3 Success Understandings We Didn’t Learn In School (2376)

One of my favorite classes in high school was psychology and law, and we watched a lot of movies, and I learned a lot, but honestly I don't think I learned almost anything about what it actually takes to be successful, maybe a successful director, but that is not the pursuit I endeavored on.

What you'll never learn in school but desperately need to know was my old tagline for Alan Lazarus, and I'll see 11 years ago, and here we are.

Welcome to Next Level University. I'm your host, Kevin Paul Mary, and I'm your co-host, Alan Lazarus. At NLU, we believe in a heart-driven, but no BS approach to holistic self-improvement for dream chasers.

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Next level nation today for episode number 2376, three success understandings we didn't learn in school. Go.

Go. Okay. What you'll never learn in school but desperately need to know. Yes. Alan Lazarus LLC.

You are 36 years old. And you are someone who didn't take school super-seriously. Okay. Now you are a successful man. Top 1% successful man.

Sure. Globally, not necessarily in the US because it's higher, but globally. Although I think you're getting there, the you understand success, we study success, we teach success, we podcast about success, we coach on success, we do group coaching programs.

You have studied success and personal development and personal growth and self-improvement a ton. Because that's what we do for a living now.

All right. What do you think should have been taught in school that was not? I won for me is self-awareness. You know that. You always go there. Okay. You know that. That's one for sure.

I would say because nobody they teach you how to learn about things, but you imagine a self-awareness course.

Oh, it'd be the best. I think Mama Z. Mama Z is doing that. Agreed. I think Mama Z. What would give context to who that is? Yes. I dated her daughter for a long time. She was our health teacher in middle school.

Yeah. She said, does anybody know what condoms are made of? And I raised my hand. It's latex. Of course. I know what condoms are made of. And then I went on to date her daughter for many years. It was weird.

The first time seeing her. We also had on the podcast. We had on the podcast twice. Twice. I think I had her on before you. You first time. Yep. Great. She's a teacher at our hometown. Awesome. Awesome human doing awesome things in the world.

So yeah, self-awareness because at the end of the day, I think success without awareness and fulfillment is very empty.

And the only way to really know what fulfills you and core values and core beliefs and all that stuff is to have self-awareness. What would that self-awareness course include? If you're the teacher. Oh, God. Kevin is teaching a high school course in this hypothetical universe on self-awareness. Go.

Team three, three, three acts structure here. One would be, let's take a look at your past. Like, let's take a look. I know you're young. Like you're in your teens, still, but like, let's take a look at what has gotten you to where you are today. That would be one.

Got to teach the drive to five. So self-believe self-worth. Got to teach that. And then.

Man, probably core values or paradigms. Nice.

Those are like simple to start. And for people listening, paradigms, paradigm, your view of the way the world is. Like a religious paradigm is somebody who goes to church every Sunday.

And they think everything revolves around religion, family paradigm. You believe families the most important thing. You probably spend a lot of time with your family.

Growth paradigm, your reading books all the time. You're learning fitness paradigm. You're probably in really good shape.

So like, what is the center of your world for lack of that?

Yeah. What's the unconscious and subconscious belief that you believe? Like, what's the point of life?

That's the point. Yeah. What's your okay? So self-awareness would be one for me.

One of them has got to be time management. Yeah. Time management slash productivity. I don't know which you prefer productivity or time management. What do you think is a better title?

Probably time management because I think it's more open. When you say we didn't learn in school. Are you thinking just like what you're thinking elementary, middle and high school?

Yeah, formal education. Yeah. So. And again, it depends where you grow up. But things you never learned in school.

Formal education. Yeah. You really don't learn these things in corporate either. I assume you probably learned something about time management, right?

Business school? Very little. Yeah, very little brother. Yeah. Not enough. Yeah, very little productivity and time management was not taught. Yeah, and I got a master's degree.

What would that course be? It would be the first one would be just understanding how much time you actually have.

168 hours a week. 112 waking hours. If you sleep 56 sleep bed hours a night, which it's you need nine in bed in order to get eight hours of sleep. No one ever taught that.

Right. It's like time, you know, or attracts time in bed versus hours of actually sleeping. Yeah. So it's almost like if you want nine hours, you got to put 10 in bed. If you want eight hours, you got to put nine in bed.

So probably that just time in general seconds minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, quarters, years, decades, lifetime, like average life expectancy.

Because I joke, if average life expectancy was 40, I'd be playing a very different game right now. Yeah. Right. Cause I'm 37. Yeah. If I had four years left, ice cream for every meal, probably. I think, you know, I've already lived 90% of my life. Like, what are we doing here? Let's just celebrate. That's interesting.

