Raising a Billionaire : Six Parenting Prinicpales from Richard Branson’s Mother – Part One.

Lately I have been stumbling upon Richard Branson’s advertisement about his “Disruptive Entrepreneurship” master class. Probably because I had just bought his best-selling book, “Screw it, Let’s do it” and the internet keeps serving me what I am already keen on! Anyway, I read it in one day. It’s an inspiring and funny book, and now, I wish I could have taken a masterclass with his late mother, Eve Branson, though :-).

I wasn’t expecting parenting wisdom in Richard Branson’s book. It just confirms that for every successful person, there has always been a loved one who has had a tremendous belief in their wildest dreams

Principle One : Believe.

I found this powerful and quite expressive of a strong, confident mindset. That was the philosophy that Eve Branson lived by. Richard described his mother as “one of those people who never says ‘can’t.’” “She believes anything is possible if you try.”

She trusted her abilities and transferred these skills to her kids. This attitude made him believe that he can achieve anything as long as he is willing to make the effort. Quoting Richard Branson ‘Success is more than luck. You have to believe in yourself and make it happen. That way, others also believe in you.’ An important lesson!

If we believe in our children, in their inner abilities, and that they can achieve success for themselves, they’ll believe in themselves. So, when your child tells you, “I want to be an artist” despite his or her basic current drawing skills, catch their passion and their potential for growth and say, “I believe you will be a wonderful artist one day.”

Insights:
Don’t forget that your child learns by watching you. Believe in yourself and in your child, and he or she will.

Principle Two : Develop the child’s Self-Efficacy.

The second principle, applied by Eve Branson, is also backed by science as well.

Richard’s mum had two aims. One was about finding useful tasks for her children; she thought that there is no good in doing nothing. The other was about finding ways to make money.

She was an entrepreneur herself; she used to make little wooden tissue boxes and wastepaper bins. She used the garden as her workshop. The kids had the job of painting and stacking them up. One day Harrods, the luxury department store, ordered them, and sales boomed. Clearly, Eve gave a high priority to engaging her children in daily activities; by giving them chores and responsibilities, intuitively she was developing their self-efficacy.

In her excellent TED talk, Stanford’s former dean, Julie Lythcott-Haims, shed light on the concept of self-efficacy and how it is as important or even more important than self-esteem (praise).

“Self-efficacy is developed when one’s actions lead to outcomes; this includes free play and chores, because they need to do the thinking, the planning, the deciding, the doing, the making, the hoping, the coping, the trial and error, the dreaming, and the experiencing of life for themselves.”

Basing her argument on the results of the Harvard Grant study, she stated that the primary role of parents is to strengthen their children’s abilities, first by loving them and then by forging a winning mindset by giving them chores. Indeed, the study found that the happiest adults and the most successful ones have the two following traits:

• First, they are able to have happy, long-lasting relationships, which is a direct result of self-love acquired through parents’ unconditional love.

• Second, doing chores during their childhood gave them the right skillset to move things forward, to initiate solutions, to innovate, and thus to be successful.

Find this thought-provoking talk here:

Insights:
As parents, we should care more about giving love and chores to our children than about pressuring them about marks and grades to get them into the most competitive colleges.

Principle Three : Build Independence. 

Eve Branson always tried to find something for her kids to do. She helped them to be independent, to think for themselves, and to get things done. Her philosophy in life is could be summarised in: “IF YOU WANT milk, don’t sit on a stool in the middle of a field in the hope that the cow will back up to you… Don’t just sit around. Catch the cow.”

She would stop the car a few miles from their house and ask the four-year-old future billionaire to find his own way home across the fields. As he grew older, the lessons and challenges grew harder, like the day she woke him up one winter morning while it was still dark and sent him on a fifty-mile bike ride with lunch to England’s south coast! Honestly, I had to translate the distance into kilometers to be able to understand the trust that she had in her little boy and in humanity: 80 km! This was in the early sixties; I guess life was different back then. For sure, she wanted him to be strong and to rely on himself, and sure, he did.

Thanks to his education, Richard Branson grew up, as he said, believing in himself, believing in the hands that work, in the brains that think, and in the hearts that love. I quote, “I knew you could do it,’ Mum said. And so had I, and I was not going to give up until I had proved it.”

In My Next letter , I will explore three other principles of Eve’s parenting mindset.