Nurture Compassion
As we’ve learned, the path to entrepreneurial success often isn’t as smooth as some imagine. An entrepreneur’s development can be forged through difficulty—a common theme of my interviews with entrepreneurs and their moms.
As my interviews proceeded, I began to notice another common theme. It turned up in conversations with people who had overcome great challenges as well as in conversations with people who had enjoyed great advantages. 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.
Consider Ellen Gustafson, who was cruelly teased at school but grew up to cofound FEED Projects (rule 6):
“My mom always told me that the most important thing in your life is what you’re doing for the benefit of others,” Ellen told me. “It’s not about money, clothes, or cars. Both my parents had leadership positions in organizations that were involved in giving back, and they talked to me about why that was important. They were involved with Catholic church clubs, and my mom volunteered with the Girl Scouts and, later, at a women’s shelter.”
And Ellen’s mom, Maura, told me about the deliberate choices she made to nurture her daughter’s compassion: “We worried about Ellen being an only child,” she said. “I wanted to be sure she wasn’t self-centered or self-focused, so we always did a lot of volunteer work. She’d help me make meals for the homeless. I’d say, ‘If you’re going to do something for your fellow man, you’ll gain more from that experience than the people whom you’re trying to help.’ She saw us doing that, and I think it had a huge impact.”
Compassion may not be the first quality you associate with entrepreneurship, but I found it again and again in the entrepreneurs and moms I talked with. It became clear to me that 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.
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?”
Scott Harrison is the founder of charity: water, a nonprofit that digs, restores, and maintains wells to give millions of people around the world sustainable access to clean water. In only eight years, charity: water built sixteen thousand wells in twenty-four countries, brought clean water to five million people, and raised $170 million for the cause. These accomplishments put Scott’s picture on the cover of Inc. magazine.
If you watch any of the videos on the nonprofit’s website (charitywater.org), you’ll be awed by Scott’s compassion and his ability to motivate and inspire. In a relatively short time, he’s improved the quality of life for millions by developing a solution to a life-threatening global problem, a solution that eluded many others who had more experience, scientific expertise, money, and political clout. But Scott had two things going for him—vision and determination—and they were integral to the mind-set he learned from his mother, Joan.
He had grown up in a small town in New Jersey and graduated from NYU. Scott’s mom told me that before Scott started charity: water, he spent ten years as a New York nightclub promoter. But, she said, in spite of his financial success, her son was miserable and felt “spiritually bankrupt.” Joan tells me that when he was “living a life of excess with no meaning,” she referred to him as her “prodigal son.”
Joan now delights in telling the rest of Scott’s story:
In October of 2004, Scott turned his back on his life in New York City and boarded Mercy Ship for a year—it’s a hospital ship that gives free medical care to people in West Africa. After a second tour as a volunteer, he returned with a clear vision to start a charity designed to meet a desperate need he had encountered there: the need for clean water.
Using the resources he had—dramatic photos from his Mercy Ship experience, an A-list of his former nightclub patrons, and an ability to motivate people, Scott visited nightclub owners and friends and asked them to become donors. They did.
Meanwhile, having no income now, Scott lived on the sofa in a friend’s apartment—the apartment that became charity: water’s first office. The kitchen table was the desk, the employees were mostly volunteers, and the Internet and telephone were the main connection to donors. To hear over the workplace noise, Scott would lean out the window when he talked on the phone.
The first event was a birthday party held at the nightclub Tenjune in September 2006. Guests purchased a $20 bottle of water to get in, and Scott raised $15,000. He used the money to fix three wells and build three more in Uganda. Months later, the donors received a picture of the well that had been built with their money, and charity: water was launched.
A few years later, when the nonprofit had experienced phenomenal growth and success, a supporter came over to me at one of the events. She shared with me that in the early stages of starting charity: water, Scott had told her that his mom always said he could do it.
I asked Joan how she thought Scott had found the courage to walk away from a life of financial and professional success to start a nonprofit to make a difference in the world.
She believes it was the parenting foundation she set early on, built on spiritual community and disciplined hard work, that got Scott through tough times when she became very sick. She believes that same foundation helped him make a change years later, when he was unhappy with where he was in his life.
