Compassion = motivation

Compassion = motivation

“If you want others to be happy,

Practice compassion. If you

Want to be happy practice compassion.”

-Dalai Lama-

I strongly feel that while the entrepreneurial mind enables a person to start and grow a business venture, it is compassion that will sustain it. If the primary motivation for setting up a business enterprise is profit, then an entrepreneur can lose his motivation once this is met. The business no longer becomes meaningful. The search for meaning in what we do is what often sustain us.

            Meeting the bottom line is important because it will allow me to pay my teacher and improve our facilities, but it is not the motivation that sustains me and keeps me fully invested in the vision of our school.

            I know of people who have set up schools, then just as quickly closed  them down, simply because they were no longer profitable. I have also met many venture capitalists who have offered to grow my school, but at a cost.

            I feel that in the end, a true entrepreneur will find more reward in the good that his business id doing for others whether it is through a service, a  product or job generation than the profits it brings.

            Compassion is an equally important component of the entrepreneurial mind. It determines the kind of decisions an entrepreneur will make, the type of culture a company will have and how customers and employees will be treated. Compassion is the heart of the business.

            The challenge for parents and teachers who want to teach compassion is to get children to care about people outside their families. Filipinos value close family ties, but we are not raised to share the same care and compassion for people in the community and the country.

            It will take a deliberate effort among parents and teachers to give children the opportunity to actively show compassion toward others.

Grace Glory Go (Philippine Star)

“We believe that every employee is an integral part of the business. We truly treat each person in the company like family. It’s faith in the fact that whatever we build will benefit not just ourselves but everybody around us. We have faith that whatever efforts we put in will bring good results.”

ABC’s of developing compassion

Always think of how you can improve people’s lives. Empathy towards other encourages compassion, which children can put into action by thinking of business ventures that can solve social ills or make a difference in other people’s lives. One of the key advocacies of the Multiple Intelligences School is to encourage children to use their intelligences to make a difference. In line with this, our children run a yearly MI Kids Can. For Kidss, by Kids Bazzar to teach children to be entrepreneurs with hearts. They create products and sell them for the benefit of underprivileged children.

            It is never too early to teach children that they can already think of ways to improve people’s lives. You can even start by asking your child to sort all his old toys and old clothes, sell these through a rummage sale and donate the earnings to support a feeding program that your child can be part of.

Believe that Filipino can. Love for country and caring for the Filipino should be in the heart of any future entrepreneur. We should model for our children pride in our heritage and our products. Buy Filipino and let your child know why. Explain how buying Filipino products will help generate businesses and jobs for our countrymen. My rule for is that we can only buy abroad what we cannot buy here. It has become second nature for my children to say, Mom, we have that in the Philippines, let’s not buy it here. By doing this, we come home with lighter luggage all the time.

            Remember that taking pride in the Filipino worker and our products will motivate the future entrepreneur to invest in our country.

Care about others. Successful entrepreneurs recognize that people contribute greatly to their company’s success. Teach your child to care more about others than the profit they can generate. Happy employees will be more productive employees. Joselito Campos learned from his father that Loyalty is a two way street. You have to take care of the employees and they will work (long and hard) for you. We treat our employees more as a family. When the entrepreneurial mind is wired to care about others, the motivation for product development and human resource development will always be meaningful and for the service of others.

“With ordinary talent and

Extraordinary perseverance

All thins are attainable.”

-Thomas Foxwell Buxton-

Commitment = determination and perseverance

Commitment = determination and perseverance

The entrepreneurial mind is fertile ground for bright ideas but it is self discipline and commitment that will see to it that an idea grows. Many people try to be entrepreneurs, but hey ultimately fail because they lack the determination and perseverance to hurdle challenges and get back up after a fall.

            Splash corp. CEO Dr. Roland Hortaleza, who build his company on innovative beauty products, says, “all throughout my entrepreneurial journey, I have had my share of failures. We’ve had failed product launches, failed product innovations, failed packaging. Our hit rate is probably only 30 percent. But if you persevere long enough, you’ll have enough success to tide you over.”

