Three ways to help your budding – or not-so-budding – entrepreneur
This week’s Global Entrepreneurship Week – we’re pretty sure it’s less about entrepreneurs having their own week (though that’s nice, too) and more about getting people to think about entrepreneurship. We reckon everyone is more or less entrepreneurial – regardless of whether that entrepreneurial spirit will turn into a business, the possibility of shaping your own destiny, being your own boss and seeing your ideas through to fruition appeals to at least some small part of all of us.
So what can we do to help budding (and not-so-budding) entrepreneurs? We’ve listed our top three’s below:
- Encourage goal setting behaviour. Learning to work towards and achieve goals is a vital component of being an entrepreneur. Ask your child to write down a list of things they want to achieve, prioritise them, and then think about the next steps needed to make their dreams become a reality.
- Promote financial literacy and independence. Learning to manage money is a must, and it’s a subject that’s rarely comprehensively covered in school. Giving pocket money and setting up an allowance will help kickstart those lessons, and children will learn that you have to save up for the things you want the most.
- Failure is not a dirty word. The greatest entrepreneurs often fail and fail again, but it’s their persistence to never give up that finally pays in dividends in the end. There is something to learn from every failure, and it’s important to make mistakes before the stakes get too high.
All of this leads not just into raising the entrepreneurs of tomorrow, but happy, confident and independent kids as well. Sometimes taking a step back, allowing children to learn to depend on themselves, will lead to the brightest futures.
And, you know, very quickly it could be them teaching us a thing or two about being an entrepreneur. Like Femi, the 9-year-old who spotted a gap in the market and simply decided to fill it. He popped by Osper the other week to tell us how he did it. Sounds interesting? Have a read here.
