee. He also cowrote four songs for Scrubs, one of which, “Everything Comes Down to Poo,” was nominated for an Emmy.
Jeff, born in Chicago to a pediatric dentist (his dad) and a dental hygienist (his mom), was raised in Florida with three younger sisters who did well in school (Traci, who has a PhD in psychology; Jamie, who has a master’s in education; and Julie, who has a master’s in counseling).
For all his success as an adult, Jeff struggled at school. Here’s what his mom Wendy told me:
If there’s one mistake I made when Jeff was little, it’s that I let him start kindergarten when he was so young because he was already reading. That meant that all through school he was always the youngest, the smallest, and the least coordinated, and nobody ever wanted him on their team. He always found an excuse not to be on the playground because he was always the last one picked. He says he’s going to write a book someday called “And You Get Jeff.” He didn’t really fit in and didn’t have many friends.
When he was in sixth grade, we were called in to the principal’s office, and all his teachers were there. They were preparing to “counsel him out.” Jeff had the highest grade in his math class, but his math teacher said he was going to fail him anyway. He said, “I give him a zero every day because he won’t do the homework.” Jeff said, “If I’m already getting the highest grade in the class, why should I do the homework? It’s a waste of time.”
Jeff’s science teacher said, “If he were a sponge sitting on the counter, he’d absorb more than he does in my class.” Jeff said, “I don’t care about science!”
Then his history teacher complained about Jeff’s lack of interest, and Jeff said, “I don’t care what the Sumerians did in 3000 BC!”
For reading class, each student had been told to pick a biography and, as part of a book report, to illustrate the person in front of the class. Jeff wanted to read a book about John Lennon, and he was incredibly excited. He was going to dress like him, play the guitar, and sing “Imagine.” But the reading teacher said she wouldn’t allow it, that Lennon was completely unacceptable, and that Jeff had to pick another person. Jeff was devastated—Lennon was one of his heroes. He said, “There’s nobody else I’m interested in.”
The principal felt sorry for Jeff and suggested that if he wanted to sing, he should enter the school’s talent show in a couple of weeks.
That changed everything, Wendy told me. It was Jeff’s first public performance, and it was one of the highlights of his mom’s life. He sang “Annie’s Song” and accompanied himself on the guitar. Everybody was spellbound, Wendy said—people had tears in their eyes:
All of his teachers who had been so mean two weeks before came up to me and said, “We had no idea that he is so talented. We really apologize.” The school’s founder, who had never talked to me before, told me, “Jeff has the most perfect pitch I’ve ever heard.”
Suddenly his classmates saw who he was and wanted to be his friend. After that, he found his place in the school through music. He was in the chorus, in the school musicals, and accompanied other performers.
Wendy wanted to nurture Jeff’s talent, so she got him voice lessons with someone who had a musical group called The #1 Bar Mitzvah Band, which he invited Jeff to join. Jeff performed several times every weekend for nine years:
Girls at the shows would run after him, wanting his picture or phone number. He was like a rock star. It was a huge confidence booster.
Jeff had always loved music. I took him to lots of shows. He grew up knowing the scores of different musicals, and lots of pop music.
I’d played piano as a child, and I wanted all my children to play an instrument. But after Jeff had a few piano lessons, he said, “I have no interest in learning this, Mom. It’s a waste of time.”
Jeff also didn’t want to learn to read music. So when he was a sophomore in high school, I bought him a fake book—it has the melody line and chords. I found two songs in the key of C. One was “Getting to Know You.” We sat down at the piano. I said, “I’m going to play the melody line, and you play the chords.”
A few hours later, Wendy said, she found Jeff at the piano, playing the songs with full orchestration up and down the keyboard. “I couldn’t believe it,” she told me. “It was better than I could ever play.” Jeff had found his calling. “Just like that, he was a pianist,” Wendy said. She soon got him started with a new piano teacher, who said, “Once in a generation, a kid comes along like this.” A week later, Jeff accompanied his school choir on the piano, and a week after that he was playing for tips at a local restaurant.
But Jeff, like many kids who veer from conventional, school-approved paths to success, still had obstacles ahead of him. His mom supported him through all of them.
In high school, as in elementary school, he refused to do homework for subjects that didn’t interest him. As the time drew near to apply to colleges, he knew that he wanted to major in musical theater so he could sing and act. “He still couldn’t read music,” Wendy said, “but he played brilliantly by ear.” As part of his application to a scholarship program in the arts, he submitted a tape of himself playing four piano pieces. On the basis of that tape, several colleges wrote to Jeff and invited him to apply. Wendy told me what happened next:
I had an appointment with his school’s college counselor. I went in with a list of the schools that had written to him and told her where Jeff was planning to apply.