Parado, would you teach? Yeah. Right. You got to teach Pareto 20% of effort produces 80% of results. And then you can't really have time management without goal setting. So you have to put some goal setting in there.

Because what's the point of time management without a goal? Right. So so there's got to be goal setting Pareto understanding time, how much you have longevity, average life expectancy, days, weeks, months, all that kind of stuff.

That, yeah. Cool. All right. So that's time management. Let's come up with a couple more. So you and I are high school teachers. We have our own high school metaphorical universe.

It's called next level university high school. Okay. All right. And we're the professors, the teachers. And you're teaching down the hall kids.

There's self awareness with Mr. Professor Paul Mary, Professor Paul Mary and get out of here because I don't have the time time management.

What are you thinking? I honestly think investing should have been one. Yeah. It's good. It's a good one way to go.

Because I think most people, that's the weird thing. Like entrepreneurs tend to win at investing just because they are patient and they have long term perspective.

I think they win because they have no choice. Well, yeah, yeah. If you go into an entrepreneurship endeavor without an investor's mindset, you're going to get destroyed. It's it's an necessity.

That's the thing is like most investors are most entrepreneurs are investors because in order to be an entrepreneur, you kind of have to be one. Yeah.

But that's a great way for like anybody who has a nine to five, which is the vast majority of people. So like take care of their future selves.

But you also have to understand that like you just put money away and you just don't touch it for 20 years.

You just you just put it in there and you have to keep putting it in there. Like that concept. I think I don't know. I wish I learned that.

I learned how to balance a checkbook. But like I didn't have to do that anymore. You know, like there's that. So I wish I learned more about that finance finance in general.

Yeah, not just investing, but finance. Well, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Dude, dumbass. That's got to be one of the dumbest things ever is that we don't have a finance course in high school. What the fuck is that?

Do you do other places and you talk to a lot of people? Again, our school is not common. Our school wasn't like great. No, it's not common. No, it's not common.

Which is alarming. I have a receipt rate. It's Aaron went to a trader Joe's. I was like, Hey, give me that receipt. Hand that receipt over to me. So I can track this.

You know how much I need to know how much money we spent in a track. Every day, baby, people don't. We aren't taught the difference between physical cash,

difference in a savings account, the checking account, difference between gross income and net income,

difference between interest rates, 3% fee versus a 6% versus an interest rates versus fees.

Because one of them compounded the other one doesn't, right? We've gotten business loans with a fee that I like because it's a flat fee.

It's like, Hey, pay me eight grand. Boom. Instead of accumulating it, right? So we aren't taught these things. Yeah, finance for sure.

That's we use money every day. Everyone uses money every day. Even kids use money, how do you make that?

Were you in my class? Were we invested in stocks? No. With Hutch? No. I invested in, I don't know what I was doing, Garmin. Great.

But crushed it. Garmin GPS was crushing it. If you kept it and held it, you'd have lost all your money.

So I think overnight mobile phones. Yeah, everything Garmin. Yeah. I think we were exposed to a little bit of it.

But here's the question. How do you, how do you get somebody to learn unsexy fundamentals?

You get them to set a goal that requires it. And then you help them understand and connect it. So I was with a client yesterday.

And I said, um, try to provide the stage, the context for this. Tucker got a little sick last week.

And he pused in my office. And we have this new food for him that if you keep it out too long, it gets nasty.

And I said, we have to make sure that we put the food away, like almost right away, because this is really, really, really good dog food.

And the reason I can tell, and again, this is me being a nerd for a second here, if you leave your food out on the counter,

and there's a few exceptions, like an orange, it has protection from bacteria and stuff. But like, you know how salad goes bad really fast?

Okay, the reason why is if bacteria doesn't want to eat it, you probably shouldn't. And then I could twink you can leave on the counter for 20 years.

And it's fine. It's because of all the preservatives and shit. So that's sort of the funny metaphor. It's like if bacteria, bacteria doesn't want to eat it.

So what's my point of all this? Why are we talking about bacteria? I had a client who didn't know the difference in viruses and bacteria.

I don't know if I do viruses spread bacteria, doesn't my viruses are hold on hold on viruses are exponential back. No, bacteria is exponential too for sure. Hold on.

It's one of you want to keep going? No, I think I've made it. I don't want to waste it. It was time viruses require a living host.

Ah, there it is. Bacteria can eat, you know, dead things, right?

And again, there's more to it than that. But anyways, the point is is the problem with knowledge is you don't know what knowledge you need to know.

