Blogs & Articles: Beyond coding: What we should be teaching tomorrow’s entrepreneurs (but aren’t) 🔗 7 years ago

Last year, President Obama called for an ambitious, $4-billion initiative to expand computer-science education to everyone from kindergarten through Grade 12. Other jurisdictions have announced similar goals, with countries like Canada, the U.K., Estonia and Singapore adding programming skills to their school curricula. There’s no doubt these are important steps to prepare for a future that promises to be exponentially different than the present.

But it’s for exactly this reason that I’d like to see more resources applied to a teaching a different, oft-ignored skillset: entrepreneurship. By that, I don’t necessarily mean the kinds of hard business skills that we’re starting to see taught in launchpads and accelerators, like how to develop an app, craft a marketing plan, find investors or even read a balance sheet. Some of the most valuable traits are far less tactical and less obvious. In fact, they’re rarely taught or even discussed.

This year, my daughter is entering Grade 8. If I had my way, some of these core entrepreneurial principles would find their way into her curriculum. I’ve learned these the hard way, struggling to build an online platform for home improvement products over the last two decades. These skills aren’t technical and they risk sounding obvious or cliched. For entrepreneurs, however, they can mean the difference not just between success and failure but between something far more important: personal satisfaction and disappointment.

Redefining risk

In an era of accelerating change, with entire industries undergoing transformation, risk is going to be a constant. What’s key is to reframe your notion of risk and your understanding of what constitutes failure. In this environment, it’s often far riskier to pursue the safe and well trodden path. Tesla, for example, could have aimed for a smaller, niche market like other electric car-makers before it. But it would have landed in the scrapyard alongside now-forgotten names like the ZENN and the Aptera.

For children, it’s important to get comfortable with risk early. Allowing students to fail and then iterate on that failure is key. We’ve inherited a paradigm where success is determined by a single letter grade, yet in the business world failure is, more often than not, just a departure point. That kind of thinking needs to find a way into the classroom, and we’re starting to see some innovative approaches in this regard, like the Learning Expeditions concept, which emphasizes this iterative attitude toward projects.

Embracing an abundance mentality

Competition is part of life and business, but the idea that others have to lose so you can win is increasingly outdated. The best entrepreneurs are finding ways to create a bigger pie for others. This is abundance thinking and it’s exemplified by companies like Airbnb that are creating ecosystems to connect suppliers and customers, creating new wealth and benefits. Closer to home, my company is pursuing a similar path with our marketplace for building supplies. Instead of hammering our suppliers for savings to pass to consumers, we’re giving them resources and data to help them efficiently connect with buyers.

I think teachers generally do a great job of championing this kind of collaborative approach, but for some reason this spirit is lost when the subject turns to business. And it’s this kind of outmoded “scarcity thinking” that lurks behind some of the greatest business scandals and debacles of our time, from Wells Fargo to the subprime mortgage crisis. A great primer text in this new school of thought (for school kids or anyone else): Peter Diamandis’ Abundance.

Accepting radical responsibility

Every entrepreneur runs into challenges and crises. The problems may not come from inside their companies, but the solutions invariably do. When the housing market tanked in 2008, our company went from a $50-million run-rate to $20-million overnight, and we couldn’t find investors to rescue us. We responded by re-examining every inch of our business for solutions. We discovered that the unique way we collected data could springboard us out of the crisis. That discovery changed us. We still sell flooring and doors, but data is now what drives our business.

How does this relate to kids? When my son didn’t make a soccer team he tried out for recently, he externalized the reasons (a situation familiar to any parent). He thought he should make it and was hurt when he didn’t. His mother and I gave him a choice: “How badly do you really want this?” We told him he could either use this let-down to inspire and train even harder or not. The outcome is up to him. He has all the power to affect change — not the coach or the team. This life lesson is deceptively simple but gets to the core of entrepreneurship.

Remembering that tech is merely a tool

Ultimately, learning how to learn is the only safeguard for people growing up in an era of exponential change. Technological skills — contrary to belief — aren’t the most critical ones. For the past 20 years or so, programming was the number-one high-tech job, for example. People wrote algorithms telling computers what to do. But machine learning has improved to the point where computers are teaching humans. Nearly one-third of software developers in a recent survey said they feared being replaced by artificial intelligence. So even integrating coding into the curriculum isn’t a panacea for the changes we’re facing.

What’s key is to constantly ask: “What’s next? How can I take this to the next level?” If machines are continually learning and improving, reading and studying widely is perhaps the only way to stay ahead. From Elon Musk, to Mark Andreesen and Sam Altman, some of the top entrepreneurs and VCs of our time are voracious readers and interrogators, whose interests extend far beyond business or their particular technical niche. This kind of lateral thinking enables making connections — and leaps forward — that would otherwise be missed.

So how do we start to teach these traits? Can they even be taught to young students? A new wave of programs are starting to explore exactly these themes as part of entrepreneurial training. For instance, in Canada, Young Entrepreneur Leadership Launchpad seeks to integrate entrepreneurial education into the existing high school curriculum. Over three semesters, students get exposure to leadership principles and mindfulness in business, before incubating their own ideas with mentors and then presenting before a panel of investors. And it’s far from the only program that’s doing this well. Introducing these ideas into a standard school curriculum would be challenging, but far from impossible.

My daughter hasn’t decided her career path yet. She’s still dreaming of becoming a movie star. It doesn’t matter to me at all if she becomes an entrepreneur, as long as she keeps that entrepreneurial drive to always improve. And this is perhaps the bigger message: The kind of skills and training that will benefit tomorrow’s students may well benefit all of us, regardless of career path. The sooner we can reinvent the curriculum — taking a few cues from the entrepreneurial mindset — the better.

This article was originally featured in Fast Company. Did you enjoy this post? Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments below and to see more from me hit follow at the top of the page or on Twitter Jeff Booth