She gave me examples of how she instilled those values. When Scott was in elementary and middle school, she would help him sort through his clothes, books, and toys, and they would give some away to kids who could use them. On Thanksgiving and Christmas, the family delivered turkeys or canned goods to needy families. And when Scott was in high school, his church youth group spent a week helping build a youth center in a low-income neighborhood, where the group also established a vacation Bible school for children. Whenever Scott earned money, Joan said, he was free to spend, give away, or save as much as he wanted—after he had given ten percent to the church and put ten percent in savings. But Scott, touched by all the need he saw in that neighborhood, sent them all the money he had.
When Scott was a teenager, Joan became seriously ill. “He was called upon to help his dad keep our house running and take care of me, since I was completely disabled,” she told me. The family’s spiritual community helped reinforce the lessons that Scott had already learned, and he was able to see the positive impact of others’ kindness during a difficult time.
“Because of my illness,” Joan told me, “Scott saw compassion in action. Our church would supply meals, clean our house, and take care of him when I had to go to the doctor. One woman even shopped for clothes and shoes for him when I wasn’t able to go to stores.” It was this experience, Joan said, that led to Scott’s becoming such a compassionate person, someone who would walk away from a life of comfort to save lives by bringing clean water to far-off corners of the world.
We learned about Adam and Scooter Braun in the chapter on competing (rule 2). Adam left his high-powered consulting job to start a nonprofit called Pencils of Promise with only $25 in the bank; it now builds schools around the world. ABC News called it “the hottest nonprofit in the country.” Scooter developed some of the most successful musical acts of our time. They have a sister in medicine.
The success of these two brothers can be traced to the sense of compassion and global awareness instilled by their parents. When Adam and Scooter were in their teens, their parents adopted two boys from Mozambique. It created a bond of adoptive brotherhood, which in turn led to Adam’s desire to build schools around the world, and to Scooter’s inviting Justin Bieber and his mom to live in a home in Atlanta that he paid for while he helped structure Justin’s rise to stardom. In effect, the family members’ commitment to one another spread across the globe when Bieber donated one dollar from every ticket sold on his Believe concert tour to Pencils of Promise, which built fifteen more schools with the proceeds.
“Our family is big on family lore,” says Susan, the two entrepreneurs’ mom. “Our children learned a lot about their forebears, and it frames who they are. Their grandparents and great-grandparents were people who came from Europe and pulled themselves up by the bootstraps.”
Although the Braun kids didn’t grow up with much adversity, they learned about it from the experiences of their parents and grandparents. Susan explained that her kids were taught from a young age to appreciate what they had, and to be aware of the suffering and hardship others had faced:
My father died when I was young. My mother was only thirty-five when she was left to raise three young kids alone. On my husband’s side, both grandparents were Holocaust survivors who had lost most of their families. Hearing their stories had a profound impact on the boys.
So both sides of our family had experiences where things didn’t work out as they had planned. It’s ingrained in us that you may have to change your plans. The safe path may not be so safe suddenly, and you’ll just have to figure it out and move forward.
That perspective seems to have had a powerful effect on the boys, Susan said. Instead of making them wary, it fueled their sense of exploration and ambition:
They’re not afraid of failure. They view it as a learning experience. They’re not afraid of falling off the edge. Our sons have a much bigger safety net than we had, even though we told them that once they finished their education, they’d be on their own. They’re more secure, more confident than we were.
Susan is another example of a full-time working mom who raised independent kids:
I was twenty-four when my first child was born, and I always worked outside the house. I didn’t have a lot of free time. I couldn’t have been a helicopter mom even if I’d wanted to. Because I couldn’t do as much for my kids, I think it benefited them. By the time we got home from work, they’d figured stuff out they probably would have asked us to figure out for them. It made them independent, resilient.
That’s not to say the boys did whatever they wanted. On the contrary, they learned early on to respect authority:
Since I’m an orthodontist, I see a lot of kids between the ages of eleven and fifteen. To me, a lot of them were over-supervised when they were young, and then their parents disappeared once their kids got to middle school. Not us. We had definite rules, with strong expectations for behavior—show respect, do your homework, go to bed on time. We had lots of rules that the boys found miserable. But, as my grandmother would say, “Better you should cry than I should cry.”
There was no room for self-pity in the Braun household, nor was there room for selfishness, period. The members of this remarkable family didn’t just talk about opening their hearts to others. They actually opened their lives to them:
My husband coached basketball in the summers. One summer, Sam and Cornelio were visiting from Mozambique on an exchange program and joined our son’s basketball team. They were sixteen and seventeen. We took them home for a couple weeks to help them—and they never left.
