5 Classes They Should’ve Taught in High School
The Amplified Impact Podcast
November 9th, 2023
I’ve been thinking about our formal education, high school and college, and how it often falls short in preparing us for real life.
I’ve pinpointed five classes I wish I’d been taught.
Class 1: Intro to Adulting
Class 2: Fundamentals of Energy Management
Class 3: Principles of Decision Making
Class 4: Learning 101
Class 5: Unlocking Creativity
But if traditional education doesn’t cut it, I’m launching Beyond the Apex University, a community of lifelong learners.
Get in touch if you want to learn more about it.
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
“The object in motion tends to stay in motion.”
– Anthony Vicino
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Episode Transcript:
Anthony Vicino:
Yo, what’s up everybody? Welcome back to the podcast. I was thinking about my formal education that I went through in high school and then in college, and it’s interesting to me. So much of what I learned in school really wasn’t about the subject materials. In a lot of cases, I don’t think I’ve used a lot of what I acquired from a knowledge perspective in college. I think most of the things that I use on a consistent basis came outside of the university. They were learned in the school of hard knocks the hard way. And I don’t know if I would have been in a position to do things differently. I was a screw up teenager and I was just on a weird path in my early 20s.
Anthony Vicino:
So I don’t know if this is the fault of the education system, but as I really look around at the people who are coming out of school, who are moving on in life, I just notice that over and over and over there seems to be a recurring trend that I think our education system left some gaping holes in the things that it taught us and didn’t necessarily prepare us to thrive in the real world. And if I had to go back, if I had to change the education system and introduce some new classes into the system, I think these are five classes that we should have all been taught, at least in high school, but maybe even in college. So the first class I would introduce is intro to adulting. I think school did a terrible job preparing me for the wacky, wild, zany world of taxes, personal finance and health insurance. I still don’t really understand health insurance, to be honest. Maybe if you’re in a different country than the US it’s not as big of a deal for you. Maybe it is, I don’t know. But in the US it is a very convoluted system.
Anthony Vicino:
I don’t really understand how it works. When I was in my 1920 and people started talking to me about deductibles, I was like, what the hell are you talking about? I don’t know what any of that means. Copay? I don’t know. I wish somebody had sat me down in high school and really walked me through, okay, here’s the health insurance system. Here’s how it works. Here’s what you need to know to prepare yourself. Now there’s a lot of money in the system designed to keep you in ignorance on this topic. So good luck getting that class approved.
Anthony Vicino:
But I wish I had learned about that. I wish I had learned about personal finance. I know there are classes that teach this, but honestly, I wish our teachers had their own personal finances figured the hell out before they ever tried to teach anybody. I mean, it’s really weird to be learning personal finances from somebody who hasn’t won the money game. I wouldn’t take advice from anybody I wouldn’t want to trade places from. So taking money advice from somebody who hasn’t won the money game seems really silly. So I don’t know how to solve this one, but it seems like in the world of virtual education, having access to some of the best thinkers, putting out free know, Ray Dalio is putting out his books and his content on like, it seems like there are ways for students, regardless of where they are, to learn from the greatest minds. And I would definitely have benefited from a personal finance class.
Anthony Vicino:
And then the other part of Intro to adulting is demystifying taxes. Like, how the hell. I never understood how I could be expected as a 19 year old to be paying taxes and just creating them on the honor system. Nobody ever taught me how to do it. Just creating them on the honor system and then turning them in. And then if I get them wrong, I don’t know. Jail time? Do I get fined? I don’t know. The whole world.
Anthony Vicino:
I don’t know. It’s so wacky to me that this thing that consumes so much of our life and is so damn important, it’s the biggest expense that any of us are ever going to incur. None of us are trained on it. None of us know what the hell we’re doing. And as a result, the people who struggle and suffer the most. And I realized this after I won the money game and I had the money to go and afford the top tier personal financers or not personal financers, financial advisors, and tax CPAs and lawyers. Once you have the Money, you can win the tax game. But the people who don’t have the money, don’t have the knowledge are the ones who are getting screwed over.
Anthony Vicino:
It’s the middle class. So I really wish somebody had taught me that in intro to adulting, the next class would have been fundamentals of energy management, like, really learning how to optimize your life through sleep, nutrition, and exercise. I think physical education PE class was a complete freaking joke. I don’t know why they ever taught us kickball, why we’re doing anything like just moving our bodies around. That’s one aspect of it. Great. Awesome. Teach us.
