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How do you start your own company?
Darryl Scriven, Clarkson University and Robyn Hannigan, Clarkson University
Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to [email protected].
How do you start your own company? — Noah H., Conway, South Carolina
Have you ever heard the expression “No guts, no glory”? Making your own business starts with guts. If you’re someone who likes to take risks and has great ideas, starting your own company could be for you.
There are different kinds of companies that you could start. You could start a company producing something you invented, like an iPhone or a mobile app. Or you could start a company that licenses the brand of an existing company, such as McDonald’s or Subway. Companies like this are called franchises.
Between the two of us, we’ve started mobile gaming companies, owned franchises and created biotechnology companies from patented inventions. One of us is an analytical geochemist – someone who measures chemicals – with inventions including a chemical detector that measures metals in air, which in turn allows us to find and remove bad metals like mercury from smokestacks. This and other inventions were spun into a new company with her students. The other of us has started companies that provide everyday goods and services, from building houses to hosting birthday parties. Even though the companies we started are very different, both of us are what are called entrepreneurs.
Entrepreneurs are those who start a company, identify needs and bring together the people, materials and money required to meet that need. Everything you buy is to meet a need you have, and somewhere, some entrepreneur started a company to meet your needs. Whether you’re going solo or have a team, you can be an entrepreneur and start your own company.
Starting your own company
There are five basic steps to starting your own company:
1) Need: The first step is identifying the want or need you intend to meet. What do you hear people saying that they love? What do they complain about? What do you always say would make life easier? Once you figure out what people are yearning for and who exactly your target customers are through some market research, then you’re ready for the next step in starting your company.
2) Idea: The second step in starting a company is coming up with an idea that meets the want or need you identified. Is it an invention that takes out the garbage? Is it a better hamburger? A great idea that meets a want or a need can be complex, like a smartphone, or it can be simple, like bottled water.
3) Product: The third step is figuring out how you will provide the product or service. Will you create and sell a new kind of hamburger, or will you offer an existing kind of hamburger where it isn’t currently available? If you plan to create and sell something all on your own, you will found a startup. If you plan to offer something that already exists in a new area, you would buy into a franchise.
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4) Setup: Next, you’ll set up your company. There are many resources available to help you do this. The first thing you will do as a startup is become a legal entity, or a business on paper. This step may require an attorney, because there are many structures your business could take, and you will need to choose the right one. Then off to the bank to set up an account so you can start receiving money and paying your bills.
5) Market: Lastly, you will need to market your product. Whether you find your own customers or hire someone to do it, you’ll need to let people know that you have a product or service that is worth paying for. You can have the best company in the world that makes the best products, but your potential customers have to know about it in order for you to be successful. With all of this information in mind, you’ll write a business plan that provides the details of your product or service as well as your plan for funding and growth. The plan answers all of the questions of who, what, where, why and how. The more detailed this information is, the more likely someone will want to invest in your ideas and help grow your company.
Before we dreamed of being entrepreneurs or starting companies, we were kids who were curious, asked lots of questions and wanted to make the world a better place. Starting a company is a great way to do that. The company you start may literally change the world.
So don’t delay; the world is waiting for you.
Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to [email protected]. Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live.
And since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what you’re wondering, too. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best.
Darryl Scriven, Dean of Arts & Sciences, Clarkson University and Robyn Hannigan, Provost, Clarkson University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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How where you’re born influences the person you become.
In some societies, kids are taught that they’re in control of their own happiness – which makes them more indulgent.Oleksii Synelnykov/Shutterstock.com
Samuel Putnam, Bowdoin College and Masha A. Gartstein, Washington State University
How where you’re born influences the person you become. As early as the fifth century, the Greek historian Thucydides contrasted the self-control and stoicism of Spartans with the more indulgent and free-thinking citizens of Athens.
Today, unique behaviors and characteristics seem ingrained in certain cultures.
Italians wildly gesticulate when they talk. Dutch children are notably easygoing and less fussy. Russians rarely smile in public.
As developmental psychologists, we’re fascinated by these differences, how they take shape and how they get passed along from one generation to the next.
Our new book, “Toddlers, Parents and Culture,” explores the way a society’s values influences the choices parents make – and how this, in turn, influences who their kids become.
The enduring influence of cultural values
Although genetics certainly matter, the way you behave isn’t hardwired.
Over the past two decades, researchers have shown how culture can shape your personality.
In 2005, psychologist Robert McCrae and his colleagues were able to document pronounced differences in the personalities of people living in different parts of the world. For example, adults from European cultures tended to be more outgoing and open to new experiences than those from Asian cultures. Within Europe, they found that people from Northern Europe were more conscientious than their peers in Southern Europe.
