This is why your kids can’t handle failure

Today’s email topic was a reader request — here’s what this parent wanted to know:

“My kids are terrible with coping when things don't go their way. I'm afraid it's going to limit their desires to get out of their comfort zones and only participate in things they are already good at or confident in. The sooner they're more comfortable with accepting what looks like a failure may be an opportunity to learn, the better!”

This parent is so right — failure is an opportunity to learn. But how do we get kids to learn that? That’s exactly what this email is going to set out to answer.

💬 And if there’s something you’d like to see me cover in a future newsletter, hit reply and let me know!

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💡 How to get kids to embrace failure

If we want our kids to get better at handling failure, we need to teach them to view it as a prerequisite to doing great things.

There are hundreds of examples of people in history who did exceptional things, and your kids have probably already heard those stories.

But I want you to go back and re-tell them, and this time emphasize the failures that person had to go through first to get to the point where they could go down in history.

Henry Ford went bankrupt five times before founding Ford Motor Company.

Jack London submitted his first story over 600 times before it was accepted by a publisher. He went on to write renowned literary classics.

Walt Disney was fired from one of his first animation jobs because his editor felt he “lacked imagination and had no good ideas.” He never gave up, and eventually, he built one of the most iconic media brands of all time.

The more you look at the stories of successful people, the more you’ll see that failure really is a requirement for doing great things — it’s not something to avoid, but something to embrace as a sure sign that you’re on the path to greatness.

We can teach this at home by celebrating not only when things go well for our kids — but by celebrating when they get up and try again after things didn’t.

If your kids are older, start things off by having a discussion with them. Ask them about a time they had to overcome something difficult. Next time your kids are struggling and feeling frustrated, remind them of this story to show them they can overcome the odds again.

In our programs, we want our students to learn to get out of their comfort zone and embrace failure, so we give them regular practice at doing just that.

At Apollo, we give kids a weekly “failure” challenge and ask them: How will you fail this week?

Kids are invited to choose a new challenge for themselves, whether that’s doing keep-ups with a soccer ball, painting, singing, juggling, etc.

Then, kids are told to record how they failed, and how they overcame their failure and discuss it at our next session.

Reframe failure as a prerequisite to success — then help your kids get tons of failure reps so they can strengthen their resilience muscle.

Resilience is the #1 skill kids need to succeed in the fast-changing future

It’s estimated that 2/3 of children today will work in jobs that don’t currently exist.

Worrying about what hard skills will be valuable by the time our kids enter the workforce is a lost cause (unless you have a crystal ball). All we know is that hard skills change all the time — what’s in demand today will be obsolete tomorrow.

So what skills are they going to need to be competitive in the job market, if we don’t even know what jobs they’ll be doing or what skills will be relevant?

I’ll tell you: they’ll need resilience.

New tech will arise constantly — the people who can roll with it and figure out how to use it in their work will be miles ahead of everyone else.

So instead of teaching kids some specific hard skill, we need to teach our kids to have the kind of mindset that can thrive in a fast-changing world.

Assess: Can your kids step outside of their comfort zone? Can they try new things? Can they challenge themselves? Are they comfortable with failure? These are the things your kids will need to be successful in the future.

And these skills are something employers are definitely hiring for — there’s a reason that the unofficial slogan of Silicon Valley startups is “fail forward”. Companies want employees who won’t be afraid to innovate.

To raise your kid’s potential, broaden their horizons. This is exactly why we have our students constantly stepping outside of their comfort zone in our programs:

• At Apollo, our students try out a new field every week through hands-on challenges and real-world projects.

• At BETA Camp, kids build a business in just 4 weeks, and most of them have never done anything like it before.

• And in our programs at Prequel, we expose kids to concepts that school isn’t teaching them — things like investing or how to master AI tools that they’ve never learned before.

The best vehicle for gaining all these skills: entrepreneurship.

All the skills your kids need to be successful in a fast-changing future, to become more resilient, and to embrace failure can be taught through entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurs learn to see problems as opportunities — every problem has a solution that can become a revenue-generating business.

Entrepreneurs must be adaptable, rapidly iterating their product as they get customer and market feedback.

And finally, entrepreneurs must be willing to fail. Odds are, the idea you start with won’t be the one you end with, and that’s okay! Entrepreneurs must be willing to test out ideas, see which ones fail, get feedback, and iterate.

This is why entrepreneurship became the focus of our first program, BETA Camp. We saw that by learning this skill, kids didn’t just get better at selling stuff (though that’s cool, too!). They got better at everything:

• Better at school: Instead of letting a bad grade fluster them, entrepreneurial kids problem-solve and iterate to find a solution.

• Better at communicating: After you’ve presented an idea to venture capitalists, it’s a lot less scary to make a new friend.

• Better at selling themselves: Like I said, sales isn’t just about stuff. It’s about the confidence to present something in a way that makes people want to get on board. If you can sell a product, you can sell anything: you can sell ideas to your friends, you can sell yourself to a top university, and you can sell a salary negotiation to your future boss.

If you want your kids to learn entrepreneurship with us, check out our next cohort at BETA Camp here. And if your kids aren’t in high school yet, check out Apollo for kids ages 10-13.

Thanks for reading!

Until next time,

Ivy

CEO Prequel, BETA Camp, Apollo

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