The good kids followed the rules, did their own work, and waited until everything was perfect before raising their hand. In school, that approach earned gold stars. In business, it tends to earn frustration. The habits that teachers punished, copying, seeking attention, failing without shame, building a gang, selling before building, and acting without permission, turn out to be exactly the habits that drive entrepreneurial success. Here are six things naughty kids do that every business owner should start doing too.
Copy the Homework
The first instinct of a good student is to come up with something original. The naughty kid’s instinct is to find whoever already did the work and copy it. In business, that instinct is worth billions.
Microsoft didn’t invent the word processor. It copied WordPerfect and built Microsoft Word. It didn’t invent the spreadsheet. It copied Lotus 1-2-3 and built Excel. Richard Branson, famously a naughty kid at school, built a business empire by entering industries he didn’t invent: airlines, credit cards, telecommunications. He found what was already working, applied his brand, made it more enjoyable, and took it to market.
Copying doesn’t mean plagiarism. It means studying what works and applying the same logic to your own context. One example from the source material: a global entrepreneur accelerator was modelled on the structure of Les Misérables, which runs the same production in cities worldwide with locally cast actors. The same materials, different people delivering them, everywhere. Another example involved taking the look, feel, and language of a Porsche 911 brochure and translating it into a high-performance business coach’s marketing materials. The principle was identical. The execution was original.
Apple perfected the tablet PC a full eight years after Microsoft introduced it, launched it as the iPad, and most people assume Apple invented the category. Copying, refining, and timing your entry well is a legitimate and highly effective strategy. The good kids are still trying to invent the wheel.
Become an Attention Seeker
The naughty kid walks into a quiet classroom and immediately hijacks the room. Teachers hate it. Markets reward it.
Attention is the upstream resource that everything else in business depends on. Revenue, growth, and profit are all downstream from whether enough people know you exist. Most businesses are starved of attention, not because the product is weak, but because the owner was trained from childhood to sit quietly and not show off.
The numbers are striking: one business grew its Instagram reach from 5,000 views per month to 5 million views per month, and the growth that followed was described as explosive. Kim Kardashian built a billion-dollar business on attention. Hailey Bieber turned attention into a billion-dollar brand in under three years. These aren’t flukes. They’re the compounding returns of treating attention as a primary business asset rather than a vanity metric.
If your business isn’t growing at the rate you want, the honest question to ask is whether it’s getting enough attention in the first place. The answer is almost always no.
Don’t Be Afraid to Fail
Good students want an A on every exam. Naughty kids don’t care about the grade. They care about what happens next.
The most successful entrepreneurs share this quality. They understand that failure isn’t a verdict. It’s data. Running fast, cheap experiments and being willing to get an F on some of them is how you learn what actually works without spending years and significant money finding out.
The good-kid approach to business looks like this: build everything to a high standard, get it perfect, then take it to market. The problem is that perfection takes time and money, and the market often doesn’t respond the way you expected. The naughty-kid approach runs three, four, or five versions simultaneously, watches what happens, drops what doesn’t work, and doubles down on what does. Prolific beats perfect. Some things work. Some don’t. The iteration is the strategy.
This mindset connects directly to how smart marketers approach lead magnets that actually convert: you test, you learn, and you refine rather than waiting until you have the definitive version before launching anything.
Form a Gang
The good kid wants to demonstrate individual excellence. The naughty kid recruits.
In school, if someone else did your homework, you were in trouble. In business, if you’re doing everything yourself, you’re the problem. The naughty-kid move is to identify who’s best at each thing and get them working alongside you. The kid who’s brilliant at maths does the maths homework. In business terms, that’s your finance director. The kid who’s great at English does the English homework. That’s your marketing lead.
Building a team isn’t a sign that you can’t do something. It’s a sign that you understand how business actually scales. Going it alone might feel more honest or more impressive, but it’s slower, more expensive, and more fragile than surrounding yourself with people who are better than you at specific things. The naughty kids figured this out early. The good kids are still trying to prove they can do it all themselves.
