Flourish & Blotts

Yo and I spent the past 3 weeks preparing for Ira’s Bookstore .

There were many goals behind it. The first was to teach her the value of creating a business. In the coming decade, the world may change so fundamentally that admission into elite universities may no longer matter in the same way. Knowledge transfer & knowledge acquisition will still matter, but they may matter less than the ability to "manipulate reality".

Not manipulate in a scheming way. More like: understanding the manifold of reality. Learning how to adjust variables in the world and create an outcome. How to work with the “matrix” of life in a mathematical and practical sense.

Less abstractly: we wanted Ira to learn that something may no longer be valuable to her, but it may still be valuable to someone else. She has around 470 books, even though she is only five. Many of them she no longer reads. Instead of throwing them away or simply donating them, we wanted to show her that these books can still create value for other families and other kids.

The second goal was communication. She spent the past 2 weeks planning and building her own trifold poster, something she will likely do throughout elementary, middle, and high school. We wanted her to get an early start in designing, making, and handcrafting something that communicates information while also pulling on emotion.

We used baby photos of her reading across the first five years of her life. She named the bookstore Flourish and Blotts, because she has already read the first five Harry Potter books, and that is the bookstore in Diagon Alley where wizards buy their books.

We also wanted to teach her entrepreneurship. Unlike prior generations, she may need to manage multiple roles, projects, or even businesses at the same time. So we want her to learn early: how to sell, communicate, recruit, organize, price, and lead.

On a side note, she got one of her older friends to come over and help. That matters too. It shows the ability to lead independent of age, and the ability to recruit others into a small mission.

We hope to continue this for the next ten years and get better every year.

It was also a lesson for Yo and me. It is uncomfortable to set up a store and sell things publicly. But all in all, this felt like a monumental step, especially for Ira.