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I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to put my all in it. Like all Days on the Road Less Traveled. Never looking back. This is one question Friday I'm Sean and it's just me today doing these episodes. These one question Fridays I kind of like these it's fun. It's fun to hear the listeners and hear their questions
and then
I really put thought into this. So this one I heard it
before I did it. So I could
Get through. Usually I do these off the cuff, but hey, little prep, never heard anybody. So, let's listen to this question together and then I'll give you my answer Sophia, Sean last Friday, you talked about the value of earning that first dollar by selling the Vans. I know that your kids are still pretty young, but I wanted to know. How are you going to teach them to be entrepreneurial and when are you going to start? Okay, great. Thanks. Sofia for the
question. If you didn't hear this, before I shared this.
Story about how I had been working on a business, a start-up. I was 21 years old. I was with my best friend's, we were working out of business for about a year and somewhere in like the 9-month, Mark, we realized, we're just sitting around and we're like, man, it just feels like we're just going through the motions and not that we were being lazy, but like, literally, we
were almost like acting out doing a start-up psycho. We do
this plan. And then we talked to this advisor, then we raise money from this investor. It's like we're doing everything except for the business part.
Which is who take a product, we sell it to a customer and then the customer is happy. And we're like, man, we've been going for almost a year now, and
we haven't even made a dollar. Like, how can we call ourselves? We
were winning all these Awards, entrepreneur entrepreneur, the year of rising, entrepreneurs prop, most promising start up. And I was like, man, it's all Bs. We haven't actually even done anything
and so we took a 48-hour challenge for one weekend. We were going to try to make our first dollar. We're trying to make a we set of goal of trying to make a thousand dollars in a weekend.
And we ended up doing something very simple. We created these like wristbands like if you remember the old Livestrong bands but thicker fatter we call it. The fat band is the fat band.com
and we were customizing them so we found a drop shipper that would let us write somebody's name or their fraternities
name or their school's name. Whatever on these wristbands
and we can basically sell you a
customized pack of 100 wristbands or whatever and they would cost us whatever 30 cents to make these things and that we could sell each one for a dollar twenty.
Like that. And it worked. We made like on a $1400 that weekend and it felt so good. I feel
like I learn more about business and that one weekend and I had the full nine months, because I had to come up with a
product, I couldn't overthink the brand name, all that good stuff, you know, had to get our first sale, had to figure out how to sell at a figure out how to create a website with take payments online, all this good stuff. So now,
this question is about kids. Now, I guess I'll point out I really wasn't as
kind of a kid. I was 21 years old, but my parents didn't do anything in that moment to
help me have that. Aha moment to get that first taste of Entrepreneurship. The light bulb for me came on later than I think. Usually here we often hear these stories about
oh no, Mark Cuban or Elon Musk. And when they were 11 years old, they were, you know, they were created a CD-ROM company and they were selling it you know in the neighborhood or they do the lemonade stand. Honestly I didn't have any entrepreneurial Ambitions. You would have never guessed when I was a kid that I would be an
entrepreneur. Having said that
I do think there are
things that I will try to do with my kids. I got two little kids too and one years old now, to help them be more entrepreneurial and here's what they are. So I'll break it down into a couple of categories.
Here are the foundational
do's and don'ts for me, when I think about how to teach my
kids, the first is, there's no rush. I will not push them into being an entrepreneur or doing
a, you know, like telling them that this is the path. There's no rush
and there's no answers,
it's on them to figure it
out and they'll, they'll get it in time.
I'm but along the way I can give them some skills
experiences in a mindset that I think will help
them. So here's how here's what I
plan to do. Let me first break it into a couple of categories mindset. How do I want them to think about things? What are the
AHA moments, where they realize something about the world
that I want to help them get to that realization faster.
So, the first thing is that I want to show them that the world as they see, it has not always been
this way. Meaning that things change, so
everything,
See that you accept as normal by either. It's this computer that I'm it's on my desk. Well, they used to be not even a computer used to not have laptops. It was one computer and a computer room before that. There was a computer, not even in a home. And before that, there wasn't even a computer, right? So like things change over time and it's very easy when you look around the world to just sort of accept, that things are the way they are. And that's it. When you don't realize that actually things are changing all the time. And most importantly, it is people who change them. So Steve Jobs has this great quote, which is
like,
The most
important thing you have to realize is I'm going to butcher it, but it was like most important thing to realize is that everything you see around you was
made up by somebody just like you, you know,
there is no, there are no
adults to this game of life,
who, who create all
the rules,
you know, everybody's making up the game as they go. And so I was the first I want to do is I want to show them that I want to instill. This understanding that things change over time. So when they see something as it is, I'm going to show them what it
used to look like. I'm going to show them what it looks like in other countries, where it doesn't look the same.