One of the boys was just older and one was just younger than Adam, who was starting his senior year in high school. He had to help them academically and socially, which put extra demands on him. But what he gave them led him to see the world differently, and to appreciate everything that he’d taken for granted—simple things like having his own textbooks. Everything that Sam and Cornelio saw shocked them. The 9/11 terrorist attack occurred shortly after they came, and they were amazed that people could write critically of the government and not be arrested. They were incredulous at the idea of an anorexic girl. They couldn’t believe someone could have enough food to eat and choose not to eat it. And it affected my kids as they watched their new brothers’ reactions.
Taking Sam and Cornelio into the family was just one way they showed their kids—by the values they instilled and the example they set—that they could make a difference. But it wasn’t the only way Susan exposed her boys to a broader perspective on life. She encouraged self-reliance for her sons from the time they were young:
We expected the kids to have summer jobs. Both boys worked summers from the age of fourteen, starting with being lifeguards and camp counselors. Adam ran basketball camps in high school and, in college, sold T-shirts and threw parties to raise money for a Cambodian children’s fund. Scott was a party promoter in college, and always helped his brother.
Adam went on Semester at Sea during his junior year in college. He went overseas with friends the next summer, traveling around Southeast Asia for six weeks. Then he did one more semester abroad in Australia. He landed a consulting job with Bain that would start six months later, so he backpacked his way through Central and South America for three months by himself.
Adam worked at Bain for fifteen months, and then he got a sabbatical and started Pencils of Promise in 2008, when he built a school in Laos. He found he couldn’t juggle both, and Bain said he had to choose. So he chose. He’s built over 350 schools now in developing countries.
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. And yet, to judge from my interviews with entrepreneurs and their moms, the mothers of future entrepreneurs sometimes take an additional step. They seem to have an uncanny knack for striking a balance: 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.
You’ll recall Blake Mycoskie, founder of philanthropic shoe company TOMS, from the chapter on letting kids learn to win and lose (rule 2). Blake’s mom, Pam, told me that after he had started several businesses, something happened that changed his life:
Blake had decided to take a month off before starting a new job with one of his mentors. There were two things he’d always wanted to do—learn to sail, and learn to play polo—so he went to South America to do both.
He had just spent two weeks in Brazil, learning how to navigate a large sailboat, and now he was living at a polo academy in Argentina. He met some Americans in a café who had some old shoes they were going to deliver to an orphanage. They asked him if he wanted to go with them, and he said, “Sure!”
It broke his heart when he went to the village. It was filthy. He’d never seen such poverty. Most of the children had never even had a pair of shoes.
Many outsiders might have felt sad about that impoverished South American village and then gone on with their lives. Almost nobody would have figured out a new way to get shoes for these kids, let alone to give shoes to needy kids all around the world. Even fewer would have done what was required to execute such a plan. But not everyone was raised the way Pam Mycoskie’s kids were. She told me that instilling compassion was an important part of bringing up her children:
We always adopted three or four families at Christmas through our church and bought clothes and toys that we delivered together to the kids. I adopted three children from Compassion International and was even fortunate enough to travel to Ethiopia to meet one in person. This has always been our family policy—to help those less fortunate. The kids have seen this practiced their entire lives, and it’s just the way we are.
That day in Argentina, Blake’s first thought was, “I’m going to go back and raise money and buy them shoes.” His second thought, she said, was to start a charity. But then, Pam told me, he began to wonder if there was a way to make it sustainable, so he wouldn’t have to depend on grants and donations. He discussed the idea of giving away a pair of shoes for every pair sold with Alejo Nitti, an Argentine entrepreneur who also happened to be his polo instructor. And Alejo said, “You’re loco!” Alejo ended up becoming Blake’s business partner. They found a garage that had been turned into a small factory for manufacturing alpargatas, the classic Argentine slip-on canvas shoes, and Blake determined to make them stylish. He decided to call the company TOMS, to represent the idea of “shoes for tomorrow.” Pam continued the story:
That was in February. He came home with his alpargatas and worked around the clock. He finally got his first retail client, American Rag, which realized they weren’t just selling a shoe, they were selling a story. The Los Angeles Times heard about it and wrote a prominent article. We were all helping him pack up shoes on the dining room table of his apartment. He sold ten thousand pairs of shoes that summer. That meant he could give away ten thousand pairs.
