Some thoughts on entrepreneurship:

Teddy R. said excellence in boxing comes two ways: natural gift or learning and hard work. He said he had boxing talent of the latter kind. Entrepreneurship is like that. It starts w/ a goal of independence. It can be learned, taught to kids.

I left my career in finance at age 37. I started and shutdown a business at age 28, but I still had the goal of being in business for myself. My business partner and I are opting our kids out of college for a variety of reasons but we plan for them to start businesses.

Some friends have fairly observed, "That sounds neat but you are a business owner -- so you have a good head start to teach you kids entrepreneurship." Maybe so. But I view myself as "transition generation".

My father was a education professor. I worked in business for others for 15 years learning all that I could. Now I am a business owner. And I am raising my boys to always think of their future career as owning a business. No college. Just books, talking with me, and work.

I gave up some time, security and money along the way, but it made sense when working toward a goal. Like Teddy R. in my OP, I learned while working toward a goal. I hope what I have learned will be a blessing to my children. That is what I mean by "transition generation".

And in case my story sounds too idealistic, my goals weren't always clear and my sin made my story much harder. In God's faithfulness I fought thru idolatry of money, porn and alcohol along the way. The latter two I brought out of youth; the first one I contracted in college.

But in spite of my sin, I had goals before the Lord along the way. "If we live and the Lord wills" is the absolute condition for any of our plans or ideas. But starting a business is not something that is unattainable for most people. It can be done with learning and hard work.

And don't despise the day of small things. A seed is small when it goes in the ground. But w/ time and nurture it can grow, especially across generations. My client's father was an electrician. Today, my client owns the same business selling large scale industrial power systems.

One of my goals before the Lord is to institutionalize some of what I have learned so that children of my friends and others can become a "transition generation" themselves, perhaps without 15 years of working for someone else. I don't know if that can work. We'll see.

The most different thing about being in business for yourself is the mindset. You have to go earn and build. No paycheck. I suspect if we can teach that mindset to young people it will be native to them. And assuming their lives are godly I am confident they can earn and build!