 If you've made it this far in life, you have probably learned that school as it is today is not a very good place to prepare yourself for the real world. You go to school, you have a teacher tell you exactly what to do every step of the way, you get out, you get good grades, you enter the real world, and you realize that this is not how the real world works at all. And if you want to succeed, you have to develop different skill sets within yourself that have not been cultivated throughout your childhood education. Today, we're going to talk about school versus real life. So let me just start this off by saying that teachers are amazing and I give them all the credit in the world and they are raising our children in creating the future generations. So this is in no way a knock on teachers. What this is is a discussion about the current structure of education, particularly in America, but maybe in other places of the world. But one thing you have to realize is that the current education system was developed during the industrial revolution. The structure in which it exists, the way that we go to school at a certain time, the bell rings, we change periods, we go to different topics, subjects, we have to do good at all of them. We have to sit still as children in seats all day long, which is the craziest thing I can imagine. This whole structure was developed to breed factory workers, the way that this is set up, to breed obedient factory workers to work in the manufacturing industry in America during the industrial revolution. The fact that it hasn't substantially changed since then, the content may have changed, the teaching methods may have changed, the teachers may have become way more awesome, but the structure in which it exists has not really changed since then. If your brain is trained to operate within this structure, this really rigid structure, and also to seek out the rewards within this structure, you're going to screw yourself in real life. You're going to get exactly what you've been trained to get, and that is a job as a cog in a very large machine. And so if you don't want to be a cog in the machine, you have to understand, one, what you've been trained to seek out, and two, how to break out of that reward structure. So we're going to talk about school versus real life, and hopefully give you some actionable takeaways that you can use to go out there and make your life better as an entrepreneur, as an artist, as an individual, as somebody who wants more freedom, as somebody who wants more success and more happiness. Take this away, use it in your own life, and break out of that previous programming. This takes a long time to break our previous programming. So the first thing I have on the list here in school versus real life is authority figures. In school, we are bred to believe that the authority figures know all, and if we can just make those authority figures happy, then everything else in our life will work out. And these authority figures have the power to make or break us, okay? They are the ultimate deciders of if we are good or not, of if we will succeed or if we will fail. They are able to punish us, to send us to detention, MRC, take us away from our friends, take away things that we love most. Now the real world does not really work like this. We have the law, and you want to obey the authority of the law, or else there are very real consequences. So one good thing we do, learn in school, we learn a lot of good things in school, by the way, there's so many things that we learn in school that have put us in such a better situation than prior to having free public education. So I should note that, like Tony Robbins taught me that if you blame somebody for all the bad things they've done to you, you have to blame them for the good things as well. And so I can't even imagine not having gone to school. So this is not like a don't go to school thing. It's what do we need in addition to that? But I digress. Coming back to authority figures, in the real world there are certain authority figures you want to obey, and there are certain authority figures you want to ignore completely. And unless you want to be that cog in the machine where you do have that boss, you do have that parental figure who tells you exactly what makes or breaks you, then you have to break out of seeking the approval of authority figures. Now a really good example of this is the scooter company. So if you've seen in cities in the united states these electric scooters that you can just walk out your front door, open it up on your app and jump on an electric scooter ride all around town. If you've seen the way that they treated their business to succeed, they came into cities, they didn't ask permission, and they flooded the streets with scooters, and then the authority figures were left to figure out, what do we do with this? And then yes, they did have to work with authority, but they didn't ask permission, and if they did, they never would have survived in a competitive environment. And again, they're here to succeed in business. They're not here to please the authorities, which they certainly did not. They upset a lot of them. So you have to understand like if you look to authority figures for approval, you're always going to be a cog in the machine. You have to become the authority in order to get out of that cycle, okay? And this is really hard to break. This is why the guru model exists in online education, because people love to have a guru. People love to have some supreme being that has all the answers. But to tell you the truth about the real world, nobody knows all the answers. You just want to take what is useful and discard what is not from those people who are your mentors. But none of them are, none of them should be treated like the authority, because it just doesn't exist. The world is much too complex. We're all human beings, okay? Number two on the list, I have, uh, making the teacher happy versus the student's happy. So this goes along with authority figures. We're, we're trained to live our life in a way that's going to make that authority happy. That, that being of the utmost importance. And again, in the real world, this is not what's important. So let's take somebody who's in a classroom and they could take two different actions, okay? They could do something funny and they could make 30 students happy, but it'll make the teacher really mad. Or they could just be really obedient and get a good grade on the test. Uh, but nobody