Troubled Teens Make More Successful Entrepreneurs | Hacker News Reader

Troubled Teens Make More Successful Entrepreneurs

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48 pointsgmatty47 comments

Don't want to spark class warfare, but this really only seems to point out to me that rich kids who got into trouble during their rebellious stages get to be entrepreneurs later when they want to rebel against something else.

While I'm not silly enough to think that's always the case, the article seems to support it, someone prove me wrong:

Quote from the article: "The economists find that self-employed workers with incorporated businesses were almost three times more likely to engage in illicit and risky activities as youth than were salaried workers. These behaviors include but aren’t limited to shoplifting, marijuana use, playing hooky at school, drug dealing and assault. In addition, the self-employed with incorporated businesses were more educated, more likely to come from high-earning, two-parent families, were more apt to score higher on learning aptitude tests and exhibit greater self-esteem than other employment types. “Of course, you have to be smart,” says Mr. Levine. “But it’s a unique combination of breaking rules and being smart that helps you become an entrepreneur.”

"It’s a unique combination of breaking rules and being smart that helps you become an entrepreneur"

This seems like the key point - you have to be experimental, non-risk-averse, and a little stubborn. Plus both activities are tons of fun!

True, and a non-class-minded non-critical mind might take just that away from it, but I think it's really apparent that they are skirting the entire perspective (of what happens to a probably larger swath of youths) -- they "broke the rules" and got away with it, which enabled them to go on to success.

To take it even farther (because this wouldn't be the internet if I weren't trying to one up everyone including myself):

Stoners have great ideas, some stoners go to jail for petty posession 3 times and do not get much of a chance at life after being incarcerated. I don't think I need to point out which stoners end up going to jail, and which get a slap on the wrist and get to smoke on a college campus later.

I'm really not trying to enrage anyone -- I just think this article was super unbalanced

I can't upvote this enough. I know about a lot of behavior that occurs inside and outside of private high schools that goes unchecked or loosely-punished, instead of resulting in police action at most public schools (poor or not). Nothing against the more privileged kids--I don't think a lot of the "troubling" behavior listed in the article is all that problematic (barring shoplifting and assault of course).

You also need 1) the resources to survive some bad outcomes early and 2) the profile of an otherwise low-risk person, which helps mitigate a lot of close calls and a few additional bad outcomes.

Those are what poor kids don't have.

I like how you changed "breaking rules" to "non-risk-adverse" :P

Although it does make me wonder the degree of correlation between troubled teens, lack of moral compass, and entrepreneur.

I don 't believe it's 'lack of moral compass' for this equation. It's such a tricky pot. What would this missing moral compass entail? drugs, privacy, sexual morals?

I would argue that a stronger internal sense of morality helps one find these cracks in the system to become entrepreneur.

A lack of moral compass would mean one would do whatever it takes without bounds to achieve the desired outcome. NSA, Crack Dealers,

A strong internal moral compass would let someone think it's not a bad thing to grow pot and sell it(George Washington), protect their wealth during hyperinflation with bit-coin (Argentina, Greece), Bring cheep education to the masses (OCW, Schwartz).

I think the idea you are looking for is: socially suggested morals. But the 'troubled' kids are smart enough to question what they see, open enough to imagine a better way, stubborn enough to not listen to nay-sayers without good arguments.

I agree, and I suspect the kids with the same 'troubled' background but lower income families are all hourly workers now, not salaried. Shame they didn't include that group in the study.

I double-agree, and I think you're painting an even nicer picture than the real one.

For lower income families, 'playing hookie' is usually called 'truancy' (which when I think about it, isn't such a nice-sounding term), and usually results in a lack of a college education altogether, leading to very very low (in comparison) paying hourly (and possibly menial) jobs.

I was astounded at the amount that some companies pay interns (I don't mean google, or any of the companies on the the extremes) -- I had some jobs before college, and some entire families subsisted on similar incomes. What did I do with the money that whole families earned (I was an intern at some point)? Buy pizza and beer.

