WeWork has officially filed for bankruptcy.

Why is this being mentioned in a parenting newsletter?

Because it’s a reminder that even the most successful people make mistakes — and don’t learn from them.

So remember:

Don’t punish the mistake — amplify the lesson.

We’re highlighting some great lessons today – let’s go! 👇

In today’s issue:

1. Tactical Tuesday: Perfectionism is sneaky. Here’s how to spot it — and help your kids overcome it.

2. Something to inspire you: How a 19-year-old built a lucrative career around the principles he believes in.

3. Ivy’s takeaway: Kids need to stand for something — and not be afraid to fail while doing it.

Perfectionism is holding your kids back — here’s how to help

On the outside, perfectionism might seem positive.

Your kid’s getting good grades, acing their violin solo, and juggling a busy schedule without dropping the ball on anything.

But in reality, perfectionism can hinder your kids. Because they’re also probably:

😥 Having meltdowns over small mistakes.

🚫 Shying away from trying new things.

⌛ Taking forever to complete assignments because they don’t feel their work is “good enough”.

As parents, it’s natural to want our kids to achieve their most ambitious goals.

But we also don’t want them to be so obsessed with perfection that they never end up doing anything at all, for fear of making mistakes

How do you know if your kids are perfectionists?

According to this study, perfectionism is composed of three major parts:

Do any of those emotions in your kid resonate with you? If so, listen up.

This study shows that perfectionism even puts kids at risk for developing multiple psychological disorders, such as:

• Anxiety disorders

• Depression

• OCD

• Eating disorders

But don’t worry, we’ve got some useful tactics to help your kids conquer the perils of perfectionism.👇

Kill the perfection monster: How to help kids make more mistakes

🛡️If your kids are afraid of being criticized by others, they’ll do everything they can to hide their flaws.

But here’s the problem: in order to be good at anything, you first need to be bad at it.

So if your kid is too afraid to show their flaws, they’ll also be too afraid to:

• Make mistakes

• Trip over themselves

• Learn as they go

Before your kid can be the expert they wish they were, they have to be a beginner — but perfectionism doesn’t allow this.

So how do we help our kids discover that being a newbie isn’t something to hide?

👉 Be a little imperfect yourself. Pick a new skill to learn, whether it’s knitting, card tricks, or roller skating — and let your kids witness you messing up, dusting yourself off, and continuing to try anyway.

👉 Stop the comparison trap. If your kid’s comparing themselves to others, tell them to compare themselves to the person they were when they started — noting how far they’ve come, not how far they have left to go.

👉 Point out the lesson. Help your kids uncover the lesson learned from every mistake they make. Remind them that they wouldn’t learn anything without messing up.

👉 Check their environment. Being surrounded by high achievers is a good thing — until your kid feels like they can’t keep up. Ask them: do their friends encourage them, or make them feel worse about themselves?

👉 Back up your promises with action. If you tell your child that all you care about is effort, then don’t ask how everyone else did on the test, says Jennifer Breheny Wallace, author of Never Enough.

Overall, it’s important to remind your kids that you love them, no matter what.

When your kids know that you’ll still love them, even if:

• They get rejected

• Flunk a test

• Miss a goal at the big game

…they’ll feel less pressure to be perfect. 

And that means more freedom to dive headfirst into that messy, human process of learning and growing (which is way better than perfection).

How a 19-year-old built software valued at $7.5B — without compromising his values

WordPress is a website creation platform that powers 43.1% of all websites.

Its combined economic impact is valued at $600B.

Oh, and it was co-founded by a 19-year-old: Matt Mullenweg.

Today, Matt is the CEO of Automattic, WordPress’s “parent company”, which is valued at over $7B. 💸

“Parent company” is placed in quotes because no company technically owns WordPress — it’s open-source software. 

And this is exactly how Matt likes it:

What exactly is open-source?

Matt created WordPress because it supported a cause he believed in, one that aligned with his vision for the world:

“Open-source is – for me, the most important idea I've been exposed to in my lifetime, actually,” says Matt. “[It’s] kind of like software with a Bill of Rights attached to it.”

Open-source software follows a list of four freedoms:

• The freedom to run the program, for any purpose.

• The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish.

• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor.

• The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions, giving the community a chance to benefit from your changes.

🤔 Sounds like a no-brainer… right?

But as it turns out, most software that we use on a daily basis isn’t actually open-source. Matt says:

For Matt, these freedoms are paramount — and that’s why WordPress is still free and entirely open-source.

Matt is living proof that you don’t need to sacrifice your values in order to be successful. 👏

The WordPress origin story

WordPress has always been an open-source project, even before its inception.

It started with some blogging software that Matt was using on a casual basis.

Then, that software was abandoned. 

So Matt, along with another enthusiast, Mike Little, picked up the torch and kept it going.

In open-source, this is called “forking” — and it was a smart move. But there was just one catch:

☝️With open-source, you can take all the code, but you have to change the name.

A friend suggested WordPress, and they were off to the races. 

Starting a business — or, rather, a movement — at 19

Matt worried he’d already missed the blogging wave.

The biggest players in tech all produced blogging software, so Matt was concerned about how his scrappy little WordPress program would fit in.

• Microsoft had Spaces

• AOL had Journals

• Yahoo had 360

• Google had Blogger

“It felt very saturated”, says Matt.

Fortunately, he was wrong, and WordPress blew everyone’s expectations right out of the water.

Lesson learned. 😅

And there were a lot more lessons coming Matt’s way, seeing as he was only 19 when he took over the WordPress software.

Since then, he’s learned a lot, and the process wasn’t always easy.

“I was a pretty terrible communicator for many of those years,” admits Matt. “So everything that’s going right, I’ve definitely done wrong at some point.” 

Making mistakes is unavoidable, and it’s often the best way to learn. But to lessen the damage from the learning process, Matt has this advice:

👉 “Make reversible decisions quickly and irreversible decisions very deliberately.”

In other words, don’t sweat the small stuff — save your time and energy for the things that truly matter.

Kids need to be taught to stand up for what they believe in — even if it means failing

Matt’s story really inspires me.

It’s easy to look back and think “well, he’s super successful now, so the risk paid off”.

But put yourself in his shoes as a 19-year-old. He was:

• Mapping out the “wild west” of the internet.

• Going up against tech giants.

• (Admittedly) making wrong decisions left and right.

For Matt, it wasn’t about being perfect, it was about trying. So for everything he got wrong, he tried something else that he eventually got right.

I’m not inside his head, but I think one of the reasons he was able to be so nimble and resilient is because he truly believed in his cause.

What cause is your kid passionate about?

It doesn’t have to be as ambitious as the democratization of the internet, but if you can’t answer that question right now, it’s probably time to help them discover a cause worth fighting for.

The life skills they’ll learn along the way are priceless.

Until next time,

Ivy

CEO Prequel, BETA Camp, Apollo

Follow my journey on LinkedIn