Building Wealth for Your Kids? These 4 Habits Can Help Prevent Entitlement

Entitlement is defined as the “unjustified assumption that one has a right to certain advantages or preferential treatment.”  

This represents the opposite of what entrepreneurial parents hope their success provides for their children. While it is possible that success in one generation leads to entitlement in the next, it’s not inevitable if you take a thoughtful, strategic approach.  

Why you shouldn’t purchase success

As parents or families experience entrepreneurial success, the focus often becomes how best to use the resources gained to support the next generation. Wealth is spent on benefits such as safety and security, learning and education, health and wellness, and wide-ranging experiences for the rising generation.  

The goal is to increase the likelihood of success, fulfillment, and even happiness. None is negative. But problems arise when parents’ efforts to purchase opportunities lead to a focus on the outcome at the expense of the process. If parents are not careful, hiring tutors, coaches, teachers, and consultants or buying travel experiences and other luxuries can lean toward “purchasing success” rather than setting children up for opportunities.  

The difference between the two might seem trivial. It’s not.  

Opportunity promotes effort, uncertainty, and growth as the next generation seeks to reap the benefits of opportunities provided. Purchasing success implies none of these. Success without effort and risk bypasses the learning process, resulting in a next generation with all the perks and none of the capability—just another way to define entitlement.  

How to prevent entitlement 

To prevent entitlement, focus your efforts and those of the next generation on the process of growth, not just the outcome. Outcomes must be understood as the result of a process, not of a transaction.  

To accomplish this, you’ll need to embrace some of the things you might have hoped the next generation could avoid because of the success of the family enterprise.  

Here are four interrelated ways to embrace the process of growth.   

1. Embrace uncertainty 

To begin without knowing the end is what gives life meaning. Families should embrace the fact that nothing is guaranteed and that it takes effort and grit to achieve meaningful things. You might make the team, you might earn an A on the calculus test, and you might get into your school of choice—or you might not. 

Similarly, you might be successful in your venture, but you might not, even if you do most things right.  

The only certain path is inaction. Embracing uncertainty is embracing action, experimentation, and growth, which leads to confidence, capability, and growth.  

2. Embrace failure and imperfection

The fact that outcomes can’t be controlled implies that failure is inevitable at some point. Not only is it inevitable, but failure and imperfection can be among the greatest opportunities to learn and grow.  

Unfortunately, families often teach the next generation to avoid or to be embarrassed by failure, robbing them of the opportunity to learn through setbacks and falling short.  

Thomas Edison is famously quoted as saying, “I’ve not failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”  

Embracing failure as an opportunity to learn can minimize its negative effects and enhance the positive.  

3. Embrace hard work  

Edison was a great example of the rewards of hard work, and this is among the largest factors if not the largest factor in success. Most people can’t excel in school without studying. Practice is the cornerstone of success in athletics.   

Any entrepreneurial venture will take long hours to have any chance of success. The hard work promotes grit, resilience, knowledge, capability, and pride, and there’s simply no substitute for it.  

So look for opportunities that will ensure the next generation has to put in the work in multiple domains. 

4. Embrace the long road

It’s a marathon, not a sprint, to get somewhere meaningful. Focusing on the process is a recognition that getting from Point A to Point B will take time. The more valuable is the outcome, the more time and effort it will take to get there, most likely.  

Families are often in a hurry to see the next generation succeed, given the family’s success. This rush, while understandable, can put too much emphasis on the outcome. Families should embrace the journey and celebrate that progress, even if it is slow. It represents time well spent.  

Success shouldn’t be purchased for rising generations in family enterprises. When families fall into that trap, it is much more likely to lead to entitlement.  

Instead, embrace the process that leads to success, as this will create a growth mindset and sustainable capabilities that will pay dividends well into the future. 

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This article originally appeared in Inc.