[-Vishen] I'm sitting here with Jon Butcher.
One of the most extraordinary men on the
planet. Jon lives a life that most of us
only dream about and he's also the
accidental creator of one of the
foremost personal growth programs
in the world: Lifebook
which is a process that helps
you create a vision for your life that
is so spectacular that it allows you to
consciously create how your life is
going to unfold. I'm with Jon
because we're gonna be talking about not
Jon's life but Jon's philosophy on
parenting. Because Jon's got some really
controversial but powerful ideas on the
nature of parenting and how to raise
kids who can live truly exceptional
lives. Before we begin, take a look at
this man and make a note that he is a
grandfather. He doesn't look
anything like the typical grandfather
but Jon's got four kids, two grandkids and
a third grandkid on the way. Jon, your
views and parenting are radical.
For example, Jon just pulled all
his kids and grandkids out of the public
schooling system. I want to ask you what
do you think are some of the greatest,
greatest BS ideas about parenting and
raising kids that society buys into
today?
[-Jon] Well, you know, I'm not here to the
disparage anybody else's way of doing
things. So I can speak for myself
Missy and I over the years have had a
lot of issues with school
in general. If you take a look at the public
school model it's really an industrial
age model that teaches factory workers
how to be factory workers. And you
go to school at 7:30. You get out
at 5pm after your after-school
activities. You'll have your number two
pencils. You sit in the class. I mean,
it's just literally training you
how to be a worker which is one of the
one of the issues that we've always had
being entrepreneurs.That's not how we
wanted to teach our kids to be.
But really the straw that broke the camel's
back after years of being sort of
dissatisfied with the way pretty much
any school system operates is when Missy
pointed out the fact to me one night
that no matter what school you go to
what that school is going to teach you
is that your passions, your desires, your
interests, your family life, all the
values that we esteem the most need to
be figured out how to fit in
around the major part of your day which
is going to be spent learning all this
stuff that you may never use cumulus
clouds, igneous rocks..How much
of your education have you used, Vishen?
In your life what you do right now and it's
the same story for every successful
person I've ever talked to. They use
almost none of what they
learned in school. So here you've got
this block of time that takes up
two-thirds of your waking hours and
that's your duty.
That's your responsibility. It also
happens to be mostly complete BS. And then
you've got to figure out how to be a
fulfilled human being and have great
interpersonal relationships and pursue
your interests and passions around that.
That all becomes secondary and that's
when we realized. The priorities are
flipped.
- You're absolutely right. Folks, if you
think about the knowledge that is going
to be most valuable to you today.
Imagine, for example, that you had eight
hours today to learn anything.
What do you think is going to help you
more? Igneous rocks, the classification of
clouds, some advanced math model? Or would
it be learning how to follow your
passion?
How to be healthy and fit at 50? How to
bring joy and happiness into your
relationships? How to speed-learn? How to
live a life of mission and purpose?
I think most people are going to see the
latter. But the question is: "Why don't we
start teaching those in schools
in the first place?" - Right, I'm
not sure that we're capable of teaching
those things. We have
delegated the job of educating our kids
to the government.
How does that make sense? For ages and
ages of human history parents taught
children but we have decided that
we don't have time for that or the that
is not important enough for us to spend
our time on. And I think we need to
question that. - In the nineteen twenties
I remember reading a quote by President
Calvin Coolidge in the nineteen-twenties
where he said "The purpose of education
is to create cogs in the wheels of
industry". So schooling evolved from a
model designed to create efficient
factory workers for the titans of the
nineteen twenties. But today we want our
kids to be more. No parent goes "Oh, I
want my kids to be an efficient factory
worker." - Today that is a recipe for
disaster. So what we teach is..
First of all, we teach the Lifebook 12
category model. We look at the most
important areas of your life at Lifebook
and that's one of the things that we
teach our kids: health and fitness, your
intellectual life, your emotional life, your
character, finances. Something you
never learned about in school. How to
have a career? Every one of our kids have
started companies. Our 12 year old this
year started his first company.
The second thing that we really depend
on to educate our kids powerfully is
travel. International travel. As you
know we spend months and months a year
out of the country and that has just
been an incredibly rich source of
education for our kids. But Vishen, here's
the new one. And this is the
radical one. When Missy and I sat down a
couple of years ago
to really try to figure out what we
should be teaching our kids in the first
place, we realized that we don't even
know. We don't even know what they need
to be learning to prepare them for
what's happening. I remember the
Genius Network event that you and I were
just at. Peter Diamandis was up there.
And he said "Nobody outside of Silicon Valley
knows how fast things are going to
change in
this world". And we're not talking about
10 to 12 years from now. We're talking
about two to three years from now.
Remember that?
So what we realized is our kids probably
know better what they need to be
learning right now than we do.
they're more dialed into the internet
There are more dialed into what's
happening in the world that's wired right
now than we are.
