‘You learn different things from your grandparents than you do from your parents, and I had the opportunity to spend my summers from ages 4-16 on my grand parents’ ranch in Texas
My grandfather was a civil servant and a teacher—he worked on space technology and missile defence systems in the 1950 and 60s for the Atomic Energy Commission-and he was self reliant and resourceful. When you are in the middle of nowhere, you don’t pick up a phone and call somebody when something breaks. You fix it yourself. As a kid, I got to see him solve many seemingly unsolvable problems himself, whether he was restoring a broken down Catapiller bulldozer or doing his own veterinary work. He taught me that you can take on hard problems.
When you have a setback, you get up and try again. You can event your way to a better place’
Dear Zbinite, these are the words of the richest man on earth—Jeff Bezos the founder & Chief Executive Officer of Amazon at the Anti Trust Hearing this week!
What do we learn from this? Grand parents play an influential role in inspiring our children. Is this new? Not really as we once covered it on the forum. Our revised 2019 book which is available for free on the forum covered this on Chapter 5 on career guidance.
We said grand parents are in a unique position to know the DNA of the family—what is the family good at? Take for instance your paternal grand mum;
She could have been privileged to see your grand great father and mother observing what they excelled at.
She also saw your grandfather as a youngman observing traits passed on from his father.
She saw your father being born, she raised him and could trace DNA from his father and grand father.
She also saw you being born! And could trace the generational DNA from 3 past generations.
If you are fortunate, she could also have witnessed your own children being born!
Now dear forumite, who is the best person in your family to know all about the family DNA?
This is the best resource person and no career guidance expert can do better than her.
Grand mothers used to test the skills of grandkids by giving them tasks such as rearing chickens, planting certain crops and assessing progress.
This is where the concept of ‘Ane ruwoko rwekurima, ane ruwoko rwekuvhima came from’
Talents were tested from an early stage. They did not wait for you to go to school before identifying your talents.
Now here is the interesting part—every kid has talent and in the past they nurtured it. This is why unemployment was nill before the modern educational system came.
Does the school system identify and nurture talent? To some extent yes as students are placed in different classes such Sciences, Commercials and Arts. But students have pressure to study hard in certain fields with the most promising job prospects.
How do you determine the talent of a student with 8 As at Ordinary level? Is it possible that their natural talent could be in Arts but society pushes them to pursue Sciences?
Apart from the schooling system—how does it identify and support entrepreneurship?
We have to go back to basics and revive what has worked and producing excellent results in the past. Grand parents are the first teachers and the first career guidance experts too.
Maximise the time your children can spend with their grand parents– this is beneficial to their future growth. The summers Jeff Bezos spend with his grand father propelled him to where he is. We are sure that the legacy will continue. He should be spending more time with his grand kids too and imparting more information.
They don’t teach this stuff in school and yet it’s the most important aspect of career guidance or even entrepreneurship. When asked about role models—few mention grand parents and instead focus on strangers they never met. Strangers with no knowledge of your family DNAs.
You too could be a grand parent or will be one in future, the question is what active role are you undertaking so that future generations will be inspired?
