How To Teach Kids To Lead | Simon Sinek

So teaching kids how to lead is the same as teaching adults how to lead. Right. Putting them in situations where they're allowed to fail and instead of complimenting them for the. For the thing, letting them try again, like feeling frustrated and trying again. It's one of the funny things about modern dating. I have a friend, a female entrepreneur. I have to say this because it's her story, not mine. You'll see why I'm catching it. She believes that men make better entrepreneurs than women. She believes.

But here's what she said. She goes. This is what she explained. She goes, when we're young, men are the social aggressors, right? Men. Men are the ones who are required to ask the girl to prom. You know, if the guy doesn't ask the girl to prom traditionally, then he doesn't go to prom, where traditionally the woman waits to get asked to go to prom, for example. And men learn the skill set, boys learn the skill set at a young age of asking somebody out and getting rejected and then asking them again and getting rejected again and learning about humiliation and just having to suck it up and try again. Otherwise you're never going to go out on a date. Sort of. This is the traditional dating model. And flash forward later on in life. You see this very often amongst entrepreneurs, which is. I've seen it happen. I've seen. I've been in a meeting where a male entrepreneur who's got. Who's developing a new product that's 20 or 30% done, he'll sell it in the room and figure it out later. And I've seen it with women entrepreneurs who are brilliant and smart and they're 90% there. And I'm like, it's not perfect yet. I'm like, it doesn't matter. Tell them, you know. Yeah. And it comes from this, this strange skill we learned back when we were kids. Now in this modern day of swiping and dating, now nobody's learning that skill. But I think what we have to learn, both for men and for women, and it's not a male, female thing, which is there are circumstances in which both all children, regardless of boys or girls, that all children have to learn to try and fail and try again and like, struggle through humiliation and figure it out and go through it again all the time, knowing that a parent or a friend is loving and caring and supportive of them all the time. And I think that's the essential part, which is there's always someone who's there who loves me. Because the only way we get courage, I For one, believe courage is an external thing, not an internal thing. You know, the reason we jump out of a plane is not because of some deep internal fortitude. It's because there's a parachute in our back. It's the parachute that gave us the courage. Sure, right.

You know, many people in this room, you know, men or women, who have risked their lives to save the life of somebody else thinking they were going to die, and through some miracle, survived.

And I've asked them, I've asked them, why'd you do it? You've got a family, you've got kids. No one ordered you to do it. No one would have ordered you to do it. No one would have faulted you if you didn't do it. You may have even disobeyed an order to do it, you know, or why did you do it? And they almost all say the same thing, which is, I did it because they would have done it for me. The courage comes from the confidence that somebody else has my back, and that's what gives me the confidence to do things even though I'm scared. And so it goes back to those human relationships. As long as a child knows that there's someone there who loves me, then we should allow them to go through those very difficult, frustrating and uncomfortable lessons.