That's true. Other things like convictions for drug use/dealing that make you ineligible for student loans, felony assault convictions that your dad couldn't hire a good lawyer to fend off, etc, also seriously decrease the chances for a poor kid with the same 'rule-breaking' attitude to end up in the same place.

Class warfare aside, there are important variables associated with class, especially when you iterate this into thousands of situations.

First off, everyone rebels, it's part of our psychological growh to become individuals. The smarter ones, i suggest might not use it for petty crap, but for min/maxing on skipping class and going to a party, or putting of school for a year or two to run with a good idea. I say smarter ones, because they are just looking at more variables to crunch.

Secondly, the financial backing of one's support system, or family, has a lot to do with mitigating the downsides of intensive and/or risky projects. If mom and dad are more successful or stable, there is more of a safety net. Couch surfing and ramen/starving might not be for everyone, so a better safety net means less downside.

Self esteem vs low self esteem is a big one too. This correlates to socio-economic economic status. Self esteem will let one believe in their good idea, instead of letting someone tell them it's stupid.

I will agree that the article is slanted twords rich kids, they just had more bonuses.

The interesting thing to me, is I think if you look at middle class entrepreneurs, they will be running their businesses taking less risk (service businesses as tradesmen / lawncare / contracting / etc) for less reward, but are fitting the same mold.

I disagree that they're rebelling in the conventional sense, since they aren't rebelling against anyone, they're usually evaluating rules, and if the rules don't fit them, they'll break them with no guilt whatsoever.

At least that's what I've seen in the small group of entrepreneurially minded kids I've met and got to know(4-5 people, a ballpark estimate would be 1% or less of people I know).

I also don't entirely agree on the financial backing part. 3 of them have financial backing, but all 3 earn their money themselves. The other 2 have no, or almost no financial backing. One of those is an outlier, since he had backing from his father, but it's uncertain whether he'll have it in the future.

One curious observation that I've made is that they all have a slant towards doing marketing. 2 of them went to college in order to study it, another 2 are doing freelance work at it, and the last one is intrested in it.

Also, 4 of them program, the 5th one not being intrested in it.

On the point of self esteem, they all seem to have very high self esteem.

I have to say that 5 people is a small set, and whether they'll be sucessfull as entrepreneurs is only something time will tell, so I've only included characteristics that occur in most of them very strongly. Still, it's a set of teenagers/young adults that allready know they want to be entrepreneurs, so it fits quite well.

I actually think that rebellion is never against someone in particular. It's usually against some sort of theme or ephemeral idea. If it was so specific, it would be easier to diagnose. While a teen might typically rebel against his/her parents, it's not their parents that they are actually railing against, deep down they generally need the structure, and want the structure that parents enforce (ever been free to do whatever you want as a kid? it either gets old/boring/pointless, or out of control very very fast until SOMEONE in authority steps in). Rather, it's the thought or feeling of "being controlled" or "not being independent".

Also, about your little case study -- 1000 people constitutes a large enough swath of 300+ million Americans, so I don't have a problem with 5 people that actually exist being a good enough case study.

A guess as to your observation: Do you know what kinds of jobs they've had as teens/young adults? Many of the starter jobs are related to sales, in some form or another (best buy, verizon, places teens know something tech related might work, even places like carwashes, etc), and (just spitballin here), I think the role of a silver tongued deal-maker is very popular in many upper to lower middle class and even lower class groups. Marketing seems like a natural extension of that. Also, I've always thought of marketing as the attractive, relatively business-minded person's liberal arts degree (but maybe that's just me).

Also, on self-esteem, it's sometimes something you can't tell from just looking. It's kind of their job as marketers to have very very high self esteem. If you get a pitch from a marketer, and they look like they have even the slightest doubt that their plan will fail and NOT bring in piles of cash, then you're dealing with a bad marketer.

Well, the point is they aren't going against rules for the sake of breaking the rules, nor to show anyone anything. The closest they come to that is the attempt to game the rules (I've seen several instances of that). I'd wager that's hacking and not rebellion. And yes, I've been left to my own devices as a kid, and I got used to dealing with things by myself. It's fine after a while, and I'm glad I learned it by the time I was 13 instead of learning it with 33.

