Hard work is critical to succeed in life

“My kids are the product of two Oxford grads, their amazing academic achievements are merely the result of their superior genetic make-up, forget trying to get the same results yourself or with your own kids.
 

That's effectively what MANY say. I mean, I hear "Your kids aren't like mine..." all the time. They're completely wrong, and it's their defeatist attitude that is at the heart of the problem.
 

Two decades ago, an illiterate guy asked me to teach maths to his 16-year-old son who could not multiply two single-digit numbers and was months away from failing his 16+ exams.
 

I agreed to help, but I didn’t teach the kid any maths. Every week I spent 15 minutes telling him, then reminding him, that he’d be cooking burgers for the rest of his life, I explained in detail what that actually meant, making him think how his life would be.
 

I said that there’s nothing wrong living an honest life like that, but he’s actively making a choice that will, in all probability, lead him there.
 

Two years later he scraped into King's College London, a top 50 university globally, to study Computer Science, and has since been enjoying a fantastic career.
 

Now listen, every kid with a laptop is able to teach themselves beyond a PhD in ANY subject EASILY. But they'd need TONS of INSPIRATION.
 

I'm on holiday with my family living out of a wooden boat on the river Loire, France, I just woke up and saw my 15-year-old son, Danyal, coding away at 6.30am, a clue to his own achievements. They didn't just happen because of his genes, they happened because he's inspired.
 

In the Information Age where anyone can so easily find out anything they want, education should be 95% INSPIRATION, 5% teaching - you can't teach a kid that doesn't want to learn - which is where our education system gets it completely wrong.
 

If we want to achieve anything amazing in our lives, without inspiration we've got one heck of an uphill battle.”