The Entrepreneurial Homeschool, Part 3

Part 1 and Part 2 covered self-regulation and abstract reasoning. The next layer is creating something other people want, then deciding whether it is worth creating.

Part 3: Making Things Worth Wanting

Math is the base, not the summit. Above problem-solving on paper sits a harder, more abstract problem: making something other people actually want. That pulls many other skills such as sales, distribution, marketing, and taste. So every day, alongside eating well, moving, and doing math, my kids also try to make things people want. And making something almost always means creating something.

Art is not obedience

We tend to file creating under art: singing, dancing, playing the piano, or painting. But playing a piece of Mozart exactly as your teacher instructed is not creating. It may teach technique, and technique matters, but technique is the base, not the summit. Art begins where the instructions end.

Here in Singapore, a lot of what gets called art education is precisely that: doing what the teacher says. Play this piece. Paint this picture. Copy this object. A child can become very good at following instructions without ever deciding what should exist. That is the opposite of creating.

Creating means making choices when nobody knows the right answer. You decide what to make, how to make it, and when it is done. You try and fail. You get frustrated. Maybe nobody believes in you. Maybe you are the only person who likes what you are making. You keep going anyway. Eventually, perhaps, you make something other people want. It is great if that thing is useful like a hammer, but usefulness comes in many forms.

My eldest, Pascale, has had the most years of this. Her art has grown from drawing to stickers, air-dry clay, polymer clay, masks and costumes, sewing, embroidery, face painting, photography, and YouTube Shorts. It did not follow a curriculum. One thing led to another. Each new thing required a new skill, a new material, or a new way to reach people.

Now she is making money at it. She already earns more than an entry level wage in some countries. That is not a side detail. She is not being paid for following instructions. She is being paid because people want what she makes.

She started with eating and sleeping well, moved through math and harder math, and arrived at making something people want. That progression is how my homeschooling is fundamentally different from the government curriculum. The goal is not just to follow instructions well. It is to decide what should exist, make it, and find out whether other people want it.

The problem above the problem

There is a problem above even that: governance. If you only ever make what people want, you slide quickly toward vices, sugar, cigarettes, gambling, the things that hijack our wiring. So as you mature, you also have to think about how what you make gets consumed.

A lot of people, and a lot of large companies, stop at “if it is legal, I will do it.” At the scale of a Google, ByteDance, or a Meta it becomes nearly impossible to resist those market forces. It is easy to criticize them for how their products farm attention and addiction, including in children, and easy to note that the age limits barely hold.

And that was fine in our household, because when I introduced my kids to these platforms, I also taught them about addiction. That is the thread running through all of it, back to nutrition. Sleep, food, exercise, math, screens, they are the same tension: we are wired to want something, we overshoot, and it turns on us. We crave sugar, so we eat too much and get sick. The right thing almost always takes effort, so we avoid it. That gap between what we are pulled toward and what is good for us is the central human problem, and it is the same problem whether you are an individual or a society. It comes down to self-control, incentives, mechanism design, and role modeling.

A real problem: eczema

Here is a real one. Pascale has eczema, and has had it her whole life. It affects her, and it affects millions of people. But pharmaceutical R&D budgets follow profit, not need. The most research money flows toward whatever will sell, which is how our system works, and we do not have a much better one. Maybe there is a cheap cure for eczema sitting right there, something that would cost a hundred dollars and wipe out the industry of creams and lotions built around managing it forever. If so, there is no economic incentive to find it. My hope is that AI and cheaper research start to open up problems exactly like that, the ones with no product to sell at the end, maybe an RNA approach, maybe something simpler, that could actually help.

Back to the bike

That is the arc I am trying to build, one kid at a time: a well-run body, regulated emotions, a mind trained on abstraction, the ability to make something people want, and the judgment to care how it gets used. None of it requires a special gift. It requires starting early, going slow, and not quitting.

Everyone can learn to ride a bike.