Margot, he will or he won’t get into Harvard. But it will have nothing to do with the grades he gets when he’s in third grade. On the other hand, what lesson have you taught him if you bail him out? You will have taught him that if he doesn’t do something, you will do it for him. Isn’t that worse than whatever bad grade he receives in third grade for turning his project in one day late? Don’t you want him to learn that he has to face the consequences for his actions and become responsible?
Bonus Track
Stumbling Into (Some of) the Rules
This book is not about my husband and me, and it’s not about our kids, so I didn’t want to include much about our family. But in the course of writing it, I had plenty of opportunity to look back and think about what our family was like, and what we did and didn’t do, compared to the families I learned about through all my interviews.
No one is more amazed than Mark and I that we raised two entrepreneurial kids. Our sons certainly didn’t get the entrepreneurial bug from us. I started in the federal government’s anti-poverty program, got an MBA, moved to D.C., worked for a while on Capitol Hill, and then worked in government doing economic policy and international development for the next twenty years.
Mark and I met when we both worked on Capitol Hill. He got a law degree, practiced law, and then worked for airlines and tech companies. It wasn’t until our older son was in college that Mark started a company, Bisnow Media, which is now the largest commercial real estate publisher and events producer in the U.S.
Our older son, Elliott, was Mark’s first employee. After a few years, Elliott left to found the national conference series for young entrepreneurs and other creatives called Summit Series (which Joel Holland referred to earlier in this book). Established to incubate cutting-edge ideas, start-up companies, and nonprofits, it was called “the hipper Davos” by Forbes. Elliott has raised millions of dollars for charities, was named to Inc.’s “30 Under 30” list when he was twenty-four, and has been profiled in many publications. In 2013, he and his Summit team raised funds to buy Powder Mountain, a 10,000-acre ski resort one hour from Salt Lake City, to create the world’s first permanent community of entrepreneurs. We attend his conferences and spend as much time at the mountain as we can. It’s through Summit that I’ve gotten to know many of the entrepreneurs profiled in this book—and, through them, their moms.
Our younger son, Austin, is a very different kind of entrepreneur: songwriter and lead singer of a band he started, Magic Giant. In a notoriously difficult field, he’s been privileged to have an opportunity to work with many great artists, and a song he cowrote, produced, and played piano on, “Listen,” was sung by John Legend as the title song on superstar DJ David Guetta’s album. Magic Giant has been gaining fans, touring, and playing festivals. We fly in for as many of his shows as we can. Austin works eighteen-hour days, seven days a week, and loves what he does.
When our boys were growing up, we didn’t know a lot of entrepreneurs. We didn’t talk about start-ups around the dinner table; we talked about politics. In fact, looking back, I now think it’s odd that Mark and I each changed jobs several times in the 1980s and ’90s and neither of us ever once thought about starting our own business. Never. When Elliott applied to college, his essay wasn’t “I am an entrepreneur.” It was “I am a tennis player.”
It’s only after the fact, as I look back, that I realize how many things we accidently did that helped them become entrepreneurs. So here’s how we did, according to the rules:
Both of our kids had a passion outside of school (rule 1). For Elliott, it was tennis, and we were always supportive, and proud of how hard he worked at it. We were the opposite of tennis parents; he had to push us for everything. We let him take lessons—although he did have to make a strong case to us for private lessons, because they were expensive. I realize now that was good: he had to convince us he needed those lessons, and he couldn’t just take them for granted. Our family went to all his tennis tournaments—first all around the area, then the region, then the country. We cheered when he won points; we were supportive when he lost (which, during the first few years, was almost always); and we believed, with him, that he could be the next Andre Agassi. He got up to thirty-fifth in the country in the juniors and played on the varsity team at the University of Wisconsin. Then he moved on.
For Austin, it was always music, although he stumbled into songwriting. He had signed up for basketball camp when he was thirteen, and broke his ankle on the first day. I desperately looked for a program that had an opening and found only one: a camp that taught MIDI, writing music on a computer. It clicked. He’s been writing music ever since. Because he loved to perform, we let him take voice lessons and piano lessons and drum lessons and guitar lessons and dance lessons when he asked for them. We went to the school musicals and the band concerts and chorus concerts. We let him go to a summer songwriting program at Berklee College of Music and, as his high school graduation present, paid for him to have sixteen of his songs recorded and produced on a CD. He majored in music composition at the University of Colorado and has worked nonstop at it ever since.
Tennis and music were their passions, not ours. We didn’t play tennis or know anything about music. Our sons chose what they wanted, and we supported them, encouraged them, and believed in them. So overall I think we did a good job with this rule, and in doing so, also made the grade with rule 5—instilling confidence—and rule 10, leading by following. When we supported the development of the mastery of their passionate pursuits outside school, we supported the growth of their self-confidence. As we saw where their interests lay, we supported their priorities with our time, money, and organizational abilities, as well as our pride in their accomplishments. We didn’t have any motive other than loving to see them working hard at something that made them happy.
