A Different Lane
Video Version
Written Version
What is the purpose of life? Too deep of a question to be solved by a children’s book series but broached in my blogs. The blogs are a reflection on my life and where I wish change occurred earlier. This manifesto serves as the basis for all of my thoughts in the blogs that also led me to write Garrett’s Ventures.
My life has essentially been a bowling ball on a lane with bumpers, guiding me toward whatever goal I had. Except it felt as if the pins were preinstalled by others as I just tried to navigate blindly rolling over myself.
“Go to college,” they said.
“Go into finance or accounting,” they said.
“You are in accounting, you might as well go big and be CPA,” they said.
“Go work for the biggest accounting firm,” they said.
Then they stopped saying things. Now I’m a bowling ball but not sure where the lane ends or a new one begins. However, I finally have time to look back and see what happened. As I reflect, I realize no one asked me what I wanted to build myself. As if working for myself or building businesses was never an option. If this was never made clear to me, I’m sure it’s not being made clear to kids in today’s society. I hope others can learn that there are different paths, different lanes, different bowling alleys, if you will. Hence, why I’ve written my series, Garrett’s Ventures; so kids can learn earlier on what paths they like or don’t like.
How do children learn early? By starting.
"Life is a chain reaction. Start in your teens, learn in your twenties, and build momentum. Or don't and risk regret in your thirties."
“You have to start somewhere. You may not even know what the goal is at first. You might get it completely wrong. But starting is the first step to learning. And you can’t learn if you don’t start. The earlier you start, the more you can grow, build, and accomplish in life.”
Having a kid made me realize how fast time is moving. I can see the growth through their eyes and feel myself pushing them the same way I was pushed. I can see time doesn’t wait on them nor anybody, and life happens. Thus, I must start teaching them now they can choose their own lane in whatever alley they want.
Garrett's Ventures isn't a book about becoming a millionaire. It isn't an argument against college or against having a salary job. It's an argument for starting sooner. We must let kids discover who they are by doing things, not by waiting for permission and be given the pins at the end of the lane for us to guide them to.
How do children know a path isn’t for them or how to continue down a hard path? By failing.
“There is no success without failure. The greater the success, the greater the failures that likely came before it.”
“Even the most successful people in the world have failed... Their failures weren’t the end of their stories; they were the beginning of something greater.”
“Children must be taught to fail early and fail often, without letting those failures define them.”
“If we teach kids that failure is part of success, we’ll raise a generation of innovators, creators, and leaders who won’t just accept the world as it is; they’ll work to make it better.”
Thankfully, I grew up in America with a good family and not in poverty. It was hard for me to fail early on. Sure, I made the occasional bad grade, but school wasn’t too hard. I was given the path of least resistance that also had the biggest bumpers to not fall in gutters of life. But should I have been given such bumpers? Kids can fail early on and it doesn’t change their outcome for the worse. Kids need to fail; It’s crucial to learning certain life lessons.
I am still learning how to fail today. I learned I can’t just write a kids book and publish it and expect high sales and to become a famous author. There’s hard work involved in success, failing along the way has to become a learned skill; a chance to reset and revise; not an end to the current game I’m playing.
So, who is this book really for? This book is for the parent who wants their kid to grow up unafraid. It's for the teacher who suspects the standard curriculum is missing something. It's for the kid who has an idea but hasn't been told yet that the idea is worth trying.
It's for the version of me that sits in a cubicle in my thirties and wished someone had handed me this book at ten.
The world doesn't need more waiters. It needs starters. It needs kids who try, fail, learn, and try again early in life. Garrett is a fifth-grader in a world he doesn’t yet know how to conquer. A shy and sometimes scared boy learns that it’s ok to fail because he started, and restarted when it mattered most. That's why I wrote Garrett's Ventures. That’s why you should join me in this venture. Together, we can show children that their future is now, and the bowling lanes are open.