The first shoe drop, when we went back to Argentina, was that October. We gave away all the shoes. It was thrilling. He’s now given away forty-five million pairs in seventy countries. Later, Blake also started selling sunglasses, and for every pair sold, a child gets the gift of sight—an eye exam or a pair of glasses.
TOMS is now valued at over $500 million, and Bain Capital bought half of the company in 2014.
But for Pam, the important thing has never been money; it’s always been her family. She told me:
Our family is very close. We all still take family vacations together. To me, that closeness is one of the best things you can give your child and that’s what we’ve always tried to do; we just loved them and supported them.
And Pam told me she discovered something astonishing about her kids:
Blake writes in his journal almost every day. One day, when he showed it to me, I realized with a shock that he and Paige had started their companies on the very same day, Paige’s birthday, February 26, 2006! He was in Argentina. In his journal, he had drawn a picture of a shoe, and written, “buy a pair today, give away a pair tomorrow; TOMS is short for tomorrow.” That day I’d gone to L.A. to spend Paige’s birthday with her, and she told me she’d decided to buy a used sewing machine with her birthday money. They started TOMS and Aviator Nation on the very same day.
Earlier, when we met Sean Carasso, cofounder of Falling Whistles, we saw that one of his primary life lessons was that hardship doesn’t have to send a person into isolation or despair (rule 6). Instead, it can be used to connect with and serve others who face adversity.
People who know Sean now as a caring and compassionate person are surprised to learn that those words hardly describe who he was when he was young:
I was a very angry kid, always arguing with authority. Perhaps it’s because of my bloodline—Italian, Greek, Spanish, Moroccan, Jewish, Native American, Swedish, and Norwegian. And perhaps it’s because I grew up in Chula Vista, on the border of San Diego and Mexico, in a violent part of the country. My neighborhood was near the border, and there was a heavy gang culture. By the time I was in seventh grade, when we moved away, many of my friends were in a gang. By the time they were eighteen, nearly all my buddies had been to juvenile detention or had been to rehab or were dead from an overdose.
Growing up in a border town caused me to ask questions early in my life to which there are no good answers. I went surfing an hour into Mexico every weekend with my mom, and I saw the disparity in the two worlds. I asked lots of questions about why life on that side of the border was so different from our side.
My mom and I had long conversations about poverty. She was willing to listen to my frustration and to engage it. Even though there weren’t great answers, we talked about why we allow the world to be like this. Even though she hadn’t studied those things, she never shut down my questions.
Instead of sheltering him, Sean’s mom exposed him to a broader and uncomfortable reality, and she encouraged him to think and care about it.
Sean also told me about something his mother did when he was in fifth grade that had an enormous impact on his life. Starting in fourth grade, he was “obsessed,” as he put it, with the latest craze, the game of pogs, in which small flat cardboard discs, or pogs, are flipped with a heavier piece, a slammer. The player who flips all the pogs wins them all:
My parents never gave me any money, because they believed that if you wanted something, you earned it, so I started out with just one pog.
I did it constantly—during recess, after school—and I kept winning. It was like Texas Hold ’em—I got all the pogs! I loved it.
By the time we got to fifth grade, the teachers said it was too distracting, and we couldn’t do pogs in school anymore. We ignored them, snuck them into school, and kept playing. One day the teachers came and confiscated all the pogs. I freaked out.
I came home and had the biggest tantrum ever. I was screaming at my mom, “It’s so unfair! The injustice!” I was so mad.
And my mom, who wasn’t really a protest kind of person, looked at me and asked, “Have you ever heard of a petition?”
And she taught me all about petitions, and how people collected signatures as a way of fighting for something they believed in. She gave me a history lesson, explained how petitions had been used to create change, taught me the context and the principles.
Instead of telling her son to get over it, or calling the principal to demand the return of his pogs, Sean’s mom treated the situation as an opportunity to broaden her son’s perspective. She helped him make a connection between his own frustration and injustice around the world. With that, Sean was off and running:
So I wrote a sign that said: WE WANT OUR POGS. And then I got every kid in fifth grade to sign the paper. And we marched into the principal’s office, and we got our pogs back. We couldn’t play at school, but we had won. It was then that I first learned the power of the people, and that when we are organized, authority can’t win.
Sean told me that the experience changed his life and ultimately led to his being able to make a difference in the world.
Then when I was thirteen, my parents decided Chula Vista was too violent, and they wanted to get my younger brother Breton and me out of there. So they moved us to Austin, Texas, which was a completely different world. The community was wealthy, and the kids wore khaki pants and pink polo shirts. I hated it. I had fit in in Chula Vista. I didn’t fit in there. I ran away all the time.