else will like them. Now in school, you're going to get a bunch of better outcome by doing the second one, making the teacher really happy. In real life, making 30 of your peers happy versus one authority figure who doesn't have any real authority in real life anyways is going to create such a better outcome for you, okay? If you can form alliances, if you can get people on your side, if you can become a leader, then half people follow you, you are going to find so much more success in life. The amount of people you can impact is going to determine a lot of your success. And so there's this whole thing about like making one person happy or making all these people that are your peers happy and you're not rewarded for the second one in school at all. And so somebody who can go out there and they can form a relationship with their peers is going to do much better in the real world than somebody who can only make the teacher happy. They don't teach you that in school, they say, fall roles, make the teacher happy. Number three on here, I have cramming versus taking the test over. So the cramming model, again, it does have its usefulness. It teaches you to hit deadlines, which is a really good real world skill. The problem with the cramming model is what you're doing is you're cramming information in your brain to just basically puke it back out onto paper for a test. This is not very useful at all in real life and it causes a lot of problems with people who try and learn real world skills. Okay, we want to use what's called just-in-time information in real life. That means we only take in and absorb things as we need to apply them, okay? If we're not going to actually apply this information, it's a waste of time to cram it into our brains. So in the real world, you can take the test over. You can go take the test, you can get an F on it, and then you can go back and you can take it the next day, and you can try the test over and over again every single day. And so somebody might spend two weeks cramming for a test and get a pretty good grade on it, but the person who knows they can take the test over, they might take the test on day one, fail the test, take the test again on day two, and pass it and be done with it. So that first person who crammed it took them two weeks. The person who took the test over took them two days. And that's how the real world works. The faster you can implement, figure out where you failed and then correct those mistakes, the faster you'll make progress in your business. So we don't want to cram. That's called analysis paralysis in the business world. When you're trying to learn everything you could possibly learn before taking any action, what we want to do is take the test every day and just take it over having learned where we failed the day before. You're going to get such a better outcome there. And again, a lot of people get stuck in this. They're just trained in their cramming model. They'll prepare and they'll prepare and they'll prepare, and the person who's out there taking action is just blowing them out of the water. So stop cramming for tests in the real world. It doesn't work. Number four, I have cheating. Cheating in school is like one of the worst things you can do. You can get kicked out for cheating. In the real world cheating is your greatest ally. So let's say that you are in chemistry class and your best friend is sitting next to you and your best friend is just amazing at chemistry. They're naturally good at chemistry. They study chemistry in their free time because it's so interesting to them. They're curious about it. They love it. And you hate chemistry. You absolutely hate it. And you go in there and you cheat off them to pass the chemistry test. In school, this is unethical. It will get you kicked out of school. In the real world, this is how you succeed. You find the smartest people in the area which you need to tackle and you pay them to tell you what to do. This is the only way to succeed. You're never going to be an expert in everything. And so in life, what we consider cheating in school is actually the path to success. It's finding people who are specialized in one area and getting their help to accomplish what we set out to accomplish. So you can see quote unquote cheating in the real world is going to put you so much further ahead than trying to do everything on your own than trying to take a chemistry test when you absolutely hate chemistry. Number five in here, I have the need to be good at everything versus one thing. And this follows the same lines. Like in school, we have to get a passing grade and ideally like an like an A you're pretty much shamed if you don't get A's in school. And so you're shamed if you suck at chemistry and you can't pass chemistry class where you might be like amazing at volleyball and gym class or you might be amazing at mathematics but you just suck at chemistry because you hate it. And so being a jack of all trades in the real world without any specialized knowledge at all is not going to get you that far. You're going to get a mediocre job. It was nice to have some expertise in crossover industries but you don't want to try and get A pluses in every subject. Okay. You want to get really, really, really, really good at one thing and then have enough knowledge in all the other areas just to get by and that's how you're going to become supremely successful in life is having that specialized knowledge. So in school you have to be good at everything but really you should just pick the one subject that you love and become really, really good at that in the real world. And again school teaches us like if you have weaknesses in areas like that's a bad thing but the real world that's not a bad thing to be bad at some things. You can't be good at everything. I started a novel writing class last night which I will undoubtedly suck at but my teacher said if you want to get good at writing you have to slip in other areas of life like you have to start to be bad at other areas of life because you just can't be great at all of it. So that brings me to my next point is that in school the most you can get on a test or a subject is a hundred percent and again this trains us for jobs to be a cog in the machine at a job the most that you can earn is your max salary even if you work on commission a lot of the times you have a cap on your commission but in the real world if you're an entrepreneur if you're a businessman or a business woman there is no cap you can get a thousand