If your parents are not entrepreneurs then the chances that you aren’t either are fairly high. If, despite all the odds, you still pursued that life the journey to get where you are today would have been one spent trying to unlearn the narrative that your parents might have put down as law. That record put on repeat that said, “go to school, go to university, get a job, and stay in that job until you retire.”

The conversations that happen at home that revolve around this theme were certainly the ones that occurred regularly in the home where I grew up. Although my mother was running a small lifestyle business on the side, it was never taken seriously as a form of income to my father. And thus, the message to us growing up never changed.

Those conversations, remarks, comments and quips on a regular basis form pathways and patterns of thinking. They shape the way in which we view the world and the opportunities we recognize or ignore. To learn about entrepreneurship as a formal choice of career much later on in life is a taxing process. It means untangling and reformatting those neurons in the brain to unlearn what was engrained for so many years and learn how to behave differently.

A new way of thinking and acting. Entrepreneurship is not simply the trade of starting a business but a lens on the world that an older generation was not exposed to nor did they value. We do our children a disservice by not allowing them the option of choice in how they shape their futures. One of which is certainly that of entrepreneurship.

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