Jan

15

When life teaches what schools don’t

January 15, 2008 |

One of the things that makes blogging fun is that it can sometimes resemble an extended game of ping-pong.

As I mentioned previously, I wrote an article for Anita Campbell over at Small Business Trends called the Top 10 Opportunities in 2008 for Personal Businesses. (Anita calls them ‘personal businesses’ but, you know, I usually refer to them as nonemployers.)

One of the things I mentioned in passing was that most of us are educated to be employees, an idea that piqued the interest of Scott Kersey sufficiently that he blogged about it recently.

And here I am, blogging about his blogging. Ain’t this fun?

Actually, the part that Scott writes that interested me was this:

A majority of successful business owners are, in fact, also failed business owners.

It takes a couple of tries to get it right. Failure is a great teacher. For many of us, mistakes lead to enlightenment, i.e. “I’ll never do that again” or “I would have approached that differently had I known then what I know now.”

It caught my eye because I happen to be well acquainted with an individual who is staring what I think is a fantastic business opportunity in the face and is so frightened of failing that he is currently totally paralyzed.

That’s too bad, too. As I told him, somebody is going to do it and I’d hate to have to watch him, ten years from now, kicking himself for not sticking his neck out now.

One of the things I found striking from my trips to Europe last year was how much they envied us a culture that forgives mistakes, that allows people to start businesses and fail and not have to feel like they needed to kill themselves as a consequence. And that is certainly true in a broad sense.

But, on an individual level, I have to wonder how many people are stopped in their entrepreneurial tracks just because they haven’t learned that major life lesson that most of us pick up somewhere around the age of one: that before you learn to walk, you fall on you butt a whole bunch of times.

Of course, my reference in that Small Business Trends article was not about teaching students about the ups and downs of life so much as it was about teaching students about how to live and (especially) work in an unsupervised environment.

Being able to do that takes a certain very specific skill set having to do with things like being self-responsible, self-governing and self-disciplined. As a general matter, schools don’t give that stuff much priority for reasons having to do with the history of the institution (and into which I am not going to travel right this second).

But Scott is perfectly right. One of the ways in which schools (and often parents, too) fail our kids is by trying to manufacture a world in which people bend over backwards to arrange for them to experience success — often whether they deserve it or not.

Nobody out here in the real world is going to do that. We are lying to them when we lead them to expect it.

Dealing with failure and understanding it as a learning opportunity are important life lessons. And, as I hope my friend eventually figures out, it’s never too late to learn them.

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Comments

2 Comments so far

  1. Thriveal on January 17, 2008 9:41 pm

    Life lessons are wonderful…

    they can teach like no other teacher I know. Thanks for this wonderful reminder, Dawn.

    Thanks, Jason M. Blumer

  2. Mike at Harbour Pilot on January 21, 2008 10:31 am

    I really like this observation.
    “Of course, my reference in that Small Business Trends article was not about teaching students about the ups and downs of life so much as it was about teaching students about how to live and (especially) work in an unsupervised environment.”

    I am trying to teach my kids this lesson, and it’s a real challenge. The school system in my area has become a micro-manager of their education. For instance, they have continuous assessment, whereby every day there is another tiny component to be graded. The impact of this approach is two-fold. The first is that the kids have little incentive to bite off bigger chunks of any subject, to really get drawn deeply into the subject. This means that they cannot really get interested in anything. The second, and more problematic thing is that control is vested in the endless baby steps of this process, and so, in the teacher. The result is that there is no stimulus applied to teach the values of self-discipline and control.
    I have actually taken to telling the kids that education is not about the marks – it is about what they put into their heads, and how they approach the world. Unfortunately, just keeping on top of this endless treadmill of valueless assignments is so time consuming that they have relatively little free time to invest in themselves.
    Education and teachers mean well, but this approach destroys motivation, initiative, and excitement. And as you note, the effects do show up for many, when they become employees, and still expect there to be “teacher” figures in the real world.

    Mike

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