How To Raise Your Kids To Lead Extraordinary Lives | Jon Butcher

I'm sitting here with John Butcher, one of the most extraordinary men on the planet. John 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. Now, I'm with John because we're going to be talking about not John's life, but John's philosophy on parenting, because John's got some really controversial but powerful ideas on the nature of parenting and how to raise kids who can live truly exceptional lives. Now, before we begin, take a look at this man and make a note that he is a grandfather. He doesn't. You don't look anything like the typical grandfather. But John has got four kids, two grandkids and a third grandkid on the way. Now, John, your views on parenting are radical. Radical. For example, John 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?

Well, you know, I'm not here to disparage anybody else's way of doing things, but I can speak for myself. Missy and I over the years have had a lot of issues with, 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. You go to school at 7:30, you get out at 5 after your after school activities. You all 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 issues that we've always had being entrepreneurs. That's not how we want to, 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, you know, 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 vision in your life? What you do Right now. And it's the same story for every success person I've ever talked to. They use like almost none of what they 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. Now I think most people are going to say the latter, but the question is, why don't we start teaching those in schools in the first place?

Right? You know, I'm not sure that we're capable of teaching those things. You know, 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've decided that we don't have time for that or that it's not important enough for us to spend our time on and that I think we.

Need to question that in the 1920s. I remember reading a quote by President Calvin Coolidge in the 1920s where he said, the purpose of education is to create a cogs in the wheels of industry. So schooling evolved from a model designed to create efficient factory workers for the titans of the 1920s. But today we want our kids to be more. No parent goes, oh, I want my kid to be an efficient factory worker.

Today that is a recipe for disaster.

Right?

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, etc. Your character, finances, something you never learn 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, 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 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 at the Genius Network event that you and I were just at, Peter Diamantes 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, they're 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. Damn, that's going to be really hard. We got to 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 12 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 and to a group of adults. Didn't take any energy from us, right? And this kid is telling us about the history of the Dalmatian Coast. We learned a lot. He nailed his assignment. That was a breakthrough for us. So that's kind of where we're going with this.

Whole thing. You know what's really funny? When I hear that story, I remember a story in my life. So 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. Awesome, right? 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 Napoleon. 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 started to get shut down in the school system because a 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 in the same way that 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, for most kids, I think for some kids they do really, really well with straight up academics. But I didn't vision school was like prison for me. Right. I don't know about you, it was.

Prison for me too.

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 true, 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, it's 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 skills that you need to be unsuccessful when you get out in real life. Right? 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. Teaches math, teaches English, teaches 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 that 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, right? And how difficult it is to sort of 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, John. Thank you for listening. Guys. I hope this gives you some idea on how you can rethink 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, John. Thank you.