Every problem that's out there,
somebody has the idea for. And as a young kid, nobody can say it can't happen
because you're too dumb to realize that you couldn't figure it out. I think we
have an obligation as parents and a society to start teaching our kids to fish
instead of giving them the fish -- the old parable "If you give a man a
fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a
lifetime." If we can teach our kids to become entrepreneurial -- the ones
that show those traits to be -- like we teach the ones who have science gifts
to go on in science, we could actually have all these kids spreading businesses
instead of waiting for government handouts ( raising children).
What we do is we sit and teach our
kids all the things they shouldn't do. Don't hit; don't bite; don't swear.
Right now we teach our kids to go after really good jobs, you know, and the
school system teaches them to go after things like being a doctor and being a
lawyer and being an accountant and a dentist and a teacher and a pilot. And the
media says that it's really cool if we could go out and be a model or a singer
or a sports hero. Our MBA programs do not teach kids to be entrepreneurs. The
reason that I avoided an MBA program -- other than the fact that I couldn't get
into any because I had a percent average
out of high school and then percent
average at the only school in Canada that accepted me, Carlton -- but our MBA
programs don't teach kids to be entrepreneurs. They teach them to go work in
corporations. So who's starting these companies? It's these random few people.
Even in popular literature, the
only book I've ever found -- and this should be on all of your reading lists --
the only book I've ever found that makes the entrepreneur into the hero is
"Atlas Shrugged." Everything else in the world tends to look at
entrepreneurs and say that we're bad people. I look at even my family. Both my
grandfathers were entrepreneurs. My dad was an entrepreneur. Both my brother
and sister and I, all three of us own companies as well. And we all decided to
start these things because it's really the only place we fit. We didn't fit in
the normal work. We couldn't work for somebody else because we're too stubborn
and we have all these other traits. But kids could be entrepreneurs as well ( raising children).
This is Adam Norman, a 30-year-old father and a journalist. I consider being a father as my full-time duty, which comes before my actual job of journalism. As a father, there will always be new challenges for me to face everyday while raising my kids. This is where the idea of this website came from. I wanted to give out my experience, along with the experience of others, to all parents out there who need an advice with raising their kids.
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