Sir Richard Branson’s mum weighed into the whole ‘Are great challengers born or made?’ debate with a little family history of her own last week. The man himself had not found enough wind to complete his attempt to become the fastest and oldest kiteboarder to cross the English Channel, but was phlegmatic about it – he rarely, he said, every completed an adventure at the first attempt.

But it was his mother, Eve, who stole the show. She was quoted in The Guardian as saying, as she watched the attempt from the beach: “He’s always thinking up something to do next. It may be that I made him a bit like that because I set him things that one really shouldn’t set a child, such as dropping him in the middle of Devon and saying, ‘Find your way home, I’ll meet you down the bottom of the hill,’ when he was about five or six. I didn’t want him just to be a dull little child.”

It is not simply small brands that one wants to avoid being dull little children, it seems. And it is the age at which she did this to the infant knight that is so interesting, shocking even (she’d probably get locked up for it if she tried it today). She really wired a sense of his own ability to go it alone into him at a very, very early age.

I wonder what the implications are for a 15 year old schoolchild, or a 25 year old brand manager. What’s the equivalent of dropping them off in the middle of Devon and telling them to find their way home, so that they become more entrepreneurially interesting?

And bearing in mind that to really translate it properly, it needs to be borderline ‘shocking’?