She laughed at me and said, “Why would you think he’d get in there? We have honor students who get rejected by those schools.”
I said, “They wrote and asked him to apply.”
She replied, “You must be mistaken. Schools like that wouldn’t want him.”
So I showed her the letters. She was stunned.
To her surprise, he got into the University of Michigan musical theater program, but he was the worst dancer in the class. He had trouble remembering the routines because he had never danced before. Piano was also hard because he’d never learned to read music. And he never got cast in any of the plays, so he graduated with no acting experience. One professor told him he’d never make it in theater.
As a result, Wendy said, Jeff decided to become an entertainment lawyer, and he enrolled at the Cardozo School of Law. But he didn’t like law school any more than he’d liked any other school, except when he wrote lyrics for Law Revue, the school’s annual musical, which spoofs the professors and legal topics. One of the deans, Frank Macchiarola, worked with Jeff on his songs, saw his talent, and eventually became an investor in Avenue Q. “Without his encouragement,” Wendy told me, “Jeff wouldn’t have finished law school. Basically, Law Revue was all he did. He told me, ‘I’ll finish, but I don’t want to do it after I graduate.’ ”
Jeff passed the New York bar exam and then decided to apply to the three-year BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop in New York. He was accepted as a lyricist, and finally found himself in an academic program where he could thrive, and where he began to write music and lyrics. It was here that he met Robert Lopez, and together they won a portion of the $150,000 annual Ed Kleban Prize for promising lyricists.
“I always believed in him,” Wendy told me:
Jeff brought me as his date on the red carpet at the Tonys, at the Emmys, and at the Grammys. My life is so amazing, I have to pinch myself. He took us onto the Paramount lot when they taped Glee. We went to a church where the Gay Men’s Chorus of L.A. sang one of his songs. He arranged for us to meet President Obama.
I’m so proud of Jeff and the person he is—a generous, thoughtful, multitalented, brilliant, creative person. We always supported what he wanted, and somehow he found his own route.
Jaclyn Mason is the owner of Charm Georgetown, a successful boutique in Washington, D.C. Growing up, she had a terrible time in school. In fact, she told me, she was always changing schools because the schools were always asking her to leave.
Jaclyn’s academic troubles were due to her learning disabilities. When she was young, she said, learning specialists told her mom, JoAnn, that her daughter would never be able to succeed in a mainstream school.
But JoAnn refused to accept that conclusion. Jaclyn told me that her mom was always a very involved and proactive parent who decided to help her daughter catch up with her classmates. Almost every day after school, JoAnn took Jaclyn to speech and language therapy specialists to help her learn to read. Jaclyn was pushed to the limit, she said, but she persevered, and she did finally catch up.
Today Jaclyn does all the buying for her store, which features jewelry, accessories, decorative gifts, and other items. She keeps up with fashion trends, and she’s in charge of marketing and social media for her business. She earned her success by working hard, but she also had a mom who believed in her and did what was necessary to help her.
Jenna Arnold is a highly successful entrepreneur in her early thirties. She’s so confident that it’s hard to believe she ever struggled while she was growing up. But Jenna’s mom, Lauren, talked openly with me about raising Jenna:
She was such a challenge—always a force of nature—but I knew her gift would reveal itself at some point. I learned that even though you only think one week at a time so you don’t get overwhelmed, you have to keep the big picture in mind—children have their own life purpose.
On the day Jenna was born, she came out screaming, and she didn’t sleep for eighteen months. I knew it would take more than me to make it work. I’d import cousins, friends, an extended family of forty to keep her soothed and entertained. I used to say to everyone, “Come help me out!” She was two years old, and I went to my room and cried my eyes out and thought, I can’t do this.
I chose mentors early on. I also leaned heavily on my husband because I had my own active career. She was independent and self-sufficient as a result, and she saw a mother who worked hard to pay the bills, to contribute to society, to educate herself, and to raise a family.
When Jenna was in second grade, I realized she had learning differences. She’d been a leader among her friends before that, and she was in the most advanced reading group. I went to the parent-teacher conference not knowing anything was wrong. The teacher said, “She can’t read like the others.” I said, “Then why is she in the highest group, if she can’t keep up?” The teacher said, “I want her to be popular—that’s where her friends are. Don’t worry. She’s pretty. She can always be a model.”
So I pulled her out of that school. We recognized her learning differences, embraced them, found the right schools, and built a network to support her. We helped start a lab school. Jenna credits her ability to manage a project, organize, and delegate to that school. They taught her the techniques to conquer her learning disability. After two years, we put her in a Quaker school because I knew that would protect her self-esteem.
