A two-year-old’s guide to entrepreneurship

Daughter shows signs of business talent

She is fierce and fearless. She takes risks and she is relentless in the pursuit of her goals. She hates losing. She has no interest in compromises. She fights for every last inch of whatever she wants. She is not in the least bit sentimental. In fact, sometimes she is even a little bit mean.

More than anyone else in our family, my two-year-old daughter displays the characteristics of a successful business owner (or, come to think of it, a drug lord from Breaking Bad).

I have no idea how she’ll deploy these talents as an adult, but for now she is running our household.

Don’t worry, Sheryl Sandberg, she is leaning in. So far, in fact, that she might fall over.

Two years ago, also during Global Entrepreneurship Week, I wrote about how her brother, like most infants, showed some entrepreneurial tendencies, including an appetite for risk and an ability to bounce back and try again quickly.

But he has nothing on her. When they fight over a toy, it doesn’t last long. He has two years and 20 pounds on her, but he always blinks first. “Take it!” he says, without a hint of bitterness. “I don’t want it anymore.”

Sometimes, when he isn’t even a party to the dispute, he intervenes and insists that his mother and I give in to her demands. This is not out of some sense of protectiveness of his younger sister, trust me. He just doesn’t like where she goes when she is disappointed.

None of us does. There is just something about the force of her personality, her sheer persistence, that triggers an instinct to surrender in all of us. She reminds both of her parents of a much-admired family friend, a longtime female executive with a take-no-prisoners approach to business and life.

She can be a handful, to say the least. But part of me is cheering on these characteristics.

Even though we must all contend with them now — and I don’t even want to imagine her teenage years — I hope her tenacity and determination never dissipate.

Some parts of our personality are hardwired, others adapt to conditions and evolve with maturity.

I’m curious to see whether her surroundings will encourage her down a path of challenge, risk and reward, or drum the instinct out of her.

I’m rooting for the former. As traditional jobs in everything from manufacturing to the public service evaporate, we’re hearing more often that we need to create a culture of entrepreneurship, to foster more young people willing to take the risks of owning a business.

There are probably many things we can do in our schools and our cities. But I’m starting to think that it’s not so much that we need to stimulate entrepreneurship but that we must stop stifling it. Many children start out with a willingness to take chances and pursue lofty goals, and everyone from parents to teachers to employers, knowingly or unwittingly, squashes them. Don’t take risks. Find a secure job. Save your money.

Those are all good pieces of advice. But if Steve Jobs had followed any of them, your cellphone would be a lot less useful. The time to take risks and forgo security is when you are young. When I started my first business, I remember thinking it might not succeed but that it would be an excellent learning experience. (It turns out I was right on both counts.)

It’s difficult for parents to watch their children stumble, but failure is a good teacher, especially in business. The first thing we could all do to cultivate more entrepreneurship is let our children take a few risks with their careers and be prepared for them to falter. The worst that can happen is they learn something and then have to look for a new job with sharper skills and a better perspective.

I’m certainly not going to push my daughter into a career in business. I don’t care what path my kids choose, as long as they are safe and happy. Besides, based on what I’ve seen so far, if she has something in mind for her future occupation, I’ll have little chance of talking her out of it.

If it turns out she does choose to become an entrepreneur, I will feel a little bit of empathy for her employees. As her brother and I know, she is already a tough boss.

But I envy her future shareholders. I hope I’ll be around long enough to be one of them.