5 Harmful Myths You Learned In School

So much of what we learn obviously occurs in those years that we spend in school. In addition to the good things like the Alphabet, all the way to calculus, there's some bad mixed in there, some myths, some unquestioned beliefs, maybe even some brainwashing that gets built into the system. And I have found that these myths can be very detrimental to one's happiness and success, which is why in this video, I want to talk about the five most important myths that you need to bust. And for me, each of these came in the form of a book. I didn't learn it in school. I learned it on my own. So if you're interested in checking out any of the books that I mention, we are happy to have Audible as our sponsor for this video. You can click the link in the description, get your first book for free with a subscription to Audible. So the first myth that you need to break, I think this one's built into school. It's the idea that what you really need in life, at least in school, are credentials, a diploma, a degree, right? That is what you're aiming for. That's often what schools sell. And the truth of the world is that what you really need are skills. What you need is the ability to produce more results and to point to a track record. My favorite story about this comes from the prosperous coach. This is what kind of broke this mindset for me. It's what allowed me to talk about charisma in the first place when I don't have a degree, because a lot of people ask me, and I didn't know what to say. I got this in this story that he tells. This guy is going to do coaching for a business. He's one of those guys, comes in, helps him switch up some organizational things and make more money, and he's competing for a spot. So he gets in there, sits down with the CEO. CEO says, okay, show me your pitch deck. The guy says, I don't have a pitch deck. I don't do pitch decks. CEO says, okay, so what are your credentials? He says, well, let me see, years of alcoholism, a divorce, and bankruptcy. And the guy goes, why would we hire you? He says, look, if you're looking for someone with credentials and a pitch deck, you can hire any of the other guys. I'm here because I produce results, and if you want to see my track record, you could check that out. The PDF. People that work with me are not looking to buy a PowerPoint. They're looking to change their organization. That's what I can do now, of course, he had the backing, the track record, the results to prove this and back it up. And he did get that job. But you need to think about this in your life, which is why when people ask me like, where did you go to school to learn this stuff? The answer is, I didn't. I didn't go to school to learn any of this. I have zero credentials. If what I am teaching you does not work, then I am using useless, whether or not I have a PhD. But if it does, then it doesn't matter what diploma I have. So focus in your life when you're learning, when you're teaching, on what you can actually affect in terms of real world change. That's going to serve you so well. The second myth has a lot to do with wealth creation. And a lot of the myths that I'm talking about are about the professional world. This is what school gets wrong. I thought for the longest time that people who were wealthy were the smart students, right? Who had good business ideas and who, you know, got the good grades. That was what someone who, they would just become wealthy. They're top of the school, they'd be top of the financial food chain. As I've gone through the world, I've seen that is not necessarily what makes someone wealthy. They can help, but really it comes down to the mindsets that someone has about building wealth. And the problem here is that the mindsets that almost every individual that I have ever met has about wealth are the ones that they inherited from their family and their community. And that means that if they grew up in a lower class place, and I don't mean this in terms of culture, I just mean financially, the mindsets that they have around money are those lower class mindsets. I grew up in a middle class household. What I was preached and what I started doing for the first part of my life was excellent grades, go to a great school, get a great job, save 10% every single month, max out your 401k, wait till you're 65 for the miracle of compound interest to kick in and you will have millions of dollars. And, and that's fine. I have no criticism of that plan. But if you think, hey, it might be fun to be a little bit wealthier sooner, and I don't want to wait 40 years for the compound interest to really start to earn for me. People who have made wealth in shorter periods of time have very different mindsets. The people who sold the book talking about the value of compound interest, that's not how they got their money. They got it from selling the book, from doing something at scale. So if you want to consider these mindsets and they will be very frustrating to you as you read them, I didn't like them when I started because they didn't jive with my world. I highly recommend checking out the Millionaire Fast Lane. This was an incredible book. Again, you can check it out on Audible in the description below. But this is. If wealth is your thing, I would start here. I also have to say the third point is to round this out. Money matters. Up to a certain point when you're moving from poor to middle class, money is incredible. Studies repeatedly have shown that that's one of the number one things you can do to improve your happiness. When you talk about 75,000 ish dollars a year and beyond, earning more won't make you happy. And this completely shifted how I thought about business. I was still interested in creating free time, but I didn't have to push as hard after that because I knew it wasn't going to make me happy. But this isn't the only point. The real myth here is that we know and society is telling us to orient ourselves towards the things that will make us happy. And the truth is, oftentimes our teachers, the commercials, our families, they push us towards a lot of things that do