So we just got done with a month in
Europe. Took our kids to Europe for a
month and we were in Croatia on the
Dalmatian coast. And we wanted our kids
to learn about the history of Croatia.
But we're stressing out a little bit
That's going to
be really hard. We gotta pull together..
And then we realized. No, we don't have to
do that. We're not going to teach our
kids about Croatia. They're going to
teach us about Croatia. So here was the
assignment. Justin, our twelve-year-old,
get online starting today, learn about
the history of the Dalmatian coast from
300 BC to the fall of the Roman Empire
about 400 AD. We want you to put together
a report after you've researched and
absorb the the key points in history and
then Friday night at dinner you're going
to present that to all the
adults at the dinner table. You're going
to present your report.
So what did that do? It taught him
research. Highly critical in the 21st
century. The ability to be able to go
online and learn the information you
need, absorb that information, organize
that information into a presentation and
then give that presentation to a
group of adults. It didn't take any energy
from us. And this kid is telling us
about the history of the Dalmatian coast.
We learned a lot,
he nailed his assignment. That's
was a breakthrough for us. So
that's kind of where we're going with
this whole thing. - You know what's
what's really funny when I hear that
story. I remember a story in my life. I
remember spending maybe 12 years in
schools learning history and I can't
remember much about what I learned in
those history books but I can even
tell you today the biography of Napoleon.
And the reason for that is because when
I was 12 years old my parents took me on
a trip to France. And I remember
being on a tour bus with my dad
and he asked me to tell him about
Napoleon. So I pulled up a little pocket
encyclopedia that I was traveling with,
read about Napoleon and I was assigned
to teach my dad about Nepoleon. And now
to this day 30 years later I still
remember the biography of Napoleon but I
don't remember anything I learned in
school.
- Here's what we call that. Can
I tell you what we call that. We call that
three-dimensional learning. Our daughter
Jade is dyslexic. We found that out when
she was in second grade so we literally
yanked her out of school and took off to
Southeast Asia for five months. And
during that time she came alive and
she'd started to get shut down in
the school system because the kid knows
whether they're stupid or smart.
They feel that. And of course
dyslexic they're always above average
IQs but they feel stupid because they
don't learn the same way the other kids
learn. So we took her to Southeast Asia
for five months. She came alive because
she was doing three-dimensional learning.
It wasn't just a book in front of her
face. She was traveling. She was
seeing the temples. She was connecting the
dots. That is the most powerful way to
learn for most kids I think. For some
kids they do really really well with
straight-up academics but I didn't
Vishen. School was like prison for me.
I don't know about you.
It was prison for me too. Well, there you there you
go. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs
are in that same sort of deal.
- So if there's one or two
really powerful tips that you could give
parents out there on how they could
teach kids, help your kids learn the
skills to truly build an extraordinary
life. What would you tell these parents?
- Well, here's the most important thing
that I would tell parents is that you
are responsible for your kids' education
not the friggin' government.
That's the most important thing to
understand. School system is good for
teaching the basics and the basics are
hard. It's hard to teach a kid math. It's
hard to teach a second, third, fourth
grader math. It's hard to teach English
or whatever your language is. It's hard to
teach some of these things. That's why we
send them to school so that we don't
have to bother. School doesn't teach
anything about character. If they teach
anything about character is not what you
want your kids to learn. They teach how
to be sheep. How to fall in line. How to
follow the rules. How to not disrupt the
class. All the the skills that you need
to be unsuccessful when you get out in
real life.
School doesn't teach anything about
money. What it is, where it comes from.
How to make it and how to have a
successful life. School doesn't teach
anything about interpersonal
relationships. School doesn't teach
anything about the most important
subjects in life. It teaches math, teaches
English, teachers reading, teaches writing.
Very important. I'm not taking anything
away from that but you need to know as a
parent that it is your job to educate
your kids and the school cannot,
literally cannot do it for you. But I'll
give you a hack if you'd like to hear it.
Serious serious hack. This is the number
one thing for parenting. It's the example
that you set. So you can set aside all the
things you need to teach your kid
and how difficult it is to
come up with an
organized curriculum to get that
information into their head. And if you
just focus on living an extraordinary
life yourself. If you just focus on
dialing in your love relationship,
dialing in a career that's a successful
fulfilling career,
dialing in your financial life, dialing
in your health and fitness. Just
literally, if you focus on living an
extraordinary life yourself and that's
what they're around. Because you are
their world. You are their example of
what a human being is. So if you can just
do that
that's more than half the battle. - That's
a beautiful idea, Jon. Thank you for
listening, guys. I hope this gives you
some idea on how you can re-think our
role as parents to help our kids truly
shine.
And help you see some of the flaws in our
modern education system that we need to
align ourselves with towards fixing.
Thank you, thank you Jon. - Thank you.