            Commitment, however, is very difficult to develop. But it is what determines a person’s ability to put in the hard work and the persistence to see an idea or task through. Commitment can be nurtured, however. The discipline of work is not developed in adulthood, but in childhood.

            I’ve heard parents say, “I know my child is smart, but why does he not apply himself to school work? His grades don’t reflect what he is capable of. I can’t get him to work and do his best.” This apparent mediocrity in work is reflective of the child’s lack of commitment to do excellent and good work.

            Parents and teachers can develop discipline and commitment by giving children the opportunity to be accountable for goals they have set. The positive expectation that they will finish what they start, without any excuses and no matter how difficult the task, gives them the character to develop commitment, determination and perseverance.

“With ordinary talent and extraordinary perseverance,

All thins are attainable.”

-Thomas Foxwell Buxton”-

ABC of developing commitment

 Always do your best and work hard. There is no substitute for hard work. Mediocrity, or doing work just to get by, is common among children who are overindulged. It doesn’t matter if you are rich or poor, if you are not careful, you will end up teaching children that they can get what they want without working for it. The Filipino trait or “bahala na”, which is about leaving everything to chance, should not be encouraged or modeled. A child who is lazy to do his homework will say “bahala na” and resigns himself to what happens the next day. Parents and teachers should watch out for laziness and push children to work hard and be accountable for their work.

Be in charge welcome responsibility and change. An entrepreneurial mindset comes with a take charge attitude. When you own a operate a business, no one else is responsible for its successes or failures. There’s only you. Teach children at an early age to welcome responsibility. Tell them that there will be challenges and there will be factors that they cannot control, but they can choose to not give up and instead confront challenges and just keep on solving problems that come their way. Give them chores around the house, or if you have a business, ask them to help out. Del Monte Phils. CEO Joselito Campos, whose father founded drug manufacturing firm Unilab, remembers helping his father out when he was just 13years old. The valuable experience opened his eyes to what workers go through every day, enabling him to become a better CEO.

Continue to be a lifelong learner. The best commitment a child can make is to be a lifelong learner. It will teach him to be self reliant and be responsible for his won knowledge and decisions.

            Perseverance is fuelled by the desire to succeed and constantly improve. If the perseverance is fuelled by the desire to succeed and constantly improve. If the attitude towards learning is positive, children will gain the entrepreneurial mindset to continuously seek better and new ways to do things or to improve their products. Successful entrepreneurs are continuously reinventing themselves and their enterprises to remain competitive. Love for learning is modeled best by parents and teachers, who mush show children that no one is ever too old to learn.

Creativity = Innovation

Creativity =  Innovation

“Creativity is thinking up new things.

Innovation is doing new things.”

=Theodore Levitt=

A creative mind gives birth to innovation. Creativity allows the entrepreneurial mind to come up with new ideas and solve problems in a new way. And the best time to tap into the wellspring of creativity is during childhood because creativity declines steadily as a child grows into an adult, as shown by a study in Utah.

Age Group                                                       percentage of creativity used

Kindergarten children                                        95% - 98%

Junior school children                                        50% - 70%

High school children/university students 30% - 50 %

Adults                                                              less than 20%

It is no wonder then that few adults come up with Eurika ideas in adulthood. Those who were able to come up with revolutionary ideas as adults were able to do so because they had a fertile, creative mind. Take the cases of Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo and Albert Einstein.

A study of their handwritten notes showed that they were far ahead of their time, and unlike their contemporaries who were limited by the language of words, all three of them used the language of words, all three of them used the language of images through illustrations and diagrams to make their creative thinking visible.

Among Filipinos, we want the entrepreneurial mind to flourish despite the tendency of many businesses to be copycats or imitators of successful products. A study by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor indicated that Filipino business are mostly small (micro) in scale and may be lacking in originality and innovativeness, reflecting the copycat syndrome.

