I was just reading a review in the Boston Globe of Kaavya Viswanathan's novel "How Opal Mehta got kissed, got wild and got a life" and was struck by the irony of it. The novel is about the "engineering for success" of Opal Mehta by her parents: admission to Harvard as the catalyst. Clearly Kaavya's real life parents have engineered a similar path for Kaavya. As a parent of three teenage boys living in a highly competitive town, with hundreds of parents similarly engineering their kids' resumes, I am sympathetic to Kaavya's parents, it is a competitive world and we want the best for our children. Parents in India and China are similarily pushing to their children to attain skills and entry to the right educational institutions to allow them to succeed.
While the world appears to have become more competitive the reality is that practically everything in nature is governed by normal distribution, also known as the gaussian or bell curve. There is no way for everyone's children to be "pushed" towards the right of the curve. Certainly as quality education becomes available to more and more children, we can squeeze the curve to make it narrower and therefore include a great portion of people within a standard deviation. Success, however, is determined by many other factors than formal education, it is especially determined by experience. One can compress life's experience into fewer years and of course some people learn from experience better than others. Nonetheless, there is no substitute for first hand experience.
Entrepreneurship is similar in nature. While there are first-time entrepreneurs who were very successful in 2-3 years of starting their ventures, the majority of us took 10+ years of experience to learn how to engineer success. I was recently on a panel at MIT put together by Asian MBA students http://www.talentforum.org/panel-entrepreneurship.htm. A student asked if it was better to work somewhere first or launch a venture straight out of school. Another VC on the panel Andy Goldfarb of Globespan said it was better to work at an established company, build a rolodex of customers and accomplished fellow employees and then start a company. I differed in my response by pointing to another panelist who was a very successful entrepreneur in China who started his company at a young age. This leads to a good question, is it better to learn on the job like a staright-out-of-school first time entrepreneur or learn on someone else's nickel first. I believe both methods work. If you want to learn on the job, surround yourself with good mentors, and make sure that you have set everyone's expectations for a slow road to success. Good mentors can be drawn from VCs, fellow CEOs (there are CEO groups such as the www.ceo-roundtables.com) and advisors. If you want to learn on someone else's nickel choose a succesful company where you are more likely to find good role models.
So a lesson from Kaavya's troubles, don't be compelled by your parents or peers to attain success on their timetable. Be in a hurry but take care to build the foundation for future success. A strong foundation comes from experiencing things first hand and internalizing that experience into your own understanding and desire for success.