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...and how entrepreneurship education can help
Why do many adults make costly mistakes when it comes to business or financial decisions? Well, it is probably due to the lack of an early education in these aspects. In school, we were always trained to memorize and regurgitate information for the sole purpose of passing an examination. No matter how well we managed to perform in school tests or public examinations, the shock of the real world is something even the brightest of us fail to expect - leading us to further problems like job-hopping, career dissatisfaction, boss problems, which will then escalate to what many adults are facing today; illness, stress and depression.
As parents, our sole purpose and want are to protect the children. As long as the child is in our care and living beneath the same roof, we are able to watch over them, advise them, make sure they take the right path - but here's the thing...children, like adults, do not know what they have until they do not have it anymore!
It is when we start working, that we realize that people out there can talk to us how they wish to and not how we wish them to, we realize that being late and procrastinating might lead to severe consequences (worse than mum's nagging!), that we have to do something when required to though we really don't want to (like speaking in public, or photocopying documents the entire day!), and that, unlike mum's constant cheers when we feel down, it is difficult to find an exterior source of motivation. Even we as adults, might find ourselves drifting away into those days in school, sometimes longing for challenges which seemed life-threatening then (like our best friend dumping us for another!) as compared to what life throws at us today! All these are real problems faced by real people in real life; and sadly, many kids and teens moving into adulthood learn them the hard way.
Education and awareness can absorb the impact of how our children accept what the future has in store for them. No one can possibly prepare our kids for the hurt they will feel in future when their idea gets rejected, or when people slam doors on their faces during a marketing campaign. It is not easy to make kids understand a life without money, as our main aim as parents is to protect them the best we can; but no matter how careful we are, our kids will grow up to face the wrath of the real world. The real world is inevitable - all of us have to face it someday...but how we accept it depends on us - how we were educated, how well we prepared. The best we can do for our kids now, while they are still in our care, is to be fair to them by preparing them for what awaits them in the real world.
Entrepreneurship, when taught to kids, is not only aimed at preparing them to be entrepreneurs, but to provide them with the tools they can use to determine their own destiny. After all, entrepreneurship does teach you to make your own choices! Research has shown that most successful entrepreneurs start early, either from helping dad in the family restaurant or stall, from selling lemonade at the side walk, or from taking the neighbour’s dogs for walks. What we sometimes fail (or choose not to understand) is that kids are very resilient. So why not prepare them from young and provide them with the necessary tools to face the world?
Start them young by enrolling them into the Young Entrepreneur Camp 2010! This three-day camp teaches the basics of entrepreneurship, business sense and money matters. Your children will enjoy this camp, filled with games, challenges, activities and video sessions. The skills learnt at this camp will benefit kids, whether or not they decide to become entrepreneurs, as the concept of entrepreneurship can very much be applied in their daily life, and in everything they do. This camp plays a dual role, in teaching them about entrepreneurship directly and also in giving them the tools they need to define their own destiny.
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