Q. A mom came up to us at a conference where we’d been speaking about entrepreneurship, “My teenage son is constantly coming up with business ideas, but I’m afraid to let him try. What if he fails?”

We are not doing our boys a service to protect them from ever failing. When we do that, failure seems more frightening. That makes them wary of taking reasonable risks that are necessary to success and when they do experience failure it devastates them. Contrast that to these famous failures:

Walt Disney was fired from a newspaper job because “he lacked imagination and had no good ideas.” Later when he tried to get Mickey Mouse into distribution, MGM told him it “would never work!” Good thing he didn’t listen.

Bill Gates dropped out of college and his first business failed miserably. Microsoft came later.

Michael Jordan initially failed to make his high school basketball team. What if he’d decided he just wasn’t good enough?

Thomas Edison was expelled from school as too unintelligent to learn. Yet, the same Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb and that project required incredible persistence. His team tested thousands of possible filaments that failed utterly before they found one that worked. Edison said, “Nearly every man who develops an idea works it up to the point where it looks impossible, and then he gets discouraged. That’s not the place to become discouraged.” His attitude was “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

And that’s the attitude we need to teach our boys. We can only do that, though, if we allow them to take risks that include a chance of failure. Let your boys risk failure while you’re there to help them up. <—Click to tweet this.

After all, what better time to fail at a business then when someone else is paying the rent and buying the groceries!

Related Resources:

Raising Real Men – We are so excited that you can now download the Mom & Dad Special (book & audiobook)! That means you can start reading and listening to practical help in raising godly sons right now! Click here for the hard copies.

“Raising Real Men is long overdue… In an era when the church has lost a biblical concept of masculinity and femininity this book is a breath of fresh air.” -Tedd Tripp, author of Shepherding a Child’s Heart

By His grace alone,

Hal & Melanie