Guide Your Child Towards Success

This is an excerpt from Professor Paul Pilzer, author of "Unlimited Wealth" and "Other People's Money"...One of the questions I am frequently asked by parents, particularly parents who have succeeded themselves but didn't have the opportunity to go to college, is what subject their son or daughter should study in college in order to achieve financial success.

I usually turn their question around, asking them detailed questions about what their child is really passionate about -sports, pets, movies, etc.- until they interrupt and tell me that they are asking my opinion about their child's economic welfare, not their child's social life. Then I explain the answer to their original question. The key to achieving financial success today, or success in any field for that matter, is being able to learn new things. And the key to having the ability to learn new things is developing confidence in your ability to learn.

Even if there were one field or another that you could study in college for financial success, it wouldn't matter because most of what you studied in school would be technologically obsolete by the time you graduated. Today, it doesn't matter anymore how much you already know about a particular subject - things change so quickly that the most successful people in virtually every field are the people who learn new things the fastest.

Thus, the goal of every educational program should be to develop confidence in one's ability to learn. And the way to develop confidence about one's ability to learn is to learn something very well. And the way to learn something very well is to be passionate about learning it.

The hope, then, for every parent conce
ed about their child's future economic welfare, is that the child discover an interest in anything - music, art, history, psychology, math - that they passionately want to learn about. If this happens, the child, on his or her own, will master learning about it and possibly even major in the subject...eventually rising to the level where they will debate the subject with their professors.

If, and when, this happens, their future will be set - for they will have developed confidence in their ability to learn. This confidence in their ability to learn will lead them to success in whatever they seek.

Thus, if there is any gift a parent could give to a child, it is to nurture, whenever it occurs, the passion that a child might develop at any time to learn about any field or subject. For if the child masters learning just one subject, the parent who encouraged the child will have given a great gift. A true "gift of the magi," a gift that keeps on giving for the rest of the child's life."

Yours for Rock Solid Kids,
Denny Strecke
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