It is here so they can see that the world is a lot more bendable. It's flexible. Its malleable the world can be bent and it's bent by people who decide that it's going to be another way. Okay? So that's
the first most important thing, right? Because that's what
entrepreneurs going to do, right? Entrepreneurs, trying to change the way this changes, the status quo in
some way and if you don't realize that the status
quo is simply made up by other people. Just like, you know, more talented, no
smarter than you, then that means that you could do it
too.
The second thing on. So that's the mindset aspirations. You are who you
admire? I always have believed this, you are you become who you admire? So I want to show them. I want to, I want to admire
people that I hope that they admire. I want to
tell them stories of people who have, who have just simply wanted something and made it happen, whether it's an athlete. Michael Phelps wanted this, and he made
it happen.
An entrepreneur who wanted this, made it happen and inventor, who wanted to solve this problem, and they made it happen. And that,
I want to tell them those stories
consistently, so that they understand this link, the basically the name of the game is figuring out what you want and then knowing that you can make it happen
and I'm going to praise that. So for example, even now
with my daughter, she's really good at puzzles, she loves puzzles. But yeah, there's these little
parenting tips. It's almost corny. But honestly, I do
believe it. I think it works
that. I praise her, not for being great at puzzles. I
praise her for. I'm like, you figured
it out. Wow. You didn't know how to do.
Do it but you just kept trying and then you figured it out, you're great at figuring things out, right? Like, I am, I praise her for being able to figure things out. I
praise her for trying things that she was afraid of. I phrase I praise her for
for, basically, like going out of her comfort zone and say you did it, anyways, right? You always do that. You're always so brave, right? You're always figuring things out. I am trying to instill in
her that she could figure anything out that she can do things, even when she's afraid of doing them. Even if she's never done that before.
I never praised for being so smart or so good at X because I think that's a trap.
So those are little things on the
praise and
aspirations. Next, let's talk about skills. So if we want to be an entrepreneur entrepreneur, is not really a thing, it's just a collection of skills and
that you that you put together and you apply with some Force. So what are those skills?
Being able to build big able to sell and being able to invest. And so I am going to invest in each of those skills at a young age and you could do them in a bunch of different ways. So being able to build, you know it could be as simple as my wife. She always talks about how when she was a
kid. Her dad used to take her on Saturdays to Home Depot, to do a building
class a free Workshop, building
class that she does on weekends. And that's
why my wife is so self-sufficient.
Like, if something is broken in the house, my wife fix it, we get furniture, my wife.
Tablet. Because she's really great at that and she loves doing it and I'm terrible at it. I'm terrible headaches. I never got any practice at it and I never got, I never found the fun in it
so I never never did it right
doing something like that. Teaches you how to build even literally how to build Furniture, but it makes it fun to build things from scratch.
And so, that's what I'm going to do. I'm gonna teach him to build. I'm gonna teach you to build toy's
computers, Furniture build anything, build a little,
you know, stage and then we'll use it for puppet
shows, whatever.
It doesn't matter. We're going to try to build things together and then the next one is selling, so teach you how to sell. So how. So we I will literally give them some experiences, like, door-to-door
sales. I don't know if you guys ever done these like, we call, it's like a, like, a fundraiser thing where you go door-to-door, you sell like, wrapping paper and ice cream and stuff like that to your neighbors. I think those are incredible experiences. I've talked about this in the past. If kale is a
superfood door sales is like a
super food for being an entrepreneur because you're going to get repetition at hard work facing rejection.
Persuasion building Rapport. Yeah, all these things. You get from door-to-door sales. So I'm going to heavily emphasized order
sales
and so this idea of being able to sell is important. Same thing with investing, I'm going to give him money
early on and we're going to invest it
together and whether they win whether they'll do well or they lose money. They'll live with those consequences say when they want something that's going to come out of that pot
and so. So that's the the core idea. Get them understanding early on about investing in a
Stock market with a very small amount of money, a couple thousand dollars or two thousand dollars and let them know that. Hey, when you want that new Xbox, it's going to
come from the earnings, you've been building up in this
thing and and so I want them to learn about investing in that way. So there's other sums there's other direct skills that I have seen. As I invest in Founders that I'm like,
the most oppressive Founders. I
meet, I really like interrogate them to find out what is it that they know or they did that made them the way that they are. And I've
seen two
Consistent experience has come up
that are highly correlated from what I can
tell maybe cause may be correlated, I don't know with being a great entrepreneur and they're not ones that I would have expected. The first one is debate.