She has one brother, Thomas, two years younger, also an entrepreneur, who lives in Dubai and does private equity projects in the region. Jenna went on to major in education at the University of Miami, where she won the top teaching award for her class, and then earned a master’s in international peace education from Columbia. When she was twenty-five, she founded Press Play Productions, a content creation company, to educate people about important social issues through media.
Lauren recognized that she could meet only a small fraction of Jenna’s needs, so she engaged others—a whole village—to help. Not all parents can start alternative schools when their children are floundering. But they can support their children by making sure they’re getting the kind of help they need, and by being proud of what they are doing well.
Erica Ford, born in New York City, is regarded as one of her generation’s top self-empowerment and antiviolence activists. In 2002, she cofounded LIFE (Love Ignites Freedom through Education) Camp and she serves as CEO. LIFE Camp’s mission is to improve the lives of Black and Latino youth by providing them with tools to promote critical thinking and personal accountability. Erica also heads an antiviolence program in the South Jamaica neighborhood of Queens, and she works to build public-private partnerships to create summer jobs and reduce violence among young people, since homicide is the leading cause of death among New York City youth.
She grew up in Queens with one brother a year older. Their father died in Vietnam when Erica was only three, and from that time on, their mother, Doris, raised her children on her own.
Erica told me that every year, her mom got a note on her report card that read, “Erica talks too much.” The school didn’t know how to deal with her. Even so, “I was always a leader,” Erica said, “whether hanging out on our bikes or in the community—maybe because I had a big mouth.”
Doris did a lot to inspire confidence in her kids:
My mother allowed us to experience the world, to experience a lot of different places and things that allowed me to feel hope. She’s from Panama, which we would visit in summers when we were little. We went to a lot of different countries in North and South America. I was always confident. Even hanging out in the community, I would walk through the drug dealers and gangs with confidence that nobody would do anything to me.
In all her years at school, Erica said, she had only one teacher who believed in her, but that teacher’s encouragement had a huge impact:
My sixth grade teacher, Miss Landrum, convinced us that we could do anything and stand up to anyone if we did it right and were organized. It made a big difference in my life. That’s why I do what I do today. Even in a small way, I know I can have a positive impact on kids’ lives.
Erica has been an activist since she was eighteen years old. When she was twenty-one, she went to Geneva with the December 12 Movement International Secretariat, an organization that consults with the United Nations. There, she said, she was treated as if she were a head of state: “I suddenly realized that I really could make a difference.”
Erica always knew that her mom supported her, even if her mom didn’t always support her choices:
When I started doing what I do, my mother wasn’t enthusiastic about it, but she supported me financially, which showed me she believed in me. When my mother would see me on TV doing a rally, since she was afraid of it—she came from a place of fear—she tried to convince me to do something else. But still, she kept supporting me. I couldn’t have gotten where I am without her financial support.
She helped me survive financially, even though her mission was to protect me. I appreciate it even more now, knowing that even if my path wasn’t her choice, she supported me anyhow. She wanted me to have a safe job, but she was still there for me.
My father was a sergeant in the Vietnam War, and I feel that willingness to fight for what he believed in—to fight for a better life—transferred to me.
In addition to the support of her mom and one teacher, Erica said, she had guidance from a lot of women in the community who were surrogate moms and helped mold her into the person she became:
I owe a lot to those women who looked after me and made sure I grew on the right path. They were the ones who really made me go back to school, because when I was talking in the back of the class, I wasn’t learning what they were teaching in the front of the class. They helped me realize how important that was for me. So many different mothers contributed to my life!
Erica’s mom always supported her, even when her teachers found her annoying. She encouraged Erica to find and use her voice, even if it was in a way she wouldn’t have chosen.
For the last ten years, I’ve been so busy organizing! People always saw me with a bullhorn, and I was still the kid who got in trouble for talking too much. But if I’d listened to teachers who wanted me to be quiet, I wouldn’t be what I am today—a voice for the voiceless.
Some schools are beginning to realize that if students are allowed to pursue their passions instead of being forced to spend time studying subjects they hate, they will be more successful. This is the principle behind Blue School in Lower Manhattan, an independent progressive school for kids from age two through grade eight. Blue School was cofounded by Chris Wink, whom we met in the last chapter, and his friends Matt Goldman and Phil Stanton. The three of them are the cofounders of Blue Man Group, which they started to inspire creativity in their audiences and in themselves—for mutual learning and growth—and they transferred those values to a school where creativity is encouraged so that children can fall in love with the joy of learning. The school’s credo is “It will be impossible to convince Blue School children that their aspirations are unattainable. There will be no talking them out of pursuing their passions. There will be no way of fooling them into believing that the stirrings in their hearts are unimportant.” Matt Goldman sees innovation as key to Blue School’s mission. “Innovation does not happen in a vacuum,” he says. “It typically requires people who have extraordinary skills, knowledge of the rules of diverse disciplines, and an added desire to integrate and break those rules. It is from this rule-breaking, ‘trickster’ energy that I believe true innovation grows” (Goldman 2013).