Recently, we were able to trace some of these differences to early childhood.
Parenting – perhaps not surprisingly – played a role.
To conduct the research for our book, we worked with colleagues from 14 different countries. Our goal was to explore the way broad societal values influenced how parents raise their children. We then studied how these different parenting styles shaped the behavior and personality of kids.
We did this primarily by administering questionnaires to parents around the world, asking them to describe their daily routines, hopes for their kids and methods of discipline. We then asked them to detail the behaviors of their children.
We also relied on the work of Dutch social psychologist Geert Hofstede, who, in the 1970s, asked IBM employees around the world about factors that led to work satisfaction.
We were able to compare his findings to ours, and we were surprised to see that his results correlated with our own. The cultural values that were revealed through work preferences in the 1970s could be seen in parenting practices and child temperament 40 years later.
This is important: It shows cultural values are relatively enduring, and seem to have an effect on how kids develop over time.
To think about yourself, or to think of others?
Perhaps the most well-known of these broad cultural values are individualism and collectivism.
In some societies, such as the U.S. and Netherlands, people are largely driven by pursuits that benefit themselves. They’re expected to seek personal recognition and boost their own social or financial status.
In more collectivist societies, such as South Korea and Chile, high value is placed on the well-being of the larger group – typically their family, but also their workplace or country.
We found that the way parents discipline their children is strongly influenced by these social values, and likely serves to perpetuate these values from one generation to the next.
For example, compared to parents in individualist cultures, collectivist parents are much more likely, when reprimanding their kids, to direct them to “think about” their misbehavior, and how it might negatively impact those around them.
This seems to promote group harmony and prepare a child to thrive in a collectivist society. At the same time, if you’re constantly being told to think about how your actions impact others, you might also be more likely to feel anxiety, guilt and shame.
Indeed, we’ve found that kids in collectivist cultures tend to express higher levels of sadness, fear and discomfort than children growing up in individualist societies.
Free to pursue happiness?
A second set of values we studied was indulgence versus restraint.
Some cultures, such as the U.S., Mexico and Chile, tend to permit and promote self-gratification. Others – like South Korea, Belgium and Russia – encourage restraint in the face of temptation.
These values seem to be connected to a specific set of parenting goals.
In particular, parents in indulgent societies tend to emphasize the importance of developing self-esteem and independence. For example, they expect children to entertain themselves and fall asleep on their own. When one of their kids misbehaves, they’ll often suggest ways he or she can make amends and try to repair the damage.
The message kids may get from this kind of treatment is that they’re the ones in control of their happiness, and that they should be able to fix their own mistakes. At the same time, when kids are expected to pursue gratification, they may be more likely to impulsively seek immediate rewards – whether it’s eating candy before dinner or grabbing a toy off a shelf at a store – before getting permission.
Meanwhile, in societies that prioritize restraint, parents were more likely to shout or swear when disciplining their children.
This might make them more obedient. But it might also cause children to be less optimistic and less likely to enjoy themselves.
Is individualism the future?
Parents seem to be motivated to best prepare their kids for the world they’re likely to inhabit, and what works in one culture might not necessarily work well in another.
But as our world becomes more interconnected, this diversity of parenting approaches may dwindle. In fact, most countries have become more individualistic over the last 50 years – a shift that’s most pronounced in countries that have experienced the most economic development.
Nonetheless, there’s still a huge difference in parenting styles and childhood development across cultures – a testament to the enduring influence of societal values.
This article has been updated to indicate that Thucydides was a historian, not a philosopher.
Samuel Putnam, Professor of Psychology, Bowdoin College and Masha A. Gartstein, Professor of Psychology, Washington State University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
How to start your own business
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Is climate change to blame for the recent weather disasters? 2 things you need to understand
Evidence connects human-caused climate change to heat waves. Ties to some other extremes aren’t as clear cut.AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino
Scott Denning, Colorado State University
Summer isn’t even half over, and we’ve seen heat waves in the Pacific Northwest and Canada with temperatures that would make news in Death Valley, enormous fires that have sent smoke across North America, and lethal floods of biblical proportions in Germany and China. Scientists have warned for over 50 years about increases in extreme events arising from subtle changes in average climate, but many people have been shocked by the ferocity of recent weather disasters.
A couple of things are important to understand about climate change’s role in extreme weather like this.
First, humans have pumped so much carbon dioxide and other planet-warming greenhouse gases into the atmosphere that what’s “normal” has shifted.