Regarding their jobs, I'll just list them by their initals. A. Promoting, Organizer, Black Hat SEO for a while. B. Freelance Computer Repair, programs PHP. Wants to build a business once he's 18. D. Computer Sales "Afilliate" proably hits it closest. Then some other gigs he didn't (want to) tell me about. D. Drug Dealing, lower-mid distribution chain. He did it in highschool because it was easy money. J. Marketing in an ad-agency, and for some reason he quit biomed to become carpenter. J is an outlier.

I have to say though that only 3 of them are Americans.

On self esteem, I've spent considerable time with this group, and I'm relatively sure that they've got high self esteem, regardless of whether they were marketing or not. It's generally hard to judge a persons self esteem acurately. You can generally guess it after spending some time with the person, seeing such things as their general confidence (which is expressed through body language more than you might think), and how they react when encountering opportunities and obstacles.

'Rebelling' in psychology happens so an individual can become an independant person. They rebel (males do at a younger age than females) to become something a bit different than the parents. We all do. The persons this article refers to just keep that mentality when it comes to other things.

"This works, but I see another way to look at it, witch removes something I don't like about the idea" Call it rebelling, call it out of the box thinking. It's what happens with us all, so we are not clones of our parents.

Rich kids rebel with cocaine and DUI; poor kids rebel by holding up convenience stores.

That's a gross oversimplification.

I actually agree that rich kids will rebel with cocaine and DUI, because I've personally seen it. I have to say that most of them are useless when it comes to working with them. Time will change that, not me.

I don't know any poor kids that hold up convenience stores, but I'm German, so maybe it just doesn't happen here as often. If they do rebel, it's usually based on noncompliance with authority figures, minor theft and drinking/drug use.

Agreeing here, and though I won't say much about cocaine and DUI (I just haven't had friends that were into that, but I probably wasn't the right kind of wealthy growing up to have those friends) -- I've witnessed more poor kids rebelling against the relative sources of control in their lives, which are often good (things like church, father figures, mother figures) and partaking in cultures that promote almost the opposite of most of the values that they maybe should learn (of course, pinning down what people "ought to" learn/believe is crazy-dangerous territory).

I'd make some examples, but I think anyone could think of some easily enough. I also want to note that I haven't technically done any research on this (nevermind the difficulty of properly researching a subject like this with so many factors), so I could be completely wrong.

Although this is drifting away from the original topic, let me tell you that wealth is relative, especially in a social context.

The bottom line in a social context isn't how much money you have, but how much value you bring to the table. Value is incredibly dependent on a wide range of factors, so you can tweak and specialize for certain situations, adding more than any amount of money could (Compare the value Bill Gates could add to a rap battle with the value Jay Z could add. Bill Gates is massively more wealthy, but in this context, Jay Z has a distinct advantage).

Let's apply it to networking. Of course, being valuable businesswise is important, but I can go to a networking event and use my conversational skills and my area knowledge to my advantage."So anybody up for this amazing insider teppan yaki 2 blocks from here? I promise it'll blow your mind." At the end of the evening I'll go home with half a dozen great contacts, which beats 200 cold business cards by lenghts.

That's exactly how I ended up with that crowd, but it wasn't actually the network I was aiming for. I was looking for contacts in the nightclub management/ promoting area, but I didn't dismiss them because they were fun at parties, they made me seem more connected, and because their parents were usually businesspeople, which would extend my network into that area. I'd be viewed as a good influence on them, which instantly put me on good terms.

I know that sounds awfully calculating, but it generally does when you break down social interactions in that manner. I hope it helps in case you want to do networking.

> I've witnessed more poor kids rebelling against the relative sources of control in their lives, which are often good (things like church, father figures, mother figures) and partaking in cultures that promote almost the opposite of most of the values that they maybe should learn (of course, pinning down what people "ought to" learn/believe is crazy-dangerous territory).

Exactly my point.

