Why I Wrote My Book – And Why I’m Now Obsessed with the Topic

Author of Raising an Entrepreneur: How to Help Your Children Achieve Their Dreams – 99 Stories from Families Who Did

I never thought I would write a book. I’ve always done a lot of writing – and words have always been important to me – but for most of my career, which dealt with international development, I was always writing something short —a couple of pages, a press release, a quick memo. I also published and edited an online picture-heavy newsletter for 10 years — but there again, everything was really brief. So no, writing a book never crossed my mind.

In 2008, my older son Elliott started Summit Series, conferences and get-togethers of young entrepreneurs.  I started attending them a couple years later, when I thought it wouldn’t be weird for his mom to be there. I hadn’t known many successful Millennial entrepreneurs and I was curious how they had decided to take on so much risk and work so hard to start their company or organization.

I started asking these remarkable young people how they had turned out the way they had. I asked them what was the most important reason they were able to become a successful entrepreneur. How did they become the person they are now? What made them so confident and so willing to put everything on the line? Why are they not afraid to fail? And also, who had the biggest impact on their life?

To my surprise, almost all of them gave me a version of the same answer: “My mom believed in me. My mom told me I could succeed at anything I put my mind to or that I worked at hard enough. She supported my passion. She’s the reason I turned out this way.”

I was stunned. I wanted to shout this revelation to the world: Believe in your children! I kept talking about it to my family. And my sons said, “Mom, you need to write a book about this.” I told them I couldn’t write a book. And they said, “You’re the one who told us to believe in ourselves. Now it’s our turn to tell you: We believe in you and know you can create whatever it is if you want it enough.”

They went on: “Being an entrepreneur and starting something from scratch is hard. Believing you will succeed when the entire world tells you it’s impossible is a challenge. It feels as if everyone thinks that your dream is a waste of time and you shouldn’t even try. The only answer is to believe in yourself. But before you believe in yourself, someone else has to believe in you. And that someone often appears to be a mom. But sometimes it’s someone else. In this case, it’s your kids.”

So I decided to research and write a book about it.

I chose 70 entrepreneurs from their late 20s through their mid 40s with a variety of interests and skills — creators and innovators from different ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds, geographic settings, religious traditions, and family structures. As I interviewed person after person I started to see more and more clearly that, while in some ways everyone‘s upbringing had been different, in key areas they all had been raised the same.  I was astonished to discover that each of these entrepreneurs’ mothers, without consciously realizing it, without knowing one another, and without having a common background, had all followed the same basic principles when raising their children.

The more I understood this, the more excited I became about it. I wanted to share what I was finding, and I knew I wanted to write this book.

The process was pretty easy. I did two or three interviews a week. (I still had a day job.) When I interviewed someone, I took notes, and then asked myself, what’s the major story they shared with me? How did they learn to compete? Did they have a mentor? How did they deal with adversity? How did they instill confidence? What did they learn about failure?

In the beginning, I interviewed both the entrepreneurs and their parents to see if they told me similar stories. And they did. But eventually I started interviewing only the entrepreneurs, because I felt the parents were more guarded — they didn’t want to say anything that would embarrass their child.

When I’d finished all the interviews, I looked at my notes to see if the way I’d categorized their stories made sense. And it did: I had eleven “rules” that all the families had followed:  Support a passion. Let your child learn to win and lose. Don’t worry about straight A’s. Mentors can be great. Instill confidence. Embrace adversity. Nurture compassion. Be a great family. Show them there’s something bigger. Lead by following. And of course, the most important of all, believe in your child.

At that point, for me, writing the book was simple. I put the stories the entrepreneurs and their parents had told me into the rule it followed. (Getting it published is the subject of another article.) I’m very glad I wrote my book. If I hadn’t done the work — all the interviews and all the research that accompanied it —I’m sure I wouldn’t understand as clearly as I do now how important it is to raise your child this way.

And for the last 10 years, I’ve been speaking to different groups of parents about this. There are so many unhappy young people in the world, and I want to shout to all the parents out there: Believe in your child!  You may think every parent believes in their child. But that isn’t true. Parents love their children; they want their children to be successful. That’s not the same thing as believing in them. None of the parents of the successful entrepreneurs I talked to told their kids to stop spending so much time on their passion, or to “put away childish things” and focus on school.

Most parents are big on offering unsolicited advice to their kids about how to spend their time. They “suggest” what career they should have, urge them to get good grades in all their classes, pressure them to get into and graduate from a good college. The parents of the entrepreneurs I interviewed never did that. They trusted their children to make good decisions; they supported their choices; they encouraged them to follow their passion. And they let them know they would continue to support them through inevitable setbacks. They made sure their children knew that failure is how they would learn and grow on their road to success.

This is what drove me to write my book.  I hope it will give you ideas about how to raise great children.

Margot Machol Bisnow spent 20 years in government, including as an FTC Commissioner and staff director of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. For the last 10 years, she has spoken to parent groups about raising creative, confident, resilient children who achieve their dreams. She served as an Advisor to EQ Generation, an after-school program in New York City that gives children the skills to succeed; on the Advisory Board of the MUSE School in Malibu, that prepares young people to live consciously through passion-based learning; and on the Board of Spark the Journey in Washington DC, that mentors low-income high school students to achieve college and career success. Her new book is Raising an Entrepreneur: How to Help Your Children Achieve Their Dreams – 99 Stories from Families Who Did. Learn more at raisinganentrepreneur.com.