Second, not every extreme weather event is connected to global warming.
Shifting the bell curve
Like so many things, temperature statistics follow a bell curve – mathematicians call these “normal distributions.” The most frequent and likely temperatures are near the average, and values farther from the average quickly become much less likely.
All else being equal, a little bit of warming shifts the bell to the right – toward higher temperatures. Even a shift of just a few degrees makes the really unlikely temperatures in the extreme “tail” of the bell happen dramatically more often.
NASA mapped the changing temperature bell curve year by year starting in 1951.
The stream of broken temperature records in the North American West lately is a great example. Portland hit 116 degrees – 9 degrees above its record before the heat wave. That would be an extreme at the end of the tail. One study determined the heat wave would have been “virtually impossible” without human-caused climate change. Extreme heat waves that were once ridiculously improbable are on their way to becoming more commonplace, and unimaginable events are becoming possible.
The width of a bell curve is measured by its standard deviation. About two-thirds of all values fall within one standard deviation of the average. Based on historical temperature records, the heat wave in 2003 that killed more than 70,000 people in Europe was five standard deviations above the mean, so it was a 1 in 1 million event.
Without eliminating emissions from fossil fuels, heat like that is likely to happen a few times a decade by the time today’s toddlers are retirees.
So, is climate change to blame?
There’s a basic hierarchy of the extreme events that scientific research so far has shown are most affected by human-caused climate change.
At the top of the list are extreme events like heat waves that are certain to be influenced by global warming. In these, three lines of evidence converge: observations, physics and computer model simulations that predict and explain the changes. At the bottom of the list are things that might plausibly be caused by rising levels of greenhouse gases but for which the evidence is not yet convincing. Here’s a partial list.
1) Heat waves: Studies show these are certain to increase dramatically with global warming, and indeed that’s exactly what we’re observing.
The hot season is getting a lot longer in some places.Michael Kolian/U.S. Global Change Research Program
2) Coastal flooding: Heat is causing ocean waters to expand, pushing up sea levels and melting ice sheets around the world. Both high-tide flooding and catastrophic storm surge will become much more frequent as those events start from a higher average level because of sea level rise.
3) Drought: Warmer air evaporates more water from reservoirs, crops and forests, so drought will increase because of increased water demand, even though changes in rainfall vary and hard to predict.
4) Wildfires: As the western U.S. and Canada are seeing, heat dries out the soils and vegetation, providing drier fuel that’s ready to burn. Forests lose more water during hotter summers, and fire seasons are getting longer.
The Tamarack Fire spread through dry forest and grass near Lake Tahoe on July 17, 2021.AP Photo/Noah Berger
5) Reduced spring snowpack: Snow starts accumulating later in the fall, more water is lost from the snowpack during winter, and the snow melts earlier in the spring, reducing the flush of water into reservoirs that supports the economies of semiarid regions.
6) Very heavy rainfall: Warmer air can transport more water vapor. Damaging rainstorms are due to strong updrafts that cool the air and condense the vapor as rainfall. The more water is in the air during a strong updraft, the more rain can fall.
7) Hurricanes and tropical storms: These derive their energy from evaporation from the warm sea surface. As oceans warm, larger regions can spawn these storms and provide more energy. But changes in winds aloft are expected to reduce hurricane intensification, so it’s not clear that global warming will increase damage from tropical storms.
8) Extreme cold weather: Some research has attributed cold weather than moves south with the meandering of the jet stream – sometimes referred to as “polar vortex” outbreaks – to warming in the Arctic. Other studies strongly dispute that Arctic warming is likely to affect winter weather farther south, and this idea remains controversial.
9) Severe thunderstorms, hail and tornadoes: These storms are triggered by strong surface heating, so it’s plausible that they could increase in a warming world. But their development depends on the circumstances of each storm. There is not yet evidence that the frequency of tornadoes is increasing.
A warning that can’t be ignored
The catastrophic impacts of extreme weather depend at least as much on people as on climate.
The evidence is clear that the more coal, oil and gas are burned, the more the world will warm, and the more likely it will be for any given location to experience heat waves that are far outside anything they’ve experienced.
Disaster preparedness can quickly fail when extreme events blow past all previous experience. Portland’s melting streetcar power cables are a good example. How communities develop infrastructure, social and economic systems, planning and preparedness can make them more resilient – or more vulnerable – to extreme events.
This article was updated to fix a typo, air as opposed to water, in the sixth item of the list.
Scott Denning, Professor of Atmospheric Science, Colorado State University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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