I can't tell you how
many people who I find to be really impressive. That have a background in debate. I think debate teaches you how to, obviously, how to speak. It? Also teaches you how to form a logical argument. So, using logic it teaches you, how to
How to see both
sides of an argument because in debate you don't just get to say
the thing. You believe, you have to be ready to
argue for or
against a specific topic. So you got to be able to quickly understand what the argument would be in both perspectives, which guess what is an amazing skill to have? And as a person so debate is something I will try to get my kids into because I've seen it translate but of course, if they don't love it, you know, they'll find their own way. The next one is gaming something that
parents often view is a waste of time. It's something that I've seen very, very correlated
to success.
So gaming teaches you how to play. I don't play on a team, how to communicate quickly and Under Pressure,
how to come up with a strategy
to win, how to
enjoy winning and bounce back from losing, right? These are all really important things to hand-eye coordination. There's a
whole bunch of stuff math. There's there's things that go into gaming that I think are really important, and it's really fun. And so, I think gaming is something I will encourage and, and but can participate with with my kids.
So those are some of the
skills section.
And now last one experiences.
So here are the the some of these things I talked about door-to-door
selling
let the the proverbial lemonade stand, so running a lemonade stand understanding The Profit loss, buying the ingredients, the next day. So eliminates and that specifically runs for multiple
days,
I will have them join my meetings. I'll tell you two quick stories. One is my
brother-in-law is very successful business guy extremely successful and he
always brings his son
too.
His meetings, his negotiations,
car auctions, whatever he puts his son in a bunch of situations that
involve business deal making money. He's in the real estate game and I
asked him was like, you know, does he like it, why does he do it? He goes goes, well, he kind of liked it. But, you know, first you
spit be quiet about it and, you know, he probably probably rather be on his iPad. But I
told him, I said, this is really important and I
said it what he tells him when he goes to these things, he has. These is what clicked for him.
He's like he's only eight, nine years old whatever. Because what clicked for him was we got into a negotiation and we bought this business and he was like yo dad like was this a good one? He's like yeah this is a great one, he was then, why did they why do they sell yo-yos?
Because my
job is to make money off people like you sons who inherit things from their parents and don't know what it's worth. I don't know how to do it. Don't know how to negotiate people like me. Take advantage of people like you and that's why you're not going to end up like
that. It's a bit of a hardcore way of saying it, but he
He's right in many ways that like if you don't teach your kids skills about business, they'll be put in positions where they're illiterate financially, illiterate,
they are incapable of negotiating well, in capable of analyzing of the property to find out what it's really worth and and so he kind of teaches him and he
asked him all the time. He's like, hey son, what do we do? When we go to these things he goes, you know, we we win
businesses off of people like me, right? Or like, you know, kids who don't learn like I'm learning and so, so I think, you know, getting your kid to the
Table. I think is more important that people realize even if the kid is very quiet. That moment there is something happening. My dad put me in a position like this that I'll never forget.
It was, I was in college and my dad started to see that I was getting into the idea of Entrepreneurship. And so he
said, hey, I got this meeting in San
Diego. Come with me. This guy's a great entrepreneur, so I get on the flight, I fly there and my dad's flight gets either
delayed or cancelled or
out of. Maybe he did this intentionally have no idea, but either way, now, I was in San Diego at my dad's not there,
and I'm like, well shit, what do you want me to do? He's like, you gotta go to the meeting and I was like, I don't even know about your business.
I don't know. Anything goes just go to the meeting. It would look really bad if we don't even show
up.
So I go to this guy's office. And my dad had talked to the guy said, hey, look my sons coming, he doesn't know anything about him. He doesn't know the first thing about the first thing, but just if you do me a favor, you know, talk to him. And so I go to this meeting the guys 20 minutes late. I'm sitting in the room, he barges in, and this guy is a ball of energy. He is like he
comes in with so much energy, so much
Swagger. And I've never seen that in a business meeting before he starts telling me. He go he goes he goes
You know, Sean. What's your name? Sean, is he a shiny goes
Sean. Let me tell you. One thing you want to write this down, you got a pen. I was
like, yeah, I got a pen, write this down.