percent on that test so in school you should be able to get a thousand percent and in the real world this will make up for all the other tests that you failed so if you go into that chemistry class again you fail every single test until the final you can get a thousand percent on that final it will make up for all those other tests in the real world you can fail 29 businesses in a row and become a multimillionaire on your 30th business it doesn't matter how many times you fail so in school it very much matters you can fail that first test it'll ruin your grade for the semester in the real world fail over and over again and we see this in people all the times they're completely unwilling to fail so they never get good at anything because they're not out there trying they're too scared to fail and the moment they fail the very first thing they give up and they think it doesn't work because in school you have to be able to pass every single test so this is just going to destroy your chances of success in business realize that you can get a thousand percent on tests in the real world number seven school versus real life we have small errors versus large errors this one is pet peeve of mine there are people out there who are obsessed with never seeing a spelling mistake or a grammar mistake and they'll see your ads and they'll say i would never trust somebody who would make a spelling mistake in their ad or a grammar mistake in an ad but now let's look at it from my point of view let's say that i could launch 10 different ads and they all have spelling and grammar mistakes or i could launch one ad and it will be perfect which one am i going to be better off doing i'm better off launching 10 ads so that i can see which one hits and then which one maybe if i'm two or three of those 10 hit then i can go back and i can correct the spelling in the grammar but here's the thing having perfect spelling is not what's going to get me to succeed having a marketing hook that captures the imagination of millions of people is what will get me to succeed and so a lot of people go out there and they focus on the wrong things they focus on being perfect presentation being grammatically correct not having any spelling errors but they're missing out on the big things having the right marketing hooks working with the right market offering the right product and so they're focused on small errors versus large errors okay they're focused on passing a class when they should be worried about taking the wrong major in school and so school teaches you to just obsess over these things that you get marked down on on a test it focuses on perfection on things that might not matter at all in business you can perfectly execute 10 projects and get absolutely no results from them even if they look beautiful even if they seem perfectly polished and so the big thing you have to worry about in life is making those large errors taking the wrong opportunities not investing in yourself when you should not taking risks when you should these are the large errors not making a spelling mistake on an ad so these grammar Nazis i can almost just guarantee that they're broke and they don't have a successful business because you can't because you have to make thousands and thousands of mistakes to run a successful business you have to make mistakes all the time and people will definitely judge you for those but you have to understand that you are focused on not making those large errors not missing the opportunity when it's right in front of your face because you're too worried about being perfect so school it just teaches you over and over again worry about the small errors but you got to worry about the big things get the big things right and uh as tim ferris said you have to let small bad things happen to let good big things happen in your life number nine again related to the previous one avoidance of failure school will just destroy a person's self-esteem for failing uh dyslexics dyslexic people show up in the business world all the time as highly successful people uh richard branson i believe is dyslexic and he runs a multi billion dollar empire and so he probably did not do very well in school and you see this in other industries with musicians with actors with artists with entrepreneurs these people that go out there and they tackle complexity that requires a lot of failure because they've learned to fail over and over again in school they failed they sucked at school they go out in the real world and they say oh i got this i know how to fail those people can go out there and they have a huge leg up on somebody who was taught that it was bad that they're lesser of a person if they fail something in school if you fail a class you know your your teachers might shame you your parents might shame you your peers might make fun of you but in the real world it's okay to fail it's okay to fail over and over again it only takes one passing grade to get where you want to go so that's the same thing like you can fail 29 out of 30 times with a new business and as long as you pass once you're good and if you're in sales which anyone who owns their own businesses in sales you have to figure out how to sell your product if we look at a typical sales conversion rate it's it's generally between one and five percent of leads and so if we're converting one percent of leads that means 99 out of 100 people are rejecting us that feels like 99 failures but it's totally normal if you can't handle 99 failures for one success you'll never make it in business that's just how the numbers work you learn it very quickly in sales so school teaches us that you want to succeed every single time and what that does is causes you to never try things that you'll fail at where in the real world you have to fail 99 out of 100 times and you hit it that one time you're good and then number nine last thing I have on the list is having the answers versus having the right questions so we're always seeking the answers in school this is the same thing about like small errors versus large errors we're always seeking the right answers it doesn't matter if you get the right answers to the wrong questions like does it matter if you know the date that's a historical figure was born no it doesn't matter to your to your life at all you don't have the right questions and if you can figure out the right questions then you can seek out meaningful answers things that will actually impact your life things that have practical implications in