We want to raise a new generation of entrepreneurs who are capable of original and innovative thinking. This is only possible if the creative minds honed.

ABC of developing creativity

Always seek to develop new ideas and improve processes. When children complain about something, encourage them to come up with creative solutions. There are always better ways of doing things and the possibilities are endless. Allow children to experiment with materials or designs. Encourage them to jot down their ideas in a notebook. With dedication, mentorship and research, an idea can become a reality.

Lllac Diaz, founder of My shelter Foundation, uses the more affordable, soil filled earth bags to construct schools instead of traditional cement and wood, allowing him to build more schools with the same budget.

The imagination and creativity employed by children when they play with blocks or construct with LEGOs can lead to a similar innovation.

Be flexible and resourceful. Creativity is not possible without flexibility of thought. Flexibility allows a person to see things from different angles. To consider things from other points of view and to represent old concepts in new ways. Resourcefulness is flexibility in problem solving. Any aspiring entrepreneur knows that change is something you need to constantly keep up with. Flexible thinking should thus be encouraged among children and teens.

Teachers and parents should allow children to come up with different ways to arrive at the same solution. Flexibility and creativity will die in homes and schools that encourage  only one correct way of doing things.

Creative imagination.  In Albert Einstein’s wise words, Imagination is more important than knowledge, for imagination is limitless. One of the valuable 21^st century traits of students is the ability to think out of the box.

The use of imagination should be encouraged in all the intelligences – creative writing (word), problem solving (number), song writing (music), dance choreography (body), experimentation (nature), painting (art) and projects (people and self). Allow them to explore the limits of creative imagination by giving them recycled materials to play with. Your future architect, engineer, designer and imaginer will be at work.

Curiosity = vision

Curiosity = vision

The parents respond to their children’s constant questioning with a curt “keep quit” These parents are not very different from teachers who order their students to just listen and not ask any question. There are also those who still heard. All of these responses conspire against the development of a child’s natural curiosity.

“Vision without action is a dream.

Action without vision is simply passing the time.

Action with vision is making a positive difference."

=Joey Barker=

Curiosity is at the core of the entrepreneurial mind. It pushes a person to want to know more or learn about a problem; question how the problem is related to prior knowledge and experience; and persist in researching and exploring all resources to know more about a problem. It allows a person to react positively to new, strange and mysterious elements of an issue or problem.

This kind o curious mind enables a person to come up with his own vision, which can be solution to a problem or an answer to a need. Without the ability to create a personal vision. Entrepreneurial activity cannot be born.

Marixi Prieto

(Philippine Daily Inquirer)

“You should have a clear idea of where you want to go. Once you have that road map, then be ready to make the necessary sacrifices to achieve what you want. Be focused and do not be distracted.

ABC of developing curiosity

Ask Question and seek answer. Encourage children to ask questions and help them seek their own answers. Teach them to do their own research, whether by reading an encyclopedia or surfing the internet. Children begin their lives as question marks, but sadly end their lives as periods. An entrepreneurial mind never stops asking question so it can come up with many possibilities. Play the “5xWhy? Game” and allow your child to ask why or how five times. Challenge yourself and your child to come up with different answers everytime. This will get the child into the habit of asking “why?”

Be a dreamer. Allow children to dream, no matter how crazy it may sound. The difference between a businessman and on entrepreneur is VISION. A businessman’s concern is to earn profit but an entrepreneur will want to see his vision become a reality. Not enough children possess the entrepreneurial mind because dreaming is not encouraged. Parents have a critical role in determining whether the child will be a bum with a dream or a successful entrepreneur. Parents have to support and teach children to systematically pursue a dream by being goal oriented. Acting on a dream will require a plan.

Choices and exploration. Curiosity flourishes when children are allowed to explore an interest of their choice. Allow them to experiment and solve problems on their own.