Gary’s Q&A

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Matthew Coleman asks Gary, In your estimation, what early influences in your life led you to entrepreneurship, travelling, and now podcasting? How was Curiosity stoked within you, and how, in your estimation, can this Curiosity be similarly stoked in the youth of today?

Well……I’m not really sure. There is no history of entrepreneurship in my family, nor any extensive traveling. I was the first person in my family to go to college.

My house growing up didn’t have many books, yet I taught myself how to read before kindergarten by watching shows like Sesame Street and The Electric Company. My first day of kindergarten, the teachers didn’t know what to do with me because I was the only kid who could read.

I have only ever applied for a real job once in my life. After graduating from college, I applied for a job with Cargill, which was a pretty low-level position that involved going out to grain elevators. I didn’t get hired, and after that, the idea of working for someone else never even crossed my mind.

I believe entrepreneurship is a mindset more than anything else. I’ve met many people who were very smart and who I think could have been quite successful. However, they were hesitant to go off on their own. They could find every excuse for why they didn’t want to do that, which is fine, but in the end, I think it was just fear.

One of the fundamental principles of economics is that there is a tradeoff between risk and reward. I am personally far more open to risk-taking than most people. I’ve had businesses that weren’t successful. It isn’t a pleasant experience to go through, but I came through it ok.

Some people are willing to risk failure, and others want more security. Both are perfectly acceptable, but opting for security means you limit your downside at the expense of your upside.

As for encouraging curiosity in kids, I think that is actually pretty easy. Everyone, early on, is curious. Kids ask tons of questions. Every seven-year-old goes through a phase where they are interested in dinosaurs.

The key is to just let them run with their interests wherever it takes them. Let them build a fort, or take them to the museum. It might be a very chaotic path as they jump from one interest to the next, but that’s perfectly fine. In the course of that journey, they’ll naturally come across topics in science, math, and history.

More importantly, because they are interested and they care, they will retain a tremendous amount of what they learn.

There is a new story I read several years ago about a kid in Iowa who was obsessed with vacuum cleaners. He developed a collection of over 100 vacuum cleaners.

This might seem odd, but consider what this would involve. Understanding how vacuum cleaners work involves understanding how electrical motors and pumps work. He would open them up and tear them apart, and eventually developed the ability to fix old vacuums. If you can fix a vacuum cleaner, then you can probably fix a whole host of small electrical appliances. No one taught him how to do any of that. He just did it himself.

So, the biggest thing is just not to inhibit curiosity, as that will eventually kill it.