Jamie Dimon’s dad taught him a ‘brutally hard’ investing game as a child that paid dividends

“You could still do this exercise and I’d still be humbled by it,” Dimon said, explaining that it began with his father — who was a stockbroker — handing him an annual report for a restaurant or a company in another industry with which he’d be familiar.

“[He’d] say, ‘Okay, look at this. Look at the history. Read the annual report. Study the industry if you want. What would you pay for the stock?’” Dimon said. “It is brutally hard … You think ‘Oh it’s worth 13 times earnings and the market has it at seven or or 25.’ And so it’s humbling.”

The exercise — which he noted his father never forced on him or his two brothers, who both had no interest in it — helped foster Dimon’s interest in finance and pave the way for his future success. At 14, he traded his first stock, he added.

And while the financial benefits to such early lessons are evident, experts say that teaching kids about money early offers value far beyond simple dollars and cents.

The life lessons hidden inside financial education

In an interview last year on the How Leaders Lead with David Novak podcast, Dimon mentioned that his father was more interested in philosophy and actually didn’t want him to become a stockbroker.

And rather than hammering financial lessons into their kids, Dimon recalled his parents imparting a different lesson: do something with purpose.

“Could be art, it could be science, it could be teaching, it could be being a parent. It wasn’t anything [other] than just do it well and have a purpose,” Dimon said. “And they were pretty strict about that, both of them.”

Yet, by teaching Dimon about stocks and investing young, his father might have helped instill the tools that his son needed to pursue that life of purpose — whatever path he’d chosen.

One 2018 study, for example, showed that offering financial education programs to youth not only boosted their understanding of that subject, but extended to “socioemotional traits and behavior” after observing “sizable positive impacts on self-control and consumption habits.”

And the global non-profit Child Mind Institute, which focuses on children’s mental health, reported that financial education around subjects like budgeting can teach kids to “think about their place in the larger world.” They add that, even if money-related activities lead to kids experiencing some sort of financial loss, it allows them “room to test out certain behaviors and learn from the consequences.”