your life having the right questions is one of the hardest things to do especially once you have some moderate success and there's no clear path forward you have to figure out okay what questions should we ask next and then you have to go out there and seek the answers from the world because you don't have them yourself so this is again comes back to the cheating thing as well like in my organization if I'm looking for answers where do I look I look to my team I look to my customers I look to the market but I don't look to myself I don't have most of the answers my job is to come up with the right questions if I can do that I can go out there and I can seek answers from people that have them apple said we don't know exactly what to do we hire the smartest people in the world to tell us what to do and the person that can hire the smartest person in the world to tell them what to do will win so I hope you see just what a difference there is between the level of thinking required to go out there and operate a successful business in the real world and the level of thinking that they teach you in school and again like I want to blame school for all the good things too you know we have advanced so much due to our current schooling system and without going to school we'd be so much further behind but I'm just saying you have some adjustments to make once you enter the real world and you need to understand like everything that school trained you for it might work when you're a kid but it's not going to work out in the real world so break out of this rigid structure break out of seeking approval from authority figures break out of non-collaboration and not harnessing the talents of people who are smarter than you break out of needing to succeed every single time start feeling a lot more starting a lot more action and start asking the right questions and you'll start getting the results that you want in life so go through the whole time school versus real life number one seeking approval authority figures number two making teacher happy versus making the students happy again you need to impact thousands and thousands of people to succeed in business so we're not trying to make one authority figure happy we're trying to make large masses of people happy from from a navals podcast he says the way to get rich is to give the world what it wants but does not yet know how to get so again like if you can make all the students in the class happy that's going to give you real results in the real world number three cramming versus taking the test over you can just take the test over again in real world number four cheating leveraging the strengths of your friends is a good thing number five needing to be good at everything versus one thing specialized knowledge mastery and one thing we'll get you really far number six a hundred percent versus a thousand percent you can get a thousand percent on tests you can have one business that blows everything else you've ever tried in your life out of the water number seven small areas versus large areas you need to let small bad things happen in order to make big good things happen so focus on getting the the big things right don't worry about the small errors uh number eight avoidance of failure start failing every single day every failure you have will get you closer to success nine having the right answers versus having the right questions you don't have all the answers i don't have all the answers none of the gurus have all the right answers but some of them have the right questions and you can cultivate the right questions too i hope this helps let me know in the comments what do you think of this do you like this style of video what bad habit did you learn in school that you've had to break out to find success or what habit you have that is has been holding you back and you might be noticing it right now so like subscribe share with a friend and i'll see you on the next video the future of work is changing your college major doesn't matter anymore degrees don't matter anymore a piece of paper cannot save you fast company says the practical skills will matter more than your degree in the new economy cmbc agrees and says the future of work won't be about college degrees will be about job skills in addition to this the impact of artificial intelligence will cause widespread job losses oxford university says that 47 of jobs will disappear in the next 25 years and i'm not just talking about menial tasks i'm talking about doctors lawyers other high-level jobs will be relegated to cheaper faster more efficient countries or artificial intelligence a two-year study from mckinsey global institute suggests that by 2030 intelligent agents and robots could eliminate as much as 30 percent of the world's human labor automation will displace between 400 and 800 million jobs by 2030 requiring as many as 375 million people to switch job categories entirely and the jobs that are left are going remote fast company says remote work is the new normal so how do you prepare yourself for the future of work how do you make yourself so valuable and flexible that you can withstand any change first don't panic adapt one solution is to make yourself indispensable and to do something where the demand for your skills not your degree exceeds the supply rise with the technological tide there are 28 million small businesses in the united states alone 543 000 new businesses get started each month and they all need marketing the current pool of digital marketers can't possibly fill this demand demand for digital marketing skills outstrips the supply according to mando demand for digital marketing professionals will rise by 30 percent in this year alone with digital advertising squarely at the top of digital marketing skills in demand learn the skills of this trade and you will become indispensable and the best part of working in digital advertising work from anywhere on your own terms once you go remote you won't go back in the state of remote work 2018 buffer says that 90 percent of survey respondents said that they plan to work remotely for the rest of their career in other words learning the skills you need to work from anywhere will make your life better and unlike university the investment in your education as a digital marketer is actually affordable instead of 30 years you can pay back your investment in one client the future is work from anywhere it's up to you whether you want to ride the trends to the top or get left behind i'll see you inside