The Entrepreneurial Homeschool, Part 1
Few people who start a business from scratch end up with financial independence. If you are one of them and you meet another, you recognize each other quickly. Not because of their fancy watch, car, or house. Quite the opposite. It’s their mindset and how modest and pragmatic they are. Oh, you did it too? Congrats. But to everyone else, it seems hard, if not impossible.
I think it’s not too dissimilar to meeting someone who has learned how to ride a bike. Once you can do it, you forget how it feels to not be able to ride a bike. And riding it gives you freedom: you can cover long distances, you can go where you want, and you can move under your own power. A good business gives you leverage over your finances and your time.
I think most of us can learn how to ride a bike and most of us can learn how to build a business. Most people underestimate the pain and most people quit too soon. So it’s better to start to learn to handle pain and develop tenacity early on.
With my children, I started teaching entrepreneurial skills before age 10. I do not need all 3 of them to run companies. I want all 3 to know how to create value without waiting for permission.
This 3-part series is about how I’m teaching my children to think, create, and choose problems worth solving.
I homeschool around a simple hierarchy. First, build a healthy and self-regulating body. Then train the mind to solve abstract problems. Then learn to make things other people want. Finally, learn to judge what is worth making and how it will affect the people who use it.
This is not a research review. It is a description of what has worked in practice with my children.
Part 1: The Animal Underneath
Learning is a hierarchy
Learning begins before birth, when experience starts to leave a lasting trace. Maternal nutrients help build our bodies, while flavors from our mothers’ diets become some of our first sensory memories through amniotic fluid and, later, breast milk.
In early childhood our first emotions get nurtured by whoever is caring for us. Quickly, we learn to control our emotions, to communicate through touch, and to lay the foundations of language. By five, most of that base is in place.
Then spoken language matures and we start to think more abstractly: basic math, reading, stories. Somewhere in here we also begin making choices, consciously or not, about how much effort we will spend, how hard we will push, and whether we treat our environment as something that happens to us or something we can harness like the wind.
That is roughly when primary school begins, and school does a decent, standardized job at the earliest stages. But by primary two or three, the fastest students are already far ahead and the slowest are already left behind. This is where the wonderful government-standardized system falls on its face. And it does not really recover until people hit the job market or try to start a business.
By the time you reach university or trade school, you have spent more than a decade on school benches. Think about the average age of becoming a plumber, an electrician, an HVAC technician, a drilling engineer, a computer scientist.
Many people spend more than a decade in school before they are trusted to solve useful problems independently. That is a shame. It could be the mid-teens. It could be dramatically accelerated.
Strong Foundations
Before a child can learn anything hard, the animal underneath has to be well. I mean the body and its basic regulatory systems: sleep, food, movement, emotional control. My kids do jiu-jitsu and ballet, they ride bikes, they swim. They sleep in the dark, in silence, through the night. They rarely get sick, they digest well, they have energy all day, and they get along with people. Because that base is handled, they can spend their attention on higher-level learning.
That foundation is worth more than it sounds. Most adults I know do not have it. Many never fix their diet, sleep, or stress until a heart attack or a cancer diagnosis finally makes them listen. My kids eat broccoli without complaint, they like salmon and chicken, and they understand why a balanced plate matters. We are still litigating whether a tomato is a vegetable or a fruit. We have at least settled the avocado. Getting these basics early is important.
I also teach them to be contrarian. When a lot of people believe something, that is a reason to look harder, not a reason to fall in line. I want them curious on purpose and skeptical of social proof. That is rarer than it should be, at any age.
That is the first layer: a body capable of sustained attention, emotions that can be regulated, and a willingness to question the default.
Next: Part 2