But I understand why they wanted to leave. The fear that comes from violence envelops you like a cloak. In Austin, I remember the first time I was out late at night when a car drove by and I didn’t have to jump behind a rock, because I knew it wasn’t a drive-by shooting. Living in a safe environment, without the fear, I could calm down and blossom.
Sean told me his parents didn’t simply encourage him to question rules and find a better way of doing things. They also encouraged him to trust his own sense of right and wrong:
My dad taught me that no rule is real unless it demands the allegiance of your conscience. You make up your own mind. Even when I was in first grade, he allowed me to question authority in every respect, even his. If I could construct an argument that was better than his, if I could articulate it calmly, saying, “I think you’re wrong because… ,” he would consider it and change his mind if I presented the better argument.
This was so important to me. I felt respected. I felt that what I thought could shape reality. Of course, sometimes it also got me in trouble because my teachers didn’t like being questioned.
That statement—“I felt that what I thought could shape reality”—captures the essence of the entrepreneurial mind-set. Entrepreneurs grow up believing not only that their ideas and beliefs and passions matter, but also that they can use them to change the world. And because Sean was encouraged to develop his own deeply felt sense of right and wrong, rather than simply obeying arbitrary rules handed down from an authority, he developed a powerful moral compass:
As I got older, the same things applied to drugs and alcohol and sex—the hard ones for teenagers. My dad sat me down and said, “I’ve done these things, and this is how it affected me, and this is how it affected my friends. You have to make up your mind about what’s right.” So I never felt the need to break rules. I made mostly good choices. And when I didn’t, it wasn’t because I was acting out of rebellion, as it was for so many of my friends.
That’s the most important lesson my parents taught me. At some level, you know what’s right and what’s wrong, and you have to know how to listen to that voice and have the courage to follow it.
I have always loved the quote from Mahatma Gandhi: “Remember that all through history there have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time they seem invincible. But in the end they always fall. Always.”
I went to the University of Texas and dropped out three credits short of graduating. I just couldn’t take Biology 301, and I wanted to get started with the rest of my life.
In his twenties, Sean moved to Los Angeles and met TOMS founder Blake Mycoskie. In 2008, Sean went on the second TOMS shoe drop, which was in South Africa. It was then that he started backpacking around Africa, and he went to Congo, where he met the former child soldiers who inspired him to cofound Falling Whistles.
Falling Whistles became an influential nonprofit, but Sean was frustrated with the slow progress toward ending the bloodshed. People were still dying, an election had been challenged, and Sean didn’t think the U.S. was doing enough to change things. He and his team spent months speaking with key parties in the region—organizations, policymakers, academics, corporations, and activists—and decided that the U.S. State Department needed to appoint a Special Envoy to signal the importance the U.S. placed on relations with Congo and on stopping the violence. Sean tried unsuccessfully for months to convince policymakers they should implement an existing law to appoint the Special Envoy, but he was getting nowhere. And then he thought back to when he was in fifth grade, and he decided he needed a petition.
Sean and his team launched the petition drive on a Monday, and within a week they had ten thousand signatures. In the end, the petition had twenty-four thousand signatures, including thirty-five Members of Congress, sixteen U.S. Senators, and representatives of eight U.S. and seventy-one Congolese aid organizations. Sean got his Special Envoy: former U.S. Senator Russ Feingold. Sean hopes that this diplomatic effort will change the relationship between the U.S. government and the Congolese people and help bring peace. He got the U.S. government to respond to his demand, and he did so with a petition—something his mom had taught him how to do when he was in fifth grade.
Parents often shelter their children from struggle and suffering out of fear of making them feel sad or scared. That’s a natural impulse, but most of the mothers 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 helped 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 is suffering in the world, and yes, there’s plenty you can do about it.
In Sean’s case, his parents talked with him honestly about their personal adversity and about the poverty he saw in the world. And by showing him how to take action to get his pogs back, they helped him learn to fight for justice—and gave him the tools he’d use to put his compassion into action.
Sean’s mom couldn’t have known that when he came home from school upset about pogs, her response would ultimately have an impact on world affairs. Instead of comforting him or dismissing him, she encouraged him to take action, and she changed the way he looked at the world. That’s part of the responsibility and excitement of raising an entrepreneur—you never know which of your smallest actions literally may have global ramifications.