Most schools aren’t like that. An article in Brain, Child by Rebecca Lanning (2013) talks of her struggles with her son whose learning issues made finishing high school a serious challenge. The author was extremely smart, well-informed, thoughtful, proactive, and involved. She took her son to specialists, had him tested, tried various medications, changed his school, helped him so much she had to cut back on her own work, and eventually got him through high school. He was brilliant but never became interested in any of the subjects, so he didn’t do well. After graduating, the kid was so exhausted, he took a “nap year.”
I couldn’t help but wonder as I read the article what might have happened if the school had let Lanning’s son pursue something that interested him, as Blue School does. Or if his mom had let him spend some of his time on something he loved, as opposed to the all-out assault on grinding through subjects he hated. Maybe he’d have barely graduated high school or only gotten a GED, but maybe he’d also be writing music or making movies or taking photos or writing computer code or drawing pictures or cooking or fixing appliances or fighting for social justice or selling lemonade. And maybe then he’d figure out a way to pursue his passion financially, instead of napping and dreading going to college.
Many parents believe that if their child doesn’t get into a good college—and then graduate—they will not have a successful career. That was true in the last century, but it definitely isn’t true today. Thacher School head Michael Mulligan (2014) says one reason so many teens are depressed is that all they’ve done is try to get into an elite college, rather than work to learn something they love. Some careers require a graduate degree; others don’t even need a college degree. Most start-ups value knowledge, not degrees. And, of course, if you start your own business, you write the job description.
Until more schools adopt the Blue School’s philosophy, there are a few things to keep in mind if you think you may be raising a future entrepreneur.
A stellar academic career simply isn’t a prerequisite for entrepreneurial success. Some of the entrepreneurs I talked with had always been great students—a third of them graduated at the top of their class from top universities, and a quarter of them earned advanced degrees. But others who are just as successful decided not to finish college and chose instead to get on with what mattered more to them. Mutual Mobile founder John Arrow, whom we’ll meet later, made an interesting point. He said that among some entrepreneurs, especially in San Francisco, there’s a view that you have to drop out of school to be an entrepreneur, but that this is not quite true. He explained: “It’s just that, at some point, you have to be fully in. You can’t run a company—especially a start-up—and have another job or be a student. It’s not about the hours in the day, it’s about the mental bandwidth. It’s about where all your focus is. And if you have a safety net, you’re less likely to give it that extra push.”
This is why, when they got a great idea, many entrepreneurs quit school to give it their all. Many were good students, some were not, but almost 20 percent of the entrepreneurs in this book left school before graduating from college because they were eager to get on with the next phase of their life.
Whether these entrepreneurs graduated from college or dropped out, never went to college or were academic stars, their formal schooling was all but irrelevant to their ability to achieve success in the real world.
Most of the people who have raised extremely successful adults probably didn’t realize what they were doing, and may have been horrified when their kids dropped out. Bill Gates, Sr., says, “As a father, I never imagined that the argumentative young boy who grew up in my house, eating my food and using my name, would be my future employer” (Guth 2009). Many of the entrepreneurs loved school and thrived in every academic situation. Many were miserable in school but finished to make their families happy. Many were miserable and didn’t finish.
The key is this: If your child is thriving in school, that’s fantastic. But if they aren’t, you have to deal with it. Forcing a child to stay in a situation where she feels stupid isn’t the solution. Don’t accept her current school and its values as the only possibility. Question approaches that haven’t managed to engage her. Consider changing schools, switching to a charter school, or homeschooling. And if your kid hates college, don’t make him finish. As we’ll see in the next chapter, another possibility that can be invaluable to a child, whether or not she’s academically oriented, is to help them connect with a mentor who counteracts any negative feedback they may be getting from their teachers or classmates.
Whatever you decide to do, make sure your children know that you support them in finding, exploring, and mastering something they’ll love.
Here’s one last thing to remember. Records show that when John Lennon was in high school, he was punished for being a “nuisance” and having “just no interest whatsoever.” He was described as “an extremely cheeky boy,” and two times, he got three detentions—in a single day. Those detention sheets reportedly sold for $3,000 at auction (Strauss 2013). And even though no one can prove it, Lennon is reputed to have said, “When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy.’ They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.”