Deep down, nearly every one of us wants to be an entrepreneur. However, forgoing your weekly paycheck to follow your true passion takes lots of self-confidence. Many of us lack that confidence. Therefore, a great portion of our lives may be spent working to build someone else’s wealth.
If that confidence was instilled within us at a younger age, we might all have the courage to open up a business. Give your children the opportunity to truly be in charge of their lives by encouraging a sense of entrepreneurship in their youth.
Encouraging entrepreneurship within your children can teach them to be:
* Self-sufficient
* An effective leader
* A strong decision maker
* Confident in their ideas and ability to succeed
Raising an entrepreneur is more than telling your child to make money; it’s about telling them to go against the crowd and follow their own intuition. Since many parents have instilled this sense of confidence in their children, the sight of self-made wealthy teens is becoming more and more common.
When encouraging entrepreneurship within your children, the only thing you have to fear is the embarrassment of declaring that your 15-year-old son earns a higher yearly income than you!
The Story of Ashley Qualls
Ashley started whateverlife.com, a website that provides MySpace layouts, when she was just 15 years old. Soon after beginning her venture, the website took off. And Ashley was declining buyout offers from savvy investors. Four short years later, Ashley’s net worth was over $4,000,000 and growing each year.
The only startup cash necessary was $15 to register her website and a small monthly fee (typically less than $10) to host her website.
Raising a Young Entrepreneur
Teaching your children about entrepreneurship need not require a fat pocket. In fact, the basis of an entrepreneurial mindset is self-sufficiency. Therefore, children can come up with the money to start the business through their own efforts.
If your children are old enough, they can get an after school job or help around the house in exchange for an allowance. Many business ideas can be funded for less than $100.
Once your child has invested time, effort, and their own money into their business startup, they are more likely to see it through and become successful business owners.
They’ll learn each step of the way and tweak their business until it becomes profitable. When your child embraces failure as a learning experience rather than a collapse, you’ll begin to see a flourishing entrepreneur growing before your eyes.
You can encourage entrepreneurship within your kids by teaching them that:
* Any idea is a valid business idea
* Failure is okay as long as you keep improving
* A profitable business requires continuous learning and tweaking
* Creativity is what counts
* Being innovative makes you stand out from your competitors
Some of your child’s business ideas will lead to great success, while others provide little more than a tremendous learning experience. Some ventures will prove to be highly profitable, while others may only produce a few dollars. The key is to teach your children to be resilient and keep moving forward toward their dreams.
If your child’s business ideas succeed, continue to encourage them to seek greater levels of success. Along the way, continue to promote self-sufficiency, independent thinking, and confidence within your kids. With these three traits, success is theirs for the taking!
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We at the Generation E Institute feel the same way, in fact so much so that our executive Director, Cheryl Peters, wrote two whole curricula on the subject. I personally was so passionate about it that I set aside some of my private consulting practice to take up the fight to bring it to as many communities as possible. After all it is our future, so let’s make it a bright one. Youth Entrepreneurship Education is the key to successful community and economic development as part of a long term strategy to get us out of a recession and back along a road of recovery and prosperity. http://www.genei.org
Thank you,
Eric Tobin