And I told the immune, I said, we just, why do you think of freezers of freezer? It's like bacteria needs oxygen, heat, and food in order to grow.

And food could be, you know, dog food or salad or whatever, whatever rots. The point that I'm making though is that's why we have freezers.

Freezers are cold, so bacteria can't grow, right? That's why the certain malaria, for example, can't be in the Northeast because it can't survive in the Northeast, right?

So again, don't quote me on that necessarily. I haven't studied malaria specifically. All right. I'm going to get some fucking DM from somebody. Well, malaria could, you know, it's like the actual end three.

I believe the etymology of malaria is been six proven cases. It's like, listen, shut the fuck up.

I got nothing else for you. Like, get a life, right? So, but the truth is is we don't know, I told the immediate, like, we need to study more biology.

Like chemistry, she took Mandarin instead of chemistry. I thought that was a huge mistake. And nobody, but no one knows why chemistry matters, especially if you don't know chemistry.

Yeah. Right. So it's almost like the people who know are the people who know the value of it.

And the people who don't know are like, so for example, I don't really know what's something I've never studied botany. I didn't know a ton about body. Okay.

I don't know why that's bad. Like, what am I leaving on the table? I have no fucking clue.

And so as I've been coaching over the years, I've realized that I'm definitely an overly curious learner. And I know we got to go here in a second.

But there's very little that I don't have curiosity to at least understand the components of.

And I think in high school, we should have set people up, not just high school, middle school, elementary school, high school, college, corporate.

Like, we didn't set people up for success, dude. Like, for sure.

Finance, fitness, nutrition, sleep, self-awareness, courage, humility, vulnerability, character, virtue.

What are you learning in health class? I don't even remember.

That's what I'm saying. We need, like, most guys don't know much about female anatomy, right? It's, it's, I think personal development.

That's why I'm so passionate about it. These books are so important because they're habits.

We didn't take a course on habits. Nothing. Dude, nothing on habits.

Now you and me, I know you got to go, if you don't have good habits and you don't know how to build good habits and you don't know how to sustain good habits, I'm not betting on you.

You're basically on autopilot to some extent, right? So why, can you imagine if we taught kids about the habit loop and how to destroy bad habits and create good ones?

Like, dude, what's two? We're going to do a part two on this, obviously, but what is that? I don't know.

That would be one of my habits. At what age are you able to, like, actually conceptualize practice and see results on that, you think?

Early, super early. You think it'll learn multiple languages? Yeah, they think it a lot.

Kids are amazing. Lock in. I mean, they're not going to be, you know, they're not dialed in at level 10.

But it doesn't mean you can't start. Amy's kids are learning finance. They have a habit tracker and a spreadsheet.

It's really quite cool. Actually, one of my clients is tutoring them. It is super cool. She'll send pictures every once in a while.

Nice to cutest. All right, we're going to do a part two. We'll do a part two on this because I do think I've always had this thought of people will be like, oh my goodness, there's this issue that's happening in the world.

It's like, well, that issue that's happening in the world is a result of something that somebody created and didn't know what was going to be an issue.

I think it'll probably get solved as most of them ended up most issues have been, but so many of them are just results of something that happened recently, ish that we just didn't know.

You know what I mean? Like smoking on airplanes. Well, yes, that's not what I was asking. No, but seriously, how ignorant were we? Super, super.

I'm thinking more like there was, there was an island that was uninhabited. They wanted to inhabit it.

There was mice on the island, so they released cats. Cats did a bunch of breeding and crossbreeding. And there was some sort of virus that killed all the plants. Well, since the plants died, all the other animals died.

And now there is no life on that. Now nobody can live there anyway, because the whole thing is fucked like that.

But solutions create new problems. That's an episode we should do at some point, too. It's like, you have a problem. You create a solution. That solution creates new bottlenecks.

That's constraint theory. Well, let's do, we'll do a part two on this, because I think this we could do a million episodes of this.

So what did you say? You said finance, self awareness, self awareness. I said time management habits.

So that's more we gave you, we gave you an extra. Well, yeah, we'll do more. We'll do more.

And then maybe we can do like, what's one thing you learned in school that you still use today?

Yeah, not something. I don't not trigonometry. Like give me something good. Yeah. Give me something good. All right, we got to go. As always, we love you. We appreciate you.

Great for each and every one of you. And if you are as committees, you say you are to getting to next level, make sure you tune in tomorrow, because we will be here every single day to help you get there.

Keep leveling up to reach your full potential. Next level nation.

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