"What the earliest utopians—Montaigne, Thomas More, Tommaso Campanella—understood was that they fought not for a place but for a new set of ideas through which to recognize what would count as Real: Equality, not hierarchical authority. Individual dignity, not slavish subservience. Our preeminent problem is that we recognize the Real in what is most deadly: a culture of duty to legalities that are, finally, cruel and destructive. We need to work inventively—as Christ did, as Thoreau did—in the spirit of disobedience for the purpose of refusing the social order into which we happen to have been born and putting in its place a culture of life-giving things." ~ Michel de Montaigne

This isn't a quote by Montaigne, it's a quote about him (Curtis White, “The spirit of disobedience: An invitation to resistance,” Harper’s, April 2006, p. 40).

I would re-title the article as "Entrepreneurs are more likely to be troubled teens". No where in the article it says that troubled teens are more successful entrepreneurs than non troubled teens.

Directionality! How dare you impose higher order critical thinking! That poor journalist can't be bothered with such abstract things.

For the non-native US-english speakers on HN, "playing hooky" means not showing up to class :)

Also better felons. If you only count the successful ones, you get this sort of thing.

That's a good point. If you look at the whole bell curve (and we're surely talking about primarily males on both ends), it's more males at the top and the bottom. Why? Higher variability thanks to imbalanced genetics (Y =! X).

The upshot is the women have more in the middle. "Where have all the good men gone?" They were never there, my dear.

Interestingly those two are not mutually exclusive. It is indeed possible to be both a better entrepreneur AND a better felon :D

In fact, one might say that an entrepreneur is the best kind of felon!

(I'm not sure what one might mean by such a statement; nevertheless, one might say it.)

I wonder how many other founders throw around romantic notions of robbing a bank. I mean there's media exposure, groupies and money. See also: Stander (2003).

This fits well with #4 on pg's list at http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html. As he noted there, asking about real world hacks became part of their standard ycombinator application.

Yup. More ways to show off.

There's a line that can be crossed if the reviewer isn't cool enough or it comes off wrong. Caveat submitter. But who's gonna worry about that? :)

The headline here on HN is completely misleading. Aside from the editorial decision to only mention the more acceptable behaviours listed in the article (alternative: 'entrepreneurs more likely to have a history of teen assault'), the article makes no claim that they are more successful founders than people who haven't got this background - just that self-employed people who have an incorporated business are more likely to have this history than salaried workers.

I think this is because of different risk preferences, which make the conclusion obvious.

These teens have higher risk preferences. Entrepreneurship is a high-risk, high-reward endeavour.

Since we count only the successful ones, those who take higher risks and are successful naturally are more successful than those who take smaller risks.

The language of the title is overloaded.

Sometimes circumstances of survival force individuals to develop hustle, while others are content with following.

The key is perhaps rebellious temprament, from authority, whether parent or employer, to seek independence and freedom despite risk.

From the article: "Using data from the March Supplements of the U.S. Census Bureau‘s Current Population Survey and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, they look at the cognitive, noncognitive and family traits of self-employed individuals who have incorporated businesses and compare it to the characteristics of salaried workers and the self-employed who don’t have incorporated businesses."

So the population of the study is people who have incorporated businesses. So by "Troubled Teens", it means "Troubled Teens" who did well enough to incorporate a business. But that doesn't count the many troubled teens who ended up poor and/or imprisoned...hopefully parents aren't getting the idea that it's better for their kid to get in trouble if they want to be rich later

Could it simply be that they are more likely to found startups? (which would not necessarily imply that they are more successful entrepreneurs but instead that they are more likely to become entrepreneurs)

In other news gamblers are more likely to win money gambling.

Doesn't that then just sound like they're bored? Being an entrepreneur/founder will never leave you bored - always things to do..

This has confirmation bias written all over it.

Why is this surprising? Success in life is about breaking rules. Startups are one example.

Job well done, Youth Center Counselors.

Who wasn't a troubled teen?

Apparently the ones that didn't get caught.

Is not what I seen.

Yvon Chouinard, founder of Black Diamond and Patagonia:

> My favorite quote about entrepreneurship is that to understand an entrepreneur, you should study a juvenile delinquent. They're both saying: "This sucks and I'm going to do it another way." You have to want to break the rules and prove that your way works.

http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2008-06-19/yvon-chouinar...

Did they check CEOs, too?

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