Advice to Entrepreneurial Parents

Immerse kids in your business experience in lieu of schooling

One of the most hopeful trends in the U.S. today is that many of the entrepreneurial tech elite are no longer putting their children in traditional schools (in Austin it is a full on movement). In order to liberate millions of children from traditional schooling, it is crucial that an elite class validates the fact that trad schooling is obsolete.

Learning remains important. Developing high level reading, writing, and mathematics skills will continue to be valuable. But at least for many educated parents, trad schooling may not be the best way for your children to learn academic skills. Moreover, it often comes with a very high opportunity cost with respect to other aspects of human development, including becoming a high agency entrepreneur. As John Taylor Gatto, NY State Teacher of the Year, has noted, trad schooling amounts to 13 years of training in being passive and dependent.

If you can get your child to become a habitual reader (in part by limiting access to digital addictions), then that is usually more valuable than are most language arts classes, especially if you discuss ideas with your children. A few hours of personalized math tutoring each week combined with 30-60 minutes of daily math practice is more valuable than most math classes at most schools.

Essentials:

Beyond developing core academic skills outside of school, immerse them in your business activities as much as possible from a young age.

1. Above all, ensure that your children respect and, ideally, are inspired by your family's business achievements. This consists of:

A. Having great achievements that you are justifiably proud of.

B. Articulating the well founded case for them.

C. Doing your best to ensure that schools, teachers, or peers don't undermine this respect.

I emphasize this one first and foremost because of the widespread phenomenon of the children of the wealthy becoming indoctrinated into anti-capitalist beliefs that sometimes (often?) lead to the most egregious betrayals of family legacy. If your child is saturated in toxic attitudes at school (or university), that can completely undermine whatever you teach at home.

2. Ensure that your children are positively socialized into the family business tradition. Whether this is a matter of shadowing mom and dad at business or in socializing with business related colleagues, it should mostly be a positive experience. When they are young you don't want them to have emotional memories of stress, anger, or hostility. You don't want them to be in a position where they are shamed or diminished. They can learn to observe quietly and patiently, but the overall vibe should always tend towards, "I get to observe the cool adult thing" or "I get to be involved in the cool adult thing" and not "I'm a burden on my parents" or "I shouldn't be here" or "I'm afraid."

3. After having the respect and positive feeling nailed, then one can gradually focus on skill development. I see skill development as a deliberate task less urgent than the two previous points because if the children honor and respect their parents' work, and if they have positive emotions around it and are proud/excited to be involved, then often a desire to find a role for themselves will occur spontaneously.

That said, we all long to be valuable to others. Thus any tiny task that you can give them that is relevant is a good thing. When they are very small it can be a bit of "make work," as in "Can you organize these cards" or "Can you remind me if they said such and such" or "Can we talk through these numbers together to see if they make sense?" That is, the more they feel as if they are part of the enterprise, the more they feel as if they are contributing, the better.

4. As they get older, the "make work" aspects should gradually transition to real work. What that is, is obviously very context dependent and child dependent. As much as possible it should allow a child to develop competence at the thing. The transition from "make work" to "real work" can be gradual, over the course of several years. As a child becomes more aware of the substance of various business-related conversations, you can ask the child what they think about this or that interaction or possibility (in a warm, Socratic sort of manner) so that you can both evaluate how deeply they are understanding situations as well as give them the respect that comes from asking their opinion. Simultaneously you can assess their judgment. In some cases, they may become more perceptive at an earlier age than you might expect, even as they are far behind on all the more technical aspects.

As you see what aspects of your work engages their attention, where they are most curious about, and where they most rapidly develop knowledge and decent judgment, you can begin to ask them to do tasks that are less and less "make work" and closer and closer to value added activities. They may not get to this point until they are, say, around puberty. But if they've been substantially immersed in your world from an early age, have abundant positive emotion around it, and understand and respect key aspects, then they may be able to add value around puberty. It is noteworthy that in traditional cultures, young men typically went through a rite of passage at puberty that afterwards they would take on a role as a young man rather than as a child.

