Entrepreneurship For The Youth

The enterprising spirit of business doesn’t belong only to the aged. Inspiring our youth to aim higher in their career goals and possibly join the ranks of the entrepreneur can instill creativity, independence, and a vigor for work that’s so often neglected. In a time where so many students are graduating college with a mountain of debt, even fewer are finding work in the fields they’ve worked so hard to enter. How can a few small steps encourage children to form their own futures?

Traditionally, allowances are given upon completion of tasks around the house. This encourages a work for wages attitude, and teaches the child in order to get paid, a series of tasks not their own need to be completed. Alternatively, giving the child an allowance without needing to complete a set of chores illustrates how to manage money. Should they spend their allotment frivolously, remind them that doing chores doesn’t make money appear. And next time, if they’d like to hang onto their money, a smarter management plan needs to be followed.

Involve your children in your business with small, manageable tasks. When attempting to illustrate what it means to be an entrepreneur, children oftentimes learn best while doing. Whether you’d prefer to have them assist in the writing of an email or help with your daily routine, by including your children in your work they will better understand what an entrepreneur’s life means.

Talk to your kids and find what their passions are. If you were staring your own business, you’d ideally center it around an activity or subject you love. Show your children that the same is possible with their interests. Though the concept may seem simple, the world will open up to a child when they understand that they don’t need to sacrifice what they love for work.

By following these few suggestions, you can plant the seeds of a concept most don’t understand or appreciate until far later in life. Such a simple idea can alter the course of a child’s future.

Entrepreneur.com put out a list today of 4 movies every entrepreneur should watch. It’s a good list so I am sharing it here as well.

1. Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview – This film is essentially just an hour an a half interview with Jobs, taped in the early 90’s shortly after he was fired as CEO of Apple. Whatever your opinion of the man may be, you can’t deny that he wound up being incredibly successful, and therefore his insights into running a business, especially in the early stages of its development, are very valuable. The film is a great place to get information since it is pretty much just a raw interview.

2. Tucker: The Man and His Dream – This movie is directed by Francis Ford Coppola and stars Jeff Bridges as an entrepreneurial car manufacturer in the 1940s. It is the only movie on the list that is not a documentary, but is based on a true story. Sometimes a narrative movie can be a bit more inspirational than a straight documentary, and this is the case with this one. It depicts the struggles that many entrepreneurs face, and the zeal one needs to overcome them.

3. Startup.com – This documentary shows the rise and fall of a failed web start up, so there is a lot to learn in it from their mistakes. All entrepreneurs make mistakes, but these were made on a very grand scale, so it sort of magnifies them.

4. Man on Wire – While not superficially related to business, Man on Wire does depict someone who has an underlying philosophy that might resonate with many entrepreneurs. Philippe Petit is driven and motivated by something internal that tells him to just do this thing that he wants to do despite obstacles and the difficulty of the task.