Chapter 1 of Young Bucks: How To Raise a Future Millionaire

Chapter One: Millionaire Mentality

THINK LIKE A FUTURE MILLIONAIRE'S PARENT

You and I are about to embark on a wonderful journey together-teaching your kids to think, talk, and act like future millionaires. You will find the experience surprisingly easy, as most kids are born with the ability to dream big dreams and are eager to succeed-the first two ingredients for great achievement. It will be extremely gratifying to watch your son discover that his own interests and talents, combined with practical business skills, can be the source of his success, earning him enough money to buy a new bike right now as well as preparing him to be a future millionaire. This is what I do for a living, and I can assure you that the rewards and satisfaction of helping children become independent achievers are never-ending.

But before we focus on your kids and their many gifts, we will begin with you, exploring your own attitudes about money and success so that you will be able to teach your son or daughter to think like a future millionaire.

The Parent Trap

Over and over again in my work with young people, I see the same tragedy unfolding-kids who are eager to become successful entrepreneurs and who have no doubts about their abilities to succeed, but whose parents, good people like you, unknowingly discourage them, beginning at an early age, from acting on their natural optimism and from believing in their abilities when it comes to money, the two leading characteristics of successful businesspeople.

While insisting that their kids work hard in school, supporting their athletic achievements, and generally loving their children, most parents, without knowing it, actively work against their children's future financial independence. By buying into some very pervasive, wrongheaded business myths in our country about work and careers and, further, by visiting their own ambivalence about money onto their children, they miss the opportunity to groom their children for financial success.

A tragedy? You bet, because what most parents are doing is the complete opposite of what they want to do for their children. No one in his right mind wants to deny his children the opportunity to succeed, both financially and emotionally. Yet I see this happening all the time in the seminars I conduct throughout this country and abroad.

No one has explained to parents that the most common path to great success is not what most people think-getting into the right college or landing a job at a big corporation-but is instead developing one's unique talents to create thriving businesses. Entrepreneurs learn this important skill early in their lives, usually from an adult who is close to them, and go on to build fulfilling and prosperous lives for themselves by creating their own businesses.

So before we begin to talk about your child and his or her talents, let's discuss the three harmful myths that block parents from helping their children become future millionaires.

Myth Number One: A college education is the key to business success.

I'm the last person to disparage a college education. A good education teaches you to think critically, exposes you to knowledge, and trains you to be inquisitive and open to new ideas throughout your life. It can also prepare you for certain careers, such as engineering or accounting or medicine. But it is far from an automatic guarantee of business success or even a requirement for success. In some cases, it can actually put you four years behind the other runners in the race to achieve.

Many of the newer, most successful businesses in our country were founded by people who learned on the job rather than in college, including Los Angeles restaurant owner Wolfgang Puck, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Miramax movie-studio head Harvey Weinstein, Apple Computers founder Steve Jobs, and Vogue magazine editor Anna Wintour.

In my own case, I won a football scholarship to college but left after one semester, because I just wasn't learning anything that seemed relevant to my life and my goals for success. Instead, I went to work, and by the age of twenty-four, armed with the confidence and experience I'd gained from my own childhood businesses, I was the CEO of my own corporation. On one occasion, I placed a help-wanted ad in the paper and got forty-eight responses within two hours, forty-three of them from people with college degrees. Here I was, a college dropout, in the position of deciding whether or not to hire a college graduate.

Please don't assume that teaching your son about business at an early age isn't important because he's headed for Princeton. Instead, encourage his business skills-he will be able to pay his own college tuition if he wants to go!