Book Review: Raising an Entrepreneur: How to Help Your Children Achieve Their Dreams, by Margot Machol Bisnow

In her new book, author and mother of two entrepreneurs, Margot Machol Bisnow, reveals what she learned from interviewing 70 of today’s thriving entrepreneurs and their parents.  She came away with the realization that the distinct way these parents raised their children contributed significantly to their success as entrepreneurs.

Machol Bisnow extracts 10 particular parenting “rules” that serve as common denominators for raising entrepreneurs, and intersperses profiles of the 70 entrepreneurs she interviewed to show how the rules apply to their lives. Readers learn about the empowering childhoods of many of today’s influential entrepreneurs, including  how people like Scooter Braun, one of the top talent managers in the country and who has built a media empire, was raised, or how the mother of Anne Wojcicki, founder of 23andMe, put unwavering trust in her to figure things out — even if it meant failing a few times first.

The author lists many of the traits that children with an entrepreneurial mindset exhibit: questioning why things are done a certain way and thinking up new ways to do them, immersing themselves in their own projects and putting homework or the projects they’re supposed to do on the back burner, etc.  She also emphasizes that there’s no sure way to know until they’re older if a child will become an entrepreuneur, but that it’s important to keep the path open.

“You can’t make a child an entrepreneur; you can only nurture those tendencies,” Machol Bisnow writes. At the very least, abiding by this parenting philosophy will lead to joyful and capable young people.

Rules such as instilling confidence, embracing adversity, and allowing the child to lead may seem obvious to caring parents, yet Machol Bisnow points out that while parents want to support their children, they often fear the child will fail. As a result, parents often quash their children’s spirits by trying to steer them towards what the parents believe will lead to their success. What results is depression and defeat in our youth. “Getting your kids to follow a path you’ve chosen for them is a sure way to stifle their fulfillment,” she writes.

Machol Bisnow argues that encouraging exploration, nurturing a child’s gifts, and believing in their abilities are baseline conditions for raising an entrepreneur. And, while many of the entrepreneurs’ parents profiled intuited how best to encourage their child’s interest, for some of those interviewed, providing unquestioning support wasn’t easy at first. But seeing the how important pursuing their chosen passion and dreams was to their child, these parents came around.

For example, the parents of Thomas Vu, the lead producer of the video game franchise, League of Legends,fled Vietnam as war refugees. They had high expectations of their children when they reached the U.S. Yet, even though Vu’s parents didn’t understand their son’s passion for video games, they came to allow it and even gifted him with a new game (The Legend of Zelda) they had to scrape together money to afford. He recounts how the game led to his extraordinary career of making video games.

Essentially, Machol Bisnow provides parents with a roadmap for raising confident, compassionate, and capable children. She writes, “To believe in themselves, most kids need someone else to believe in them first. It’s probably no coincidence that every one of the successful entrepreneurs I talked with is supremely confident. Every one of them had a mom and/or family member who believed in them and told them they could do anything they set their minds to.”

To learn more, visit raisinganentrepreneur.com.

Must read: Annual Book Recommendations For CEOs And Global Business Leaders, 2024.

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