If you want to ensure that your kids succeeded in life, do you know what you should spend your time focusing on?

Would you try to make them as smart as possible by increasing their amount of study? That would be good start, but intelligence is mostly hereditary and it only helps to a certain point.

As cited in Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, there was a famous “genius study” where a researcher studied the lives of a highly select group of kids with off the chart IQs. Ironically, after following the kids from middle-school into adulthood, the geniuses were no more successful than other college graduates.

Some of them were highly successful, but so were the same percentage of other students. So they dug deeper to determine what was different about the ones that were so successful.

What they found was that high intelligence only matters to certain level. After that, other skills become more important.

Once you are smart enough, then you need something that only your parents can teach you, namely, how to relate with others. The kids that could readily sell themselves and their ideas to others were more successful in life.

Think about it. If you are genius with a great idea, no one would know of your genius until you get your idea published or implemented. And most great ides don’t publish or implement an idea by themselves.

You need to convince a commercial publisher that your idea has merit and it will sell. Or you need to convince an academic panel that your idea has merit and adds to the current knowledge base to get it published in a journal.

If you start a business around your great idea, you have to convince others to join your company and buy your product. In other words, no matter how you look at it, you need to be able to sell your idea to others.

So what should parents do to cultivate successful kids besides providing intelligent genes?:

1. Communication: Parents who taught their children to confidently communicate their ideas and win people over with their words had more successful kids.
2. Focus on an Interest: Parents who cultivated and encouraged their children’s interests had more successful kids. To be successful in life usually involves specialization and lots of practice.
3. Persistence: Parents who taught their children to diligently ask authority figures for answers and help (without offending) were more successful.

Of course there is no silver bullet to any of this, and luck plays a part. Nothing in life is guaranteed, but if you are looking to make you kids as successful as possible (isn’t every parent?) then this is a place to start.

We’ve had bad luck with our kids – they’ve all grown up.

~Christopher Morley