5. Depending on the path of a particular family, it might be worth considering playing a role in the family enterprises as an alternative to school and college. The reason to do so is not at all to isolate the child into a family cult. Ideally the child should develop a broad and diverse social network. That said, it is fine if the general skew of such a network is more heavily biased towards productive adults modeling purpose-driven productive behavior rather than networks strictly consisting of school-aged peers.

A Return to Natural Learning

We evolved in tribes in which children were largely integrated into daily adult life. While young, boys would remain in the village while the men went off on hunting expeditions. But even there, the boys and girls would be fully aware of the work of the village women, gathering and cooking and gossiping. Children might go play in the forest, with younger boys learning to hunt small animals with older boys. But everything from morning to night was a matter of either engaging in real life or "play" that largely consisted of imitating, and thus practicing, the activities of real life. The radical age segregation of schooling was unimaginable.

Psychologist Peter Gray has written extensively about how children learn in hunter gatherer communities. He notes,

Although hunter-gatherer children usually played independently of adults, they were not segregated from adults. . . . All of the adults - with their different personalities, knowledge, skills, and foibles - were potential models to children of the kind of adult they wish to become or avoid becoming. The children studied the adults and, in the privacy of their play, mimicked specific adults’ actions and personalities . . . In our culture children playfully mimic the heroes, villains, and fools that they see on television, but in hunter-gatherer cultures the models available to mimc were the real adults of their band, who represented the real ways of life toward which the children were moving.

Every five year old would be exposed to role models of all ages. His social life would be saturated with the full range of human development within a tribal environment in which respect for the norms of the tribe was ubiquitous, in which survival dictated mutual support and productive skill development (e.g. hunting and any associated crafts such as the production of hunting weapons). Tales of heroes and tales of fools, with gales of laughter at foolishness, were told around the community fire every evening.

Peter Gray continues,

Hunter-gatherer children could see first hand most adult activities, and those they didn’t see they heard about as they listened to adult gossip, conversations, and stories. . . . they observed all activities that occurred in camp. They often accompanied their mothers on gathering trips. By the time they were young teenagers, boys were allowed to join men on some of their hunting expeditions. Thus, through observation and participation, they learned about the values, lore, and skills of their culture and then they incorporated it all into their play.

We evolved to learn the customs of our tribe naturally and effortlessly. In the literature on the “science of learning” much is made of the distinction between “primary knowledge,” such as our first language or walking, that we learn naturally, and subjects such as mathematics or how to read, which we must (typically) be taught explicitly. Great math platforms such as Math Academy are designed entirely based on the science of learning. But that kind of structured didactic teaching is not necessary for skills and attitudes that are embedded in our cultural lives as natural human behaviors.

Nearly 150 years of lobbying by the education establishment has grossly exaggerated the extent to which school-taught “secondary knowledge” is necessary (See Bryan Caplan’s The Case Against Education for substantial documentation of this thesis). While certainly mathematics qualifies, and thus the recommendation above to continue 30-60 minutes of mathematics daily year round. But beyond math and learning to read, which takes a few weeks or months at the most, much of the necessary human development for modern life can be learned in an immersion context, especially a family immersion context - if the adults are already modeling the behaviors and tossing in explanations and conversations along the way.

Do develop family traditions of reading, watch, and discuss whatever knowledge or subjects you want your kids to be exposed to. They are more likely to care about, and remember, sacred family traditions, including meaningful conversations with their parents, than anything taught in school. Consider “gathering around the campfire” in the evening to read books together, watch movies or documentaries together, or simply talk about meaningful events in the history of your family or your family’s business. Become storytellers to each other, ritualize being together face to face for conversations after dinner. Consider adding in singing together, or board games, improv games, building models together, etc.

So what might immersion in the family business look like in the modern world?

