My kids are my source of inspiration. Children in general are bursting fountains of innovative ideas. Some of them make us laugh, yet others annoy the heck out of us, but most of them are exciting. Especially when it’s your own kid who comes up with an idea 🙂
But this time it wasn’t an innovative idea that got me inspired. It was the entrepreneurial spirit and execution of my elder son, Eran.
The kid is hooked on a computer game. Which in itself is nothing special. Though the game is quite interesting. He and his friends play Minecraft. Now, I’m always very curious about what excites my children. And I’m the ops guy at home, helping everyone with their tech needs. So I started looking at the game, helping Eran with installing game mods and reading up on the game history and ecosystem. I loved the whole story of the game starting out as an independent side-project of Notch and growing to 60 million sold copies. The game is surrounded by a flourishing environment of open-source modders, animators and music video makers. And the impressive sale to Microsoft for 2.5 billion dollars last year definitely looks like a happy end for Notch, if not for the community.
So Minecraft itself was a source of inspiration. But it wasn’t what made me write this post.
It was Eran who did two remarkable things. The first one was starting his own youtube video channel, recording Minecraft gameplay with his original comments. I helped technically with that too – assisting in finding a screen recording app and uploading the first clip. But the idea was originally his own and the boy showed enviable persistence in getting this done. You know – pushing me to help him with me being busy with all the other things like work, blogging, consulting, side-projects, etc.
And the second thing – Eran set up his own Minecraft server in the cloud for him and his friends to build their own worlds. Technically it’s easier than it sounds with the new Minecraft Realms service offered by Mojang (the company behind the game). But it’s a paid service – and I told him right away that I’m not sponsoring this project and he’ll have to crowd-fund it. i.e – persuade his friends to put some money to pay for the server together. Took him about a month to get everyone aligned, but in the end he came back to me with the first round of funding. I took the cash, paid with my credit card, and he set up the realm. Now he’s running the server, and they are all having a lot of fun.
I don’t know about you, but I find this wonderfully inspiring. You know – envisioning something people around you (including yourself) can benefit from, enlisting them to participate and invest and then taking responsibility for execution. And all that at the age of 11.
So how come some of us have hard time doing these things at the age of 30, or 40, or 70?
Fear of failure? Bad experiences?
No matter what the reason is – look at your kids for inspiration and keep doing what you think is good for you and the world around you.