10 Truths for Parents of a Young Entrepreneur
If you are a true entrepreneur, then you can certainly relate to this.
As
a kid, you were probably diagnosed with ADD. Your teachers were
constantly frustrated by your “acting out” or your “inability to follow
the rules of the assignment.” You probably didn’t have the best grades.
Your creativity was mistaken for disobedience and rebellion.
And above all, you probably didn’t have the smoothest relationship with your parents.
Don’t
get me wrong, there are plenty of entrepreneurial spirits that pledge
their parents were the first to support them in all their endeavors.
Gary Vaynerchuk comes to mind here.
But
for a lot of us, it has been a constant struggle since day one to
convince those around us that our wildly imaginative ideas are not
daydreams — they are very real, very tangible pursuits that, for
whatever reason, attract us.
And we believe we can bring them to life.
If you are the parent of an entrepreneurial kid, it can be very easy to see their risk-taking behavior as a negative.
I would know — I was one of them.
I
was diagnosed with ADD. I was a straight C student all the way through
high school. I was constantly thrown out of class for being
“disruptive.” I didn’t have many friends — because I was far too
committed to the things I was interested in (like becoming one of the
highest ranked World of Warcraft players and gaming bloggers in North
America). And I was sent to therapist after therapist with the hopes of
understanding why I wasn’t “normal.” Why my head always seemed to be in
the clouds and I couldn’t get myself to enjoy studying Geometry.
Obviously, it wasn’t until long after the fact that my own parents realized what it was they were dealing with: an entrepreneurial spirit.
If you are the parent of an entrepreneurial kid, here are 15 things I hope you remember:
1. We can’t change who we are.
We
love what we love. We’re fascinated by things. We follow our intuition
and we trust ourselves enough to figure things out as we go. It’s not a
choice — it’s simply in our DNA.
2. We don’t need your fear, we need your support.
We have enough fears to deal with.
We fear how it’s all going to come together. We fear what the world will think of us. We do not need your fear in us as well.
All we need is you to believe in us.
3. We love the journey.
That’s the whole point of being an entrepreneur.
It’s
not about securing the paycheck or ending up with the house and the
white picket fence. It’s about the game of it. Building something of
value.
That’s why we do it — for the love of the game.
4. We are ok with learning through experience.
As a parent, it’s tough to watch your kid fall.
But we welcome the fall.
We
want to fall off our bikes so we learn how to ride them. We want to
jump off the cliff so we can learn how to dive. We aren’t book-learners.
We learn better through experience.
5. We hate, more than anything, being told we can’t do something.
The whole point of the game of entrepreneurship is to do what hasn’t been done before.
The
more you tell us we can’t do something, the more frustrated we will get
(and that isn’t always a healthy thing). Please, don’t tell us it can’t
be done. If that’s what we want to explore, then just support our
journey.
6. We don’t want to be like Johnny, Martha’s boy, who has a really nice office job selling insurance.
If we wanted that, we would have done that.
But we don’t.
7. We value our freedom over everything.
Creative freedom. Freedom to travel. To explore. To build.
Freedom is what we’re after. Not money, not a title. Not safety.
Freedom.
8. We want to help other people.
This is not a selfish endeavor.
We
want to build something that will give back to others, provide
opportunity, and in some way leave our mark on the world. That has to
count for something, right?
9. We know we can do it.
Something inside of us says, every day, “I know I can do this.”
It
might just be curiosity on our part, but so what? We want to know if
that voice is real — if we really can “do it.” And we’d rather find out
the hard way than wonder “what if” for the rest of our lives.
10. We don’t expect you to understand it, we just hope you’ll respect it.
Entrepreneurship is such a vague of a pursuit in life.
To
be honest, we’re not even sure what it means either. All it means is
we’re going to figure something out on our own. Maybe we know what that
is now, maybe we don’t.
We don’t expect you to understand. We just hope you’ll respect us for staying true to who we are.
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