Great customer service. If you have great customer service, you can own the whole goddamn
world and I was like okay that didn't seem very profound but let me write this down and he's like, I just got off the
phone, I'm late because I got off the phone with this TV company. We have we bought a TV and it's cracked and they were the service was awful. Terrible. You know am I ever going to buy from these guys getting no customer service because if you have great customer service you can own the world. Did you write that down? I was like yeah I wrote it down and basically this guy was just as fire ball of
energy
He
taught me about what his background, his story of how he was how he
was, he wrote, you know, he's sold movies, he wrote a he was a
Hollywood script writer, then he built a skyscraper in San Diego because he thought real estate was the game to be playing. Then when the internet started coming out he built like an early version of red
box like a movie DVD, rental thing and malls
and then he got into that. He he started investing said that he go. He's just each time you just EK. He's like failing up. He's like not really making it happen, but he fails up. And then he met.
Guy in an elevator investors company. It turned out to be
like the biggest textbook start up in the in the world. And then, you know,
he married the woman who did 1-800 Flowers and he has one thing. After another just shared like ten stories
companies, he built Investments, he made people who met blah blah blah. And I'm kind of captivated by this guy and he's like you hungry. Let's go get lunch and we just left the office on abruptly. And I was like, well, okay, and he's walked into this restaurant. And the restaurant was like O'Neill. Yeah, we
got your table ready and he had his own table at this restaurant.
San Diego and San Diego, weather is perfect. And I'm
basically just like, wow, this guy's got living the
life and his table, every table in there had tablecloth, except for his table had paper because he needed a pain to be able to do
deals. You would write stuff down on the table, cloth itself on the paper to teach me about what was really no stuff that was going on. And he didn't even order, they brought out a bunch of appetizers and they just they knew and he had his own tab, he didn't have to pay, he just left and I was like I want to be this guy and he at the end, he gave me
his book and he signed it and I read his book on the
way home.
On the airplane and I was like this guy is amazing and
literally that experience is so formative because I just saw somebody. Again, you are who you admire. I saw somebody who's just seem like, they're having
so much fun. I felt like this guy was in
the mall and he got locked into the toy store, and he was just playing with all the toys of life and I was like, jeez. This, this is how
I want to be. I want to have and you can hear me now, I want to have this kind of energy. I want to have this kind of
Charisma the storytelling this enthusiasm this variety of
business experiences.
This
Lifestyle where I just flow through the day. I'm not locked into one schedule or any patterns
that I'm used to, you know, asking for a table and then sitting quietly and then paint waiting for the bill at the end. This guy just had his own rules to life and I really admired that. So I want my kids to meet people like that and so they can admire them. But also put them in
those experiences, get them, those experiences to let them Shadow me, join meetings, things
like that so that they can, they can see, you know, people that are
really interesting and they might have that
itch start to develop like, oh, I want to live like this guy lives. This
Versus the cubicle life versus the doctor life versus whatever
else. Okay? Last thing a few other things that I think are good
experience at what that have definitely traveling International. So I was lucky I grew up in Indonesia and China doesn't bunch of different places
and so therefore, I got to see third world countries, I get to see that other people
live differently. This Builds an immense amount of gratitude for what you have things you take for granted you know clean streets and lights and you know running water and things like that. Warm hot water every time you turn on the shower.
Or so you'd start to not just take those off for granted, you develop some gratitude there. The second thing is
you realize that the world is a lot
bigger than just your little bubble, my wife, you know, gripping,
California lives in California. We still live, you know, 15 minutes away from the place. You grew up and she loves it here. She's very safe here but in reality that exposure to change, you know, to moving, having to make new friends, to going to a new country. And not knowing the language that exposure is really important and, you know, she went to India
things like that. That's how she developed it. But I want to
Lee. Make sure my kids have a not so comfortable experience going to a variety of different places, you know, Europe and Southeast Asia. Things like that, so that they can experience that. That's one thing I can do as a parent that's like in my control. The other
things I think would be fun is I want to help them another thing I've seen correlated with success in as entrepreneurs learning how to just simply
flip things. So, you know, by something sell it on
eBay.
