Let’s Raise Our Kids to Be Entrepreneurs (Video)

Raising kids and helping them become the best version of themselves isn’t easy. Most parents would probably agree with me on that. But according to Cameron Herold, parents make some monumental mistakes, and one of the biggest is that we teach our kids the wrong things. “Being an entrepreneur is actually a good thing,” Herold argues. That’s exactly what we should be teaching our children, because in most societies, entrepreneurship is still seen as something bad.

His idea is simple: help kids become great at what they’re already good at, instead of pushing them toward mediocre results in things they aren’t suited for and don’t understand. He quotes a well-known proverb that captures it perfectly: “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” Spotting the entrepreneurial spark in kids and fanning it into a fire could have a huge impact on the business world as we know it.

Besides parents taking the wrong approach with entrepreneurial kids, the big problem is the education system, which seems equally inadequate all over the world. The standard school system teaches you to do a lot of things, and most of them won’t suit you. After all, who is truly passionate about languages, math, history, geography, chemistry and physics all at once? It’s like claiming one person can be an equally good writer, scientist, hydrologist and dentist. Nobody would assume that, right? So why do we assume kids can be equally good at every school subject?

On top of that, schools today favor careers like law, medicine and science. In other words, school teaches us how to find a job, not how to build a company and create jobs for others. The world we live in runs on business, so why is entrepreneurship as a career still frowned upon? No wonder so many young people who start their own businesses didn’t exactly shine in school.

Watch the talk below to learn more about raising kids with an entrepreneurial mindset, plus some great stories from Cameron Herold’s own childhood as a kid entrepreneur.