Let me start with a few concrete examples of children who are being raised to some extent along these lines:

1. Alana Garcia’s dad is a co-founder of Friendly Shoes, custom shoes for people with disabilities. Her mom is a nurse who works long hours. Alana has never been in daycare. Instead, she has grown up hanging out with her dad as he goes back and forth to work, listening to podcasts as they drive, reading and working from his office, and sometimes helping out in minor ways. When he is not on business calls or working on business documents, he may be explaining to her what he is doing and why. She spends several hours per day in jiu jitsu practice as well as 2 hours per day part time at The Socratic Experience, but beyond that whenever her mom is working she is hanging out with dad as he does business. It is an ideal education.

2. My brother, Danny Strong, also buys, remodels, and sells real estate. His children, now grown, were homeschooled, but their homeschooling “academics” were trivial exercises just done to placate the state. Meanwhile his children were involved in all aspects of the family business from a young age while not attending school. For high school graduation, he gave each of his children the capital to buy an initial house to flip. My niece Emma, now in her early 20s, has remodeled and flipped three houses already, making money on each one. Making a living this way has become second nature to her.

3. Lacey Price is a real estate agent whose husband runs a propane distributership. Her sons were not at all interested in academics and were failing while in school. Her oldest son was mechanical and begain fixing lawn mowers and boat engines while not going to school. He also helped his dad with the propane distributorship. While technically a “high school dropout,” he is now working in auto repair shops while also running a branch of the propane distributorship. He is much happier, healthier, more motivated, and more polite to his parents since dropping out of school and working in the real world.

4. Emilio Tucker’s dad, Jack Tucker, buys and sells real estate. As a 12 year old, Emilio was given the task of vetting tax delinquent properties based on a set of criteria. Once he mastered the criteria, he hired and managed a team of virtual assistants to find more properties. As AI agents improved and the difficulties of managing human beings became apparent, by the time he was 13 he had let go of the virtual assistants and was vetting properties on government data bases using an AI bot that he had developed. Again, his dad had immersed him in his business world for years, engaging in calls, explaining what he was doing, teaching him the basics. Emilio joined The Socratic Experience again for two hours per day to obtain additional conceptual frameworks regarding entrepreneurial activity. He and his dad are constantly exploring additional potential AI businesses. He is racing through Math Academy for math, covering high school geometry as an 8th grader in three months. But mostly he works with his dad and receives performance-based compensation which is already in the six figures range. He is legitimately leading his branch of the family business.

5. Braden Blacker’s dad is a serial entrepreneur, most recently selling Songclip (Audiobyte). He is now a principal for Concordia Capital, which both invests for family offices and provides investment banking advisory services. Braden had been following his dad’s work, reading his pitch decks, listening to calls, sometimes going to meetings, for years. By the time he was in high school, he was selling hoodies online and in a band trying to promote their music. It was then that he realized that the entire challenge in music was distribution. With experience producing his own music, he began reaching out to influencers and offering to write and produce music for them, thus leveraging their existing fame and audience into pop star status for them. He was able to get a few gigs like this and then got into talent management for influencers. This led to a gig while still 17 at Fixated, a new media company for content creators. After six months there he left to go on his own as a digital marketer and talent manager, now working with his dad on media, content, and advertising deals, with Braden at 18 the lead advisor on the content side and his dad and Concordia as capital partners.

In each of these cases, the child’s career path and success if 90-99% attributable to immersion in the parent’s business life rather than to anything that was learned in school. Whether or not they enroll in additional academic classes at schools or universities, the salient factor in their success consists of exposure to and conversations about the parent’s business. For such children, attending college is an optional consumption good/status signal. It adds little tangible career value.

In many ways, this kind of life is the modern version of immersion in hunter-gatherer communities. Simply by means of living a life in which the child is fully and included in the parent’s activities, with warm conversations and explanations, the child naturally takes on the roles exemplified by the parents.

Obviously this is not always going to be the case. Occasionally the child of entrepreneurial parents may choose to go into academics, or law, or medicine, or something completely orthogonal to the parent’s activities. Sometimes this may be due to having a different personalities or tastes. On other occasions it may be due to negative emotions or experiences associated with the parent’s work life.

But given the extreme costs and dangers of traditional schooling, I encourage more parents to liberate themselves from the unnecessary structures imposed by the education lobby and enculturate their children in the honored family business(es).