For a little bit more right by Sneaker and then sell it to a sneakerhead, right? So just flipping things as an experience. I want them to have and and the last thing is a little exercises. So there's this thing called the
marshmallow test that people do with with employees kids students, it's a pretty famous test. And what they
do is they give you a bunch of. They put you in teams and then they give you a bunch of random tools like sticks rope like a string. Sorry, and one more.
Hello. And the game is, you need to build a structure using only these
tools and whoever can get it from the table height, to the ceiling, like the closest to the ceiling, whoever gets their marshmallow, the highest wins.
And so you do this exercise, you play this game, there's a big moral of the story in the moral of
the story is what happens? Is that everybody's yeah, here's what adults do, especially High, you know, High achiever types, like consultants and stuff like that. They will first quickly, you know, divide and
conquer. You know, one person is the leader, they'd say, hey you're going to focus on this. You're going to focus on this. You're going to
focus on this and then they
first is make a plan. Let's not just
jump in still Elena. Let's not be stupid about this. We only have so many materials. Let's make a plan
so they make this plan the drawing out a structure, one
guy.
Like I know the physics of this, we needed to be this this angle, blah blah blah,
and then they finally start to build in the track. Let's build the foundation really good
first, ball blah. And
finally at the end, o 2 minutes left. Oh God, they shove the marshmallow on at the end and the whole thing collapses and the so always because the marshmallow has a lot more
weight to it than you anticipate. Marshmallow seems like a small thing but
relative to these sticks and
string the marshmallow is extremely heavy to collapses and structure almost every single time. And so
somebody who literally
They just took like two two
sticks and shoves the marshmallow on they'll win and
and kids take the opposite approach. Kids immediately,
stick the marshmallow on they, don't wait till the end, the stick the marshmallow on if they don't eat
the marshmallow they put it on first and then they start to learn to oh wow it falls over once and they're
like oh that's not going to work with to make sure this thing can hold the marshmallow weight and they build the whole structure around that key risk for that key assumption. And
this is like very akin to how that entrepreneurs and good entrepreneurs. Go a
bad entrepreneur. Waste a lot of time planning
and avoids
Shipping the product to the customer avoids. The, the harsh reality of rejection till the very
end, and that's when they put the marshmallow on and then when it does it collapses in there devastated because they put so much working there. As a great entrepreneur
will typically say, well let's not spend too much time planning on paper let's just prototype here
so let's just try something
quickly early on let's try giving it, you know, put the marshmallow on this
ship it and if it falls over no
problem. That's just you know attempt one we put very little into it. We learned something. Let's make attempt to better an attempt 3 and they'll get
Five
attempts in that same 20 30 minute period that the other group got one attempt. So
I'm going to try to teach them these sort of like almost like moral of the
story type of exercises that will show them the value. In rapid prototyping in facing rejection early on
in learning you know, testing your
key risks and your key assumptions are finding what is the key risk key, assumption and not being afraid to fail. So those are some of the things that I'm going to do to recap the mindset that things change, and that the world is not just the way it is.
Because that's the perfect way. It's like, no. It's been constantly evolving constantly changing and it will change again. And the people who change
it are. Just people like you people who see things. See, the status quo
decided can be better. The next is I'll tell them stories of people who have done that and I'll
praise them, specifically, for figuring
things out or bouncing back from failure, rather than just being smart or being good. At being good at X,
that would teach them the skills of building selling and investing
specifically, giving them a chances to become good at
Debate gaming, things like that
and then I'm going to have you know experiences the lemonade stand
selling door-to-door traveling to third world countries.
You know, joining meetings are sitting in on meetings, flipping something on
eBay and like the marshmallow test
and I'm going to do all those things. And I'm not even going to mention
the word entrepreneurship. I'm not going to mention that they should do something because it's their choice about what they want to do. My job is to create an environment where they get exposed to it, where they get to dabble in it where they get to build core foundational skills that they can choose to use later. If it's
If it's what's for them. So hopefully that helps Sophia, thank you for the question. And I'm glad I got to sit down and think about this because I do have kids and just sitting down to answer your question for 15 minutes. Writing down my notes, you know, that helps me be a better dad. So thank you and I hope you guys enjoyed one question Friday. If you'd like these, you can go submit your own questions. It's like MFM pod.com and there's a little microphone button where you can submit your question to. All right, take care.
I feel like I can rule the world.
I know, I can be what I want to travel. Never looking back.