Did we let them compete and learn to lose as well as win (rule 2)? I’d say so. For Elliott, losing was a big part of pursuing his passion: because he started playing competitively so late, he lost most of his tennis matches for years. Austin entered singing, acting, and dancing competitions, and he also played competitive sports through college, probably losing more than he won. Like many of the families profiled in this book, we found that sports was a great route to learn about competing, the trade-off between hard work and results, grit, resilience, and determination. Although, again, that’s not why we did it. We didn’t have a grand plan. We simply had two very active boys who loved athletic activity.
Neither of the boys were academic stars in high school, but they shined brightly in the things that mattered to them. And we couldn’t have been prouder of their achievements in those areas; we demonstrated our joy in their progress over and over; although we were more academic, we tried very hard not to worry about straight A’s (rule 3).
Looking back, one of the best things I did was something I didn’t do. When Elliott dropped out of college halfway through his junior year to help his dad expand his new company, I was appalled. My dad had been a professor, and it never occurred to me that I might have a kid who didn’t graduate from college. Elliott told me he would take off just one semester. Then he asked for one more. I now think it was one of the smartest things he did: to get on with his life rather than spend time studying subjects he wasn’t interested in. Today, I’m so pleased that I didn’t insist on his graduating. I wasn’t happy at the time, but I swallowed hard and trusted him to make his own choice.
Both our kids had incredible mentors (rule 4), to whom we owe a great deal. I didn’t find them; our kids did. Elliott had two extraordinary tennis coaches during his middle and high school years, who instilled a strong work ethic and stressed honor and integrity on and off the court: Martin Blackman and Vesa Ponkka. Austin had several mentors in high school who taught him about perseverance and character: high school band director Earl Jackson; football special teams coach Drew Johnson; athletic director Neil Phillips; track coach Tre Johnson; his favorite teacher, Rick Kirschner; and his college football coach, Dan Hawkins. And the fact that they believed in him more than compensated for the fact that some of his other teachers didn’t.
We were blessed to have these extraordinary men take part in our boys’ lives, because they taught values that guide them today. Martin, for example, told Elliott when he was in eighth grade that if he wanted to be a champion on the court, he had to be a champion off the court. And when Austin was in college and had just turned twenty-one and someone wanted him to buy him alcohol, he said, “My coach says, ‘Nothing good can come from going to a liquor store.’” If those words of advice had come from a parent, would they have had the same impact? Thank you, Coach Hawk!
While we’re on the subject, I’d like to add that parents need mentors, too. In addition to having had extraordinary parents myself, I realize looking back that I had a parenting mentor, Landon Lower School headmaster Marcos Williams.
I remember one example in particular. Elliott was in third grade and had spent a lot of time on his homework the night before. When I went into his room in the morning after he’d gone to school, I saw it on his desk. I got in the car and drove to school and stopped in the office to see if they could get it to him. Marcos came out to talk to me, and said something like this:
So I took the homework back home.
I needed to hear what Marcos had to say that day and, looking back, I think he pointed out a weak point in my parenting: that my desire to “make it better” could be stronger than my ability to stand back and let my kids take their lumps.
I stood up for my sons a lot—possibly too much. Sometimes I let them fight their own battles, but other times, when I thought someone in charge had treated them unfairly, I got involved. In hindsight, it may have been the biggest mistake I made: being too helpful, too concerned, too involved. But at least my sons knew I had their back.
Some of the families in this book have taught me quite a bit about other facets of parenting that weren’t such a factor for us. Our family was very fortunate not to experience any significant adversity (rule 6) while the boys were growing up. No one has control over adversity striking their family or their child—illness, death, and misfortune can come without warning. Many of the parents, and their children, I talked with for this book met it with such strength and grace that they emerged resilient and more courageous than ever. I can only hope we would have handled adversity as well.
I would also say that a lot of families I interviewed were much more deliberate at nurturing compassion (rule 7) than we were: they made it a central theme of their lives. Actions matter: families profiled here did big things like adopting needy kids, as well as significant work regularly doing service for others, such as volunteering in shelters. These families made a priority of showing their kids that there’s something bigger than they are (rule 9) and that being part of it adds meaning and purpose to life.
I do think that we were a great family (rule 8). There are as many different ways to be a great family as there are great families. As for us, we always ate dinner together. Someone asked me once what time we ate, and I said, “When the last person walks in the door.” We all went to Austin’s concerts and plays and football games; we spent every vacation for three years going to Elliott’s tennis tournaments.
And we traveled extensively together. I wanted the kids to get to know different places and I hoped it would make them aware that there were other cultures and other ways of doing things. It turned out that it had a more important and unexpected dimension: it strengthened us a family, because we were alone together, creating shared experiences. I can’t recommend family travel enough. I cherish the memories of the four of us together, creating a bond I hope will last forever.
If you have kids who dream of changing the world, I’m excited for you. You’re in for a challenging, thrilling, and rewarding ride—one that may take you places you can’t even imagine. I hope that wherever their journey ends, they’ll know you were with them the whole way. I can’t wait to hear what they accomplish.
