What Entrepreneurs Know That Schools Don’t
This has been on my mind today…
I want to tell you a kid I know. Lindsey’s son, his name is Gavin.
Gavin was homeschooled — and the summer he was 10, he decided he wanted to sell freezies at the soccer fields near his house.
So he made a business plan.
He figured out his costs and his pricing. He negotiated a loan with his mom. He bought supplies. He created a marketing strategy — posters, freebies, showing up consistently so people knew he’d be there.
He learned that you need a permit to sell things in a public space. So he got one.
He ran the whole thing himself with his homeschool mom’s support.
He was 10.
While Gavin was doing all of this — while he was learning profit margins and customer service and what happens when you run out of stock on a hot day — public school kids his age were sitting in classrooms.
Learning about money in a textbook.
I think about that contrast a lot.
Not to criticize those kids or their families.
But because it exposes something important about what we think education is for.
School teaches you about entrepreneurship.
Life teaches you to be an entrepreneur.
Those are not the same thing.
Here is what Gavin learned that no classroom could have taught him that summer:
That an idea is worthless without execution.
That customers don’t care about your plan — they care about whether you show up.
That failure isn’t theoretical. When you overbuy inventory and it melts, you feel it.
That success isn’t a grade. It’s a line of kids with sweaty fists full of quarters.
And he could learn all that because he was homeschooling. Because he had time, and support, and freedom to follow his interests.
I’ve built companies.
I’ve hired people.
And I can tell you with certainty that the skills that determine whether someone thrives — really thrives — are almost never the ones school measures.
Risk tolerance. Resourcefulness. The ability to start something from nothing and keep going when it’s hard.
The ability to fail on a Tuesday and show up again on Wednesday.
School teaches compliance.
Entrepreneurship requires the opposite.
It requires the willingness to do something before you’re sure it will work.
To make a decision without a teacher telling you the answer.
To be wrong in public and learn from it without it defining you.
We cannot keep preparing kids for a world that no longer exists.
The economy they are entering rewards the builders. The problem solvers. The ones who can look at a gap in the market — or a soccer field full of thirsty kids on a hot day — and figure out how to fill it.
Those skills aren’t taught.
They’re practiced.
And they have space in homeschooling.
Just ask Gavin.