Teaching Our Children to be Entrepreneurs

We live in a society that preaches the importance of graduating high school, attending college, and having a great career working for someone else.  For many of us, it just does not happen that way.  You graduate high school but you can’t afford to attend college or you attend college but can’t find this great career the world promised you.  Intelligent and determined individuals find themselves hunting for the perfect career that will fulfill their purpose.  Very few think about how they can spend that time and energy building their own empire.  We aren’t taught in high school the art of entrepreneurship because they are so focused on pushing college or the military.  College isn’t for everyone.  There are many successful entrepreneurs that do not have a college degree.  Among those are Steve Jobs (Apple), Richard Branson (Virgin Airways, Virgin Records, Virgin Mobile), and Dave Thomas (Wendy’s) just to name a few.  A college education is great, saying that I recently graduated with my Bachelor’s degree.  It doesn’t necessarily give you everything you need to succeed in life.  You can be successful with or without a college degree.  A college degree also does not mean that you have to land a corporate job working for someone else.  You can take those skills and run a successful business of your own. 

This article recently posted in the New York Times states “a little less than half of the nation’s students graduate in four years; given two more years to get the job done, the percentage rises to only about 60 percent.”  The other 40 percent are left wondering what they will do next.

Let’s begin to give our children more options.  There are many ways they can achieve success.  Start teaching children that they can make their own money now.  Get them involved in selling small products to friends or neighbors.  Explain to them purchase price versus sell price and profit margins.  They may not be interested quite yet because they’d much rather spend some else’s money but you are planting those seeds.  When they are ready they know other options are available if college doesn’t quite work out. 

I sat my children down a few months ago and showed them the Ted Talk below by a young entrepreneur named Maya Penn.  My children were glued to the screen the entire time.  They even began to brainstorm afterwards about the different kinds of businesses they could run.  It was so cute. 

Plant those seeds today so your child can be the entrepreneur of tomorrow.

Please let your children watch this video and let’s start WATERING OUR SEEDS.

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Feature image courtesy of onlinembapage.com