Anthony Vicino:
Teach us what we need to know about Vo two max. Endurance and strength and balance and all of these things. Like, teach us the fundamentals. Of how that all works so that we can build it into a healthy lifestyle. Teach us nutrition, not just how to cook. Don’t just teach me how to cook, but teach me what I really need to know about nutrition so that I can take care of that thing, I can fuel my body, and then teach me what I need to know about sleep. I’m going to spend one third of my life sleeping. Don’t take it for granted that I know how to do it, because here’s the thing I’ve really come to realize over the last few years is that even as a 39 year old male, I still struggle with sleep.
Anthony Vicino:
And there’s still so many aspects of it that I’m figuring out because I’ve made it a priority to educate myself on. But it is a very deep hole with a lot of information to dig through. So what the hell? Why do you think a 17 year old has this figured out? They stay up until 02:00 a.m. And they wake up at 05:00 a.m. I mean, the very fact that we have our classes for students in high school starting at like 07:00 a.m. Is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. Considering that the teenage brain does its best work later in the days. The teenage brain is not designed for morning work.
Anthony Vicino:
So anyways, different topic for a different day. The third class I would introduce is principles of decision making, specifically how to stop making stupid decisions. I would teach kids a formalized framework for thinking through important decisions, both big and small. But having a method for measuring and tracking the quality of your decisions, I think is so damn important, it’s completely overlooked. The fourth class I would teach is learning 101. And so instead of teaching people about the Civil War or about space exploration, in the would teach kids how to learn and how to acquire information for themselves, like how was the best way for them. And then I would teach them, I would give them, I would still instill in them a love of learning, and then I would set them loose on whatever that learning, like, whatever that love is directed at. I don’t care what you learn, I want you to learn how to learn because that is the foundation for a life of self education and growth.
Anthony Vicino:
And it’s hard to go wrong if you know how to learn in life. It’s one of the highest ROI skills any of us can acquire. And then number five, the fifth class would have been unlocking creativity. I think it’s so important that we teach kids and people how to intentionally cultivate creativity, which is the most important skill in the modern workforce. But the problem is, our school system is designed for complete opposite. It’s designed to teach you memorization and recitation and conformity, not any of the things that would enable you to go and thrive in the real world, where what’s really valued there is not convergent thinking, which is, oh, you put in this framework, this formula, this equation, and you get the one answer, no, that’s not really how life works. Most of the problems that are worth solving in life require divergent thinking, which is that you’re not converging to a single solution. But there are a mix of answers along a spectrum of gray probabilities.
Anthony Vicino:
And you have to, depending on the context and the circumstances, make a decision, going back to the principles of decision making class to bring it all together. And so I think creativity is one of those skills that instead of Beating out of our kids, if we could cultivate and grow, imagine what we could do as a society. So those are five classes I wish they would have taught me in high school. And if you’re still in that place where you’re thinking, I would like to learn these things, then you are in luck. I am putting together what I call beyond the Apex University. It is going to be the education program, the school, the community that I wish I had had when I was younger. It is going to be hosted on school. This is my buddy’s community and course education platform.
Anthony Vicino:
It is going to be a monthly subscription. It’s going to get access to all of the different courses that I’ve created, and I will continue to create around these topics of fundamentals of energy management, intro to adulting, learning 101, how to build a business, the five P’s of business. All of that is going to be there. There’s going to be monthly small group coaching, not small group coach. I guess it could be small group coaching, but monthly live Zoom workshops. There’s going to be office hours so that you can get direct access to me if you have questions, and we can help you acquire these skills, or at least go deeper into them. Because it’s one thing to bitch about the fact that school and education system failed us. It’s another thing to actually try and do something about it.
Anthony Vicino:
And so that’s my attempt. This is my attempt to try and do something about it beyond the Apex University. If you guys are interested in learning about that, shoot me a DM. Shoot me an email, anthony@anthonyvacino.com and say, hey, let me know about beyond the apex when it goes live. We’re going to be launching here in the next couple of weeks and we’ll get you enrolled. So I’m really excited about that, by the way. I think it’s going to be a lot of fun, like bringing together a community of lifelong learners and growers. It’s going to be amazing.
Anthony Vicino:
So hope to see you guys there and that’s going to do it for me. Until next time, my beautiful peeps. Stay hyper focused, my friends.
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