3 Lessons I Wish School Taught Me

I had a love hate relationship with school.

School was meant to be a place where you received a collection of knowledge to prepare you for the world ahead.

It wasn't, far from it.

Let me be blunt here. The world that school prepared you for does not exist anymore.

At times, school felt like an intellectual prison that stunted my growth. I liked solving math problems and studying geography, physics and chemistry. These topics fell into my natural interests.

But I severely disliked the rest of it. I created the belief that English was tedious, History was boring, and Religion was useless.

I consider myself lucky because my relationship with was love hate. For some of you watching, it is only hate.

If I hate school and school is a place for learning, then I must hate learning, which is a logical association your brain may make.

What a criminal effect.

When your impression of learning is negative, how do you think your life will turn out? Take a look around. It's not good at all.

Learning is the first step to improving at anything. This is especially true when you want to level up your life. It is no wonder so many people do not take the first step.

Let's be honest here: I don't remember much of school. I have little recollection of transformative moments in my understanding of the world. Instead, all of the ideas, knowledge, and skills I carry with me now were acquired post-school through self-education.

So, let's talk about three lessons I wish school had taught me about the world ahead.

Lesson 1 - Hone Your Compass

Years ago, I was having a conversation with a friend. We were reflecting on our time in school, and our conversation drifted to the remodeling of the school.

His main criticism of my ideas was that if school didn't tell him what to learn, he would know what to learn. This stumped me, and I didn't know how to refute it.

Today, I call bullshit.

All of us were born curious. The environment stamped that curiosity out of you.

When people say, "I have no interests" or "I don't know what interests me," it's because they are not paying attention to what sparks curiosity in their brains.

Why would you? You were denied the opportunity to follow that curiosity in school.

Your days were broken into one-hour blocks of learning about something you didn't choose, without any vision of the future. Autonomy is one of the most important intrinsic motivators, and you had none of it.

Instead, you were told to shut up, sit down and sit still. Any attempt to break out of that mold was quickly punished.

School saw students as nothing more than pre-packaged cookie dough, ready to be processed and baked.

In other words, school is a one-size-fits-all model.

You live for the weekend as an adult because you lived for the weekend as a child.

This goes against your biology. We were wired to explore, to venture out into the unknown and see what we could find. It was playful and dangerous, but also fun. Unlike school, it was guided, not structured rigidly.

Every child had the opportunity to explore their curiosity in an inefficient way. Of course, there were rules of the tribe to operate within, but exploration was key to every child's development.

Through that process, you develop taste.

Think of taste as your gut instinct. By tasting a variety of foods, our ancestors learnt what was nourishing and what was poisonous.

Trial and error refine your taste. Through experience, you hone your compass.

Experience gives you more reason to back yourself and trust your gut. Your gut is your best compass, but you must refine your taste first.

Explore. Experiment. Iterate. And you'll be just fine.

Lesson 2 - The real currency of the world

Listen carefully, students.

Ask your mum and dad what the world's currency is, and they will tell you money.

Ask your grandparents what the world's currency is, and they will tell you time.

They're both wrong.

The real currency of the world ahead of you is focus.

Where you decide to put your attention will determine everything you give and receive during your life. All of it comes back to focus.

Everything you do from the moment you get out of bed to the moment you go back to sleep requires focus. You put your focus on one thing, then the next thing, and then the next.

Where you aim your focus will determine if you are:

• Miserable or content

• poor or wealthy

• fat or fit

• lonely or connected

Conscious, aware and intentional effort is the goal. Without it, your life begins to decay. That is the law of entropy.

Focus is Sisyphus pushing against the big bang.

Most people float through their existence, like NPCS in their own stories. Their focus is unconscious and unaware, which is no wonder they hate their lives.

No one gets what they want by accident unless they are extremely lucky, but even then, you need to put yourself in the position to be lucky.

Getting what you want is resource collection, and money is the universal resource.

All business, from marketing and sales to leadership and team building, is about capturing the attention of your audience.

Everyone is bidding for your attention: the videos you watch, the products and services you buy, the money you receive from your employer in exchange for your time, and your dogs bugging you to take them for a walk are all bids for your attention.

Your attention is constantly being exchanged for everything else.

Unfortunately, most people believe the wealth creation game is zero-sum. The pie is only so big, and by taking a slice, someone else misses out. The population is split into the haves and the have-nots.

Over thousands of years, intentional focus has made the global pie bigger. Look at the photo below of Tokyo in 1960 vs. 2010 and tell me the population of Japan didn't get vastly richer in a short 50 years.

The pie got bigger. Focus made the pie bigger. Focus can create wealth. Focus can make the game a positive sum.

Focus achieves the impossible.

Maybe focus can transform you from an NPC to a developer.

Lesson 3 - Yes First, No Second

We need to tie the first idea to the second idea.

You hone your compass by saying yes to everything. This is the exploration phase of your life.

You need to learn what you want and what you want to like. Pay attention to mistakes. You also need to know what you do not wish to.

Through experimentation and iteration, you can draw the map of your life, and you construct the narrow path forward.

At this point, you have exited the exploration phase of your life, at least for the time being. Now you must learn to say no.

Every decision needs to be evaluated against the simple question, " Does this move the mission forward?"

The thing is, every time you say yes to something that doesn't matter, you say no to something that does matter.

During this phase of your life, take Naval Ravikant's advice: "Make no your default." If you hesitate, then the answer is no.

Your focus is the most valuable resource you have. It's the resource that collects the resource that collects all of the resources. But focus is finite.

When you have that project — that one meaningful goal, decide what you are going to suck at in advance, only say yes to the things that push the mission forward.

This means you must detrain yourself from what school taught you. You were always taught to say yes to the authorities, and your agency was stripped away.

Don't be afraid to say no to people in higher positions than you if it doesn't advance your mission.

Say yes to start. Say no to finish. Use your focus wisely.

That's for you today, my friends. Thanks for reading.

Enjoy the rest of your day

Josh