So, You Wanna Own a Sports Bar?

One of my favorite things to do is to mentor teens on entrepreneurship. Since my husband is a high school teacher, I’ve been invited many times to come in as a guest and talk about starting and building businesses. My favorite part of the class is listening to the student’s ideas and making suggestions about what steps to take first and how to show the through line from idea to reality.

One standout interaction I had, that remains a favorite for me to this day, was a young man in the class, 18 years old, a huge kid. He towered over me but with this huge, mischievous grin. I was going around the room asking kids to share their ideas and when it came to be his turn, he volunteered eagerly:

‘I want to own a sports bar.’ “Wow! that’s so great!” I said.

“Okay, so what do you think is the first thing you should do?” His response was what I loved best:

“I’m thinking pick a location and then get some money from a bank or something to open the bar.”

This made me smile and I had to really try hard not to laugh. Not because anything he said was necessarily wrong or silly, it was just that in his enthusiasm, he left out about a hundred steps he needed to take in order to get to where he already was in his mind.

In my opinion, this is what’s so great about talking to young adults. They have this, dare I say, naive enthusiasm, for taking on these massive goals which I think is the best thing about them. They’re undaunted by the realities that we, as full fledged adults, struggle with constantly.

In some ways I think now more than ever we need to adopt a bit of rogue teen enthusiasm into our structured mindsets and take our ideas all the way to ‘the bank.’

That said, I did of course counsel our young friend on some of the steps he’d need to complete along the way but I was careful not to squash his vision of finding a location immediately. In fact, I encouraged him to start looking for areas that he thought might be a good spot, to start thinking of a name, what the sign would look like, what kind of food they’d serve…

The fact that it would most likely take a few years before he’d get to the ‘borrow some money from a bank or something’ stage, was not as important as knowing that it was attainable.

I think back on t the years I hedged before finally starting my new biz counseling program, about how I’d wanted to do it for a lot longer than when I finally decided to pull the trigger. For one reason or another it was never the right time. Granted, I do believe that you create the thing you want exactly when you’re supposed to have it but I also can’t help but think that sometimes we could take a few pointers from these young adults who just shrug and say ‘Yeah I’m just gonna start this thing and see what happens.’

So here I go, starting my own “sports bar”. I’ll just have to see what happens from here…

What’s your sports bar?

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