Should Parents Act Like CEOs or VCs?
Why you should raise your kids to be Pirates.
Dear Friend, Subscriber, and fellow Category Pirate,
Most parents act like CEOs.
In the legendary television show, The Office, Michael Scott (everyone’s favorite branch manager at Dunder Mifflin) asks Oscar in Accounting to explain what it means when the company has a surplus of $4,300 at the end of the fiscal year.
Oscar explains it to Michael like he’s five (as Michael requested):
“Your mommy and daddy give you $10 to open up a lemonade stand.
So you go out and you buy cups, and you buy lemons, and you buy sugar. And now, you find out that it only cost you $9. So you have an extra dollar. You can give that dollar back to Mommy and Daddy, but guess what? Next summer, when you ask them for money, they’re going to give you $9 because that’s what they think it costs to run the stand.
So what you want to do is spend that dollar on something now—so that your parents think that it costs $10 to run the lemonade stand.”
This is a great explanation of many modern day parent-child relationships.
It also perfectly explains how most employees at large companies view towards the annual budgeting process—and why so many vendors look forward to the great “month before fiscal year-end spending spree” season.
The purpose of parenting has evolved across history. In the Agrarian age, food production through agriculture was the central goal for society—and more specifically, the community and each individual family unit. More children meant more workers. Your job as a parent was to teach your children how to provide more leverage to your family and community by learning valuable skills like hunting, gathering, cooking, and so on. Or, it was to extend the versatility of the family and community by learning new skills like communication, architecture, or math, with the goal of amplifying the family’s ability to both provide and capture resources.
Either way, the family unit was the priority. And your job as Parent was to ensure your child became a functioning member of the community.