How to Grow Entrepreneurs

We celebrate entrepreneurship in this country and endow it with an almost mystical aura:  the entrepreneur fearlessly scrapes and crawls her way to meteoric success and we applaud her crafty hustle and work ethic. 

To be sure, America is the best place for that exact success story to happen.  But, more often than not, entrepreneurship is just as much a product of privilege as of sheer hard work.  Or so goes this piece in Quartz: "Entrepreneurs Don’t Have a Special Gene for Risk - They Come from Families with Money." 

It's not to say entrepreneurs shouldn't be feted.  It still takes courage and moxie to launch out on your own, knowing that you are putting yourself at risk for failing badly.  But it is a far easier and more common first bold step to take when you have a good social and financial support network to fall back on if you don't succeed.

As a parent and as a celebrator of entrepreneurship, my takeaway is to help cultivate in my kids three things: (1) a willingness to try and even to fail, (2) an appreciation of the privilege that they come from that they have people and resources in their corner so they can swing big, and (3) a desire to use that leg up in part to help others who don't have such luxuries.