not make people happy. And we know it as a culture, as a science, but we still move towards it anyway. And so for me, stumbling on happiness was huge. For busting some of these myths, I thought that what I wanted in my life was tons of money, unlimited freedom, unlimited access. And what you realize when you read this book and when you pay attention in your life is that unlimited freedom doesn't make people happy. Now you're going, I could go left, I could go right, I could go straight, I could go up, I could go down. That's not what you want. You want freedom in certain aspects of your life and to limit your choices so that you can be satisfied in others. There's a lot of things like that in this. I highly recommend checking it out if you want to start moving towards things that genuinely make people happy and stop doing those things that you've just been told to do your whole life. So this has been big for my decision making. The fourth thing, again, this is all sort of rounding itself out. There's a belief that I had that 20s were the best time to grind, right? You're fresh, you're hungry, you're young, you're going to get in there, you're going to make a killing. And if you do have a dream, right? Do it in your 30s. You'll have saved some money if you want to start a business and you can have fun on the weekends and when you retire at 65. The book that absolutely shattered this for me was the Four Hour Workweek. And it says, look, yes, a lot of people in their 20s do not have money. I was absolutely one of them coming out of college with $100,000 in debt. But the truth is, you actually will probably never have fewer obligations than you have in that time period. So if you have a dream to travel, to see parts of the world, to backpack, to start a business, despite the fact that you don't necessarily have all the experience and all the money to back it up, the fact that the risk is probably lower because you have more time to make up for it makes the younger years some of the best years to go do that. If your plan like mine was to wait till you knew a bunch to start a business, you're oftentimes kidding yourself. You get the golden handcuffs you don't break out. So reading the Four Hour Workweek changed my life. I mean, I had a suit and tie job and when I recognized this, that I was just going to lateral up in a company for the rest of my life till I retired, I quit, I moved to Brazil. It was a whole difficult story. But because I was young, I was able to sleep on the floor, right? I was able to not have a crick in my back that was terrible. When I woke up in the morning, I. I was sprightly and I was able to make it work. Longer story there, but there's so many mindsets that make truly the Four Hour Workweek the best book I have ever read, the one that I recommend the most. And you're considering any of these, Check this one out. It is mind bending even if you don't start your own business. The fifth mindset. This is one that actually got charisma on command going. And it's the belief that I think a lot of us have, is that artists are born number one and that artists create art when they feel inspired. And what I found in my own life, whether your art is dance, whether it's music or writing or painting or poetry or just any other sort of creative thing, web design, that you could potentially do to earn a living and love what you do, art is a blue collar job. Now don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with having a hobby of painting and not trying to earn any money off it and not necessarily trying to push your skills to the next level. But if you fancy yourself a potential writer, someone who could do something that they truly enjoy, you need to actually start treating that as a discipline. That means you clock in and you clock out. You put in hours. You have to produce a certain number of words, you got to make a certain number of paintings, and you got to get the garbage out of you. And it doesn't always feel good. You don't feel inspired when you sit down every single time. But with the mindsets in the book the War of Art, I was able to crank through some of my first blog posts. They weren't very good. Posted them. Eventually it got better. And over time, right, you hone your craft and you start to be able to be a bit more recognized. So if you think that you would like to be more creative, to potentially move into a creative field where you're doing something you love and getting paid, you have to check out the War of Art. This one is. It made me post my first blog post. Right? This is why Charisma on Command became a thing. So I hope that you guys have found these mindsets very, very helpful. If you are interested in any of the books that I mentioned, I'm going to write a lot more books that have changed my life. These are my curriculum for living a good life, truly. And I did the math. Many of these are worth their weight in gold. Not kidding. And you don't have to pay that. The first one comes free if you want it on audiobook. So if you want to check it out. Www.Audible.com Charisma when you sign up, you get the entire library is available to you. They've got tons of different books. You can listen to them when you're traveling. You can listen to them as you're working out. You can listen to them when you're walking in the park. The nice thing about this is that you don't necessarily have to create that much more free time to sit down in your bed at night with your pen and paper. You can do it as you are moving to and from other places. So you are feeding your brain and busting the myths that I mentioned. So if you want to check out any of those books, I, I highly recommend doing so if you have any particular questions about details and what I talked about, I know I kind of sprinkled bits of my story in let me know. I can maybe cover it in another video. And I hope that you guys have found this one helpful. If you want to check out audible again, that is www.audible.com charisma or text charisma to 500500 on your mobile phone. Hope that you guys found this one helpful and I look forward to seeing you in the next video. Sam.