How To Raise Entrepreneurial Kids with Jodie Cook

My guest choice for today’s episode is a bit different and I am really excited to welcome Jodie Cook! Jodie is an entrepreneur who built and sold her social media agency over a ten-year period. Her experience of starting up, creating a brand, winning and serving clients, hiring a team, and growing and selling a company has been written into books and articles with millions of readers. She is the author of several books including two volumes of Stop Acting Like You’re Going to Live Forever, How To Raise Entrepreneurial Kids, Instagram Rules, and The Clever Tykes Storybooks. She is also a Forbes 30 under 30 Social Entrepreneur in Europe and a regular contributor of theirs.

Jodie first shares her background story. Growing up, she followed the traditional path when it came to her career. After high school, she went to college because that is what you are supposed to do. After that, she got on a graduate scheme, and this is where it all changed for her. This is where she learned how to think for herself through different coaching sessions. This is also the time she decided to start her own business.

We then take a little detour with our conversation and talk about the fact that Jodie powerlifts competitively. She shares that she was always quite sporty and started out as a runner, doing half marathons and 10k races. Eventually, she joined a gym that had a lot of competitive lifters and soon she began competing and truly enjoyed it. Since then, she has represented Great Britain internationally and she still competes within the British Powerlifting Federation in the under 57kg (125lbs) bodyweight category.

We then discuss how to get kids to be interested or want to learn more about being an entrepreneur. When she was doing the research for her book, Jodie interviewed around 200 people on how they're raising their kids to be entrepreneurs and how they themselves were raised to be entrepreneurs. What she found was that it either came from inspiration or desperation. In her book, How To Raise Entrepreneurial Kids, Jodie talks about four pillars: the mindset, the skills, the experiences and the coaching.

We then dive into the mindset of raising entrepreneurial kids. Jodie explains that in the book, the mindset pillar consists of a lot of different areas. The first one is the Family Mission Statement, a set of family values; the other part is setting goals, how to develop a child's interests instead of shutting them down.

Next, Jodie explains what she believes is one of the biggest disservices that we make when it comes to raising our kids as entrepreneurs. It became incredibly easy to trust the “educational conveyor belt,” to think in terms of what the school or the college wants us to do. It is commonplace to think that we're choosing our own way forward when actually we're choosing from a very predetermined set of options.

Lastly, we discuss Jodie’s book, Stop Acting Like You’re Going To Live Forever. A couple of years before she wrote this book, Jodie was attending a Forbes event and met an editor who told her that they were launching a contributor program for Forbes. Jodie followed up with the editor a few times after that and when the program launched she was accepted as a contributor on the topics of entrepreneurship. Soon, one of her articles called “How to Stop Caring About What Everyone Else Thinks” received massive attention. This is when she decided to publish her articles as a book. Since then, she has published the first volume with 36 different articles and the second volume with 45 articles.

Don’t miss this episode of the Just Start Real Estate Podcast with Jodie Cook, who delivers a wisdom-packed interview on the entrepreneurial lifestyle!

Notable Quotes:

“I definitely didn't have a business plan, it was just two words: getting clients.”

Jodie Cook

“I started to become fascinated that I started my own business at 22 years old, but hardly any of my friends did. They all went down the traditional career path.”

Jodie Cook

“I am fascinated with how entrepreneurs are created and that's what led to me thinking about it, talking to people, writing about it.”

Jodie Cook

“Everyone's born with self-awareness and then education takes it away.”

Jodie Cook

“We are all different and we all have different strengths and weaknesses.”

Jodie Cook

“A lot of entrepreneurs that I've met, interviewed, and talked to have something competitive in their background.”

Mike Simmons

“It's either inspiration or desperation; they've come from one of those places.”

Jodie Cook

“If you find something that you love that much and that you're really good at, you could probably turn anything into a business. Because the business side is secondary to you continuing to follow your purpose.”

Jodie Cook

“Everything in your life revolves around doing the work the school tells you to do and kind of just moving down this path with your head down. It's no wonder that most people just end up being spit out at the end of that conveyor belt in the same place.”

Mike Simmons

“Sometimes people take themselves too seriously and lack of perspective is what causes that.”

Jodie Cook

“It's so easy to bring something down and it's not that easy to build it up. It's just another reason why we really don't need to care about what anyone thinks because you are the artist and the architect.”