Sell First, Then Build
This is where the good-kid mindset causes the most damage. The instinct is to build the thing, get it right, and then sell it. The naughty-kid instinct is to sell it first and only build it once people have committed.
The smartest software companies do this. The best product businesses do this. Pre-orders, waitlists, and early-commitment campaigns all operate on the same principle: validate demand before you invest heavily in supply. If you can’t sell the idea before it exists, you probably can’t sell the product after it does.
The examples are concrete. Tickets sold before the event was organised. Thousands of people added to a waitlist before the software was built. Angel investment secured on the basis of a forecast, not a finished product. In each case, the commitment came first and the creation followed. To the good kids, this feels like deception. To experienced entrepreneurs, it’s just how business works. If you can’t build it, you refund the money. The risk is low. The information you gain is invaluable.
A practical way to implement this is to launch a waitlist page before you invest significant time or money in building anything. The page doesn’t need to be elaborate. It needs to communicate what’s coming, why it matters, and give people a way to signal interest. ScoreApp makes this straightforward, with templates and AI tools designed to help you build a waitlist or diagnostic scorecard quickly. If enough people join, you build. If they don’t, you’ve saved yourself months of wasted effort. You can explore how waitlists and lead generation tools work together to create demand before a product even launches.
ScoreApp’s diagnostic approach fits naturally into this strategy. Rather than a static landing page that simply collects email addresses, a scorecard gives potential customers something useful immediately, while giving you zero-party data about who’s interested and why. That means when you do build, you’re building for an audience you already understand. If you want to test this for your next launch, see how a single well-structured product can scale to seven figures when demand is validated first.
Ready to put the sell-first strategy into practice? Build your first waitlist scorecard with ScoreApp and find out who’s genuinely interested before you spend a single hour building the thing they asked for.
Stop Asking for Permission
The final habit is the one that separates entrepreneurs from employees most sharply. Good kids wait for permission. Naughty kids act and ask for forgiveness later if they’ve stepped on anyone’s toes.
Entrepreneurs are creating things that don’t yet exist. By definition, there’s no established authority to grant permission for something new. Waiting for someone to open the door means waiting indefinitely. The naughty-kid approach is to kick the door down, figure out whether it was the right door, and deal with any consequences afterwards.
This doesn’t mean acting recklessly or ignoring ethics. It means recognising that the habit of waiting for approval, which served you well in school, actively works against you in business. The people who succeed are the ones who move before they feel fully ready, before they have full permission, and before they have certainty about the outcome.
If you’re building a business and you’re still waiting for someone to tell you it’s a good idea, that’s the good-kid conditioning talking. The naughty kids already launched.
Putting It Together
These six habits aren’t a personality type. They’re a set of choices. You can copy what’s already working in your market rather than starting from scratch. You can treat attention as a core business resource rather than something to be modest about. You can run cheap experiments instead of waiting for perfection. You can build a team rather than doing everything alone. You can validate demand before you build supply. And you can act without waiting for permission.
Each of these habits is learnable. The challenge is that most people spent years being rewarded for the opposite behaviours, and those rewards created deep grooves. Recognising the pattern is the first step to changing it.
For a broader look at how these kinds of mindset shifts connect to the way markets are changing, the piece on the five biggest marketing shifts you need to understand is worth reading alongside this one.
The sell-first habit in particular becomes far more powerful when you pair it with a tool that does more than collect email addresses. ScoreApp turns a simple waitlist into a diagnostic experience: people answer meaningful questions, get a personalised result, and you get zero-party data that tells you exactly who’s interested and what they need. That’s the difference between a list of names and a list of qualified prospects. Build your first scorecard with ScoreApp and find out who’s ready before you commit to building anything.
For a practical next step, see how ScoreApp handles this with quizzes, scorecards, and lead capture, then map the same principle into a simple funnel.
