Working Smarter Than Harder
“There is something very cool and very unique about every child. Entrepreneurship, whether literally in business or not, really is just the process of people learning to apply their talents and gifts to the world in meaningful ways.”
There is a very high probability that children of entrepreneurs become entrepreneurs themselves. I learned this from an entrepreneurial scholar named Dennis Ray while taking entrepreneurship courses in the business faculty during design school.
Dennis spent several years studying what differentiated successful entrepreneurs from their less successful counterparts and his conclusion was that successful entrepreneurs are more likable. While this conclusion is not scholarly sounding, it makes sense to me. If I like someone, I am way more likely to help them and buy from them. I might even go out of my way to do so.
My son Kyle is successfully negotiating his youth. He has fully recovered from the teenage onset dementia that seemed to have kidnapped his brain while his preteen hormones were raging and is becoming a successful young man. Kyle took a series of youth-focused personal growth courses when he was fourteen and he woke up into a bright and articulate young man with a keen sense of what is going on around him. As a result he has managed to develop friendships in every major clique at school and moves easily between them all. He is what Dennis Ray would call “likable.” He relates well to almost everyone.
My first born seems well on his way on the path of entrepreneurship. In grade nine, we pulled him out of the regular school system and home-schooled him for the year. Kyle had been resisting the structure of junior high school and so my ex-wife put in a year of focused attention on our son. Kyle did very well that year and has done very well in regular high school as a result, but he learned a very entrepreneurial lesson. He figured out early on that by working smart, he could get all of his school work done quickly, allowing him to both sleep in and then spend the afternoon with his friends or his Play Station. It seems that regular structure will not work well for him. While he now understands that sometimes he has to play in the system to get what he wants, he needs to invent his own game.
I first noticed this part of his creativity when he was quite young. Since I love words, I thought it would be funny to teach my kids big words too. At the age of four, Kyle asked me why the drips of hot chocolate stuck to the rim of his cup after he was done. I explained that that phenomenon was called “surface tension.” I learned this in engineering school. The next day he showed me a glob of ice cream stuck on his spoon and declared: “look Dad, surface tension.” Later on he remarked that “usually I am introspective, but today I feel like talking.” He had a way better vocabulary at five than I did in the first year of grad school.
During elementary school I was the kind of student that liked to play rather than work and most of my report cards featured the same admonition from a long series of teachers: “Keith is a bright boy and he could do so much better if he just applied himself.” Kyle read all my old report cards and seemed to understand the evolutionary idea that it is a good idea for a son to improve upon the father. He has.
As a young boy, Kyle loved to play monopoly and his devious little mind discovered a stunning strategy. With some coaching from his mom, he figured out that in the first few rounds of the game the other players seldom bought the three light blue properties on the cheap street just past Go. He would ever so subtlety buy up Oriental, Vermont and Connecticut Avenues — the easiest three to get hotels on. He generated huge rents early in the game, prevented everyone else from getting monopolies on other streets and quickly bankrupted his opponents. This is just one way my son has learned to work smart, not hard, and he has great capacity to learn more from people around him.
There is something very cool and very unique about every child. Entrepreneurship, whether literally in business or not, really is just the process of people learning to apply their talents and gifts to the world in meaningful ways. And that is higher purpose, higher profit.