When you empower kids to take charge of their own financial destiny from an early age, you give them the best possible start in life. If you want to show kids how to motivate themselves to achieve, the ideas in this blog post could be a place to start. We don’t get taught how to show kids how to motivate themselves to achieve in the normal course of events, so those who want to show kids how to motivate themselves to achieve have to go out of our way to find help and resources, and to trade information.
It is so important to show kids how to motivate themselves to achieve. the mainstream media pours a relentless torrent of negative and demotivational messages at kids, and kids are easily sucked in to spending hours sitting like blobs and consuming those messages. Watching television actually changes the brain activity, making it more difficult to get up and turn the thing off. It has an almost hypnotic effect. Only by working doubly hard to get the right stuff in during the early years can we give our kids any resistance against the new “opiate of the masses”.
The education system, too, is not set up to show kids how to motivate themselves to achieve. If anything, it is the opposite.
As Robert Kiyosaki points out in his first book “If You Want To Be Rich And Happy, Don’t Go To School”, the education system creates in kids an absolute terror of making mistakes.
Successful people are willing to “give things a go”, even if they don’t have all the answers before they start. They accept that mistakes are the price of progress, and they simply adjust their course according to the feedback provided by their mistakes.
Entrepreneurs, in particular, are willing to fail. As Winston Churchill said, “Success is the ability to go from one failure to the next with no loss of enthusiasm”.
We know the education system crushes the kids who “fail”, even on one single occasion during their school career. It still stunts the ones who don’t fail, because they are still imbued with the crippling fear that they might fail at some point, and suffer the awful fate that befalls those who do.
It comes back to the caring adults around each child to try to undo the damage done by the education system. Kids rely on their families and communities to rebuild their spirit and encourage them to take risks, to do silly things, and to shrug off the tag of “failure”.
A system constructed the way our traditional education system is constructed is just not able to show kids how to motivate themselves to achieve. If you are raising young entrepreneurs, the education system won’t give you much support. Fortunately, with the internet, there are more and more resources available for people who want to show kids how to motivate themselves to achieve.