The Shark Tank Massacre
Last year, thirteen-year-olds pitched their business ideas to parent-entrepreneurs.
The parents destroyed them.
Six weeks of work, demolished in minutes. In public.
The Eagles weren't ready. The judges said so. To their faces.
And every parent in the audience was grateful.
Here's the thing about failure:
Schools pretend it doesn't exist. They cushion it, reframe it, rename it. They turn F's into "areas for growth." They give participation trophies for showing up.
We don't.
When a robot won't run the maze after fifteen attempts, we don't fix it.
When a business pitch falls apart, we don't rescue it.
When the world says "not good enough," we don't argue.
We say: "That didn't work. Now you know. What's next?"
Protection is selfish.
We protect kids from failure because watching them fail hurts us. Not them. Us.
But parents who send their children to Flourish aren't buying protection. They're buying preparation.
For a world that won't care about their feelings.
For investors who won't sugarcoat feedback.
For life that won't hand out second chances.
Those kids whose robots kept glitching?
They figured it out. Eventually. Without us.
And now they own that knowledge in a way they never could have if we'd helped.
That's not education. That's transformation.
The difference between resilience and antifragility:
Resilience bounces back.
Antifragility gets stronger.
We're not raising resilient kids.
We're raising kids who seek out failure. Who hunt for it. Who know that every massacre is just data for the next attempt.
The Shark Tank massacre wasn't a disaster.
It was a gift.
The parents knew it.
The judges knew it.
And deep down, the Eagles knew it too.
That's why we do this.
Not despite the failures.
Because of them.
