13 things school should have taught me:

The value of self-education

School will teach you how to make a living. How to survive as an ‘acceptable’ member of society. Self-education, on the other hand, will teach you how to live well.

How my food is made

The meat you eat, where does it come from? It seems that no school curriculum teaches about the origins of the food it serves at its cafeteria.

How to defend myself

My school years were filled with bullies. It’s the same in almost all public schools. Our schools should teach our children how to protect themselves. Counterintuitively, this will decrease total violence and the severity of such.

When to ignore feelings

Most kids don’t want to read, exercise, or do anything positive with their lives because it doesn’t ‘feel good’. In our current society, we overemphasize feelings. Forgetting that as an adult, you sometimes have to do things that suck.

The value of discipline

When you’re heart-broken, injured or sleep deprived. When you have 1,000 reasons to just stay in bed. When your emotions urge you to ‘just give up’. You must find 1 reason to keep going. Be a person that others can count on. Discipline is an underemphasized skill.

Long-term thinking

“If I could just pass this year’s grade, I would be so happy.” This sums up the thinking of almost every student. It doesn’t go more than a few months in advance. That’s nonsense. School should teach us how to design your lives long-term. 5, 10 and 20 years in advance. That’s where most of the magic happens.

How to think like a physicist

We go through decades of schooling, yet we never learn how to think. 

We reason by analogy and we end up engaging in groupthink. Monkey see, monkey do. 

We must learn how to think for ourselves. And the best way to do so is understanding the shortcomings of our mental faculties (biases) and reasoning by first principles. Thinking like a physicist is a skill. Elon Musk, a learned physicist, is a master at this.

How to be social

As a natural introvert, it took me years of working in the fitness industry to engage in decent conversations. I used to be scared when having simple discussions with a stranger. Scared, even when asking for directions. 

Today’s kids have 90% of their social life on their phones. That’s a recipe for disaster.

How to find a partner

Man or woman alike, you must understand that you can be spoilt for choice or find a high-quality partner. Dating is a skill. Yet most people don’t know how to do it. Instead, we feel scarcity. We settle for ‘good enough’. 

No one wants to be someone else’s ‘good enough’. Creating a society of relationships like this is the breeding ground of resentment.

How to get and stay in shape

In 13 years of schooling in Switzerland, arguably one of the best education systems in the world, 0 hours were spent on teaching me how to get and stay in shape. 

We’re the first generation where our children might just have a lower life expectancy than ourselves. We must break this cycle and educate our children properly.

The value of frugality and spending money

I’ve been taught numerous times to save all of my money. Yet if you study almost every great person, you notice that they were frivolous & smart spenders. 

Thomas Edison was millions in debt. So was Julius Caesar. So was Nikola Tesla - and so is Elon Musk. 

Why? The greats value their time more than money. They know that time is the number one asset that should be guarded. Emphasize money, but do not stupidly overemphasize it.   

How to dream big

Our current school system likes to put kids in standardized boxes:

‘Learning difficulty’, ‘bad at math’, ‘bad at sports’, ‘ADHD’ - you name it. 

We’ve come up with 100s of labels. To what utility? The only thing we do by labelling kids is breeding victimhood. We create a society of low self esteem. A society of people constantly doubting themselves - for the sake of political correctness. 

Kids need to know that almost everything they want to change - they can change. Instead of putting caps on our potential, our school system should teach us to RAISE THE BAR. To dream BIGGER and to aim to do the impossible. 

How to optimize karma

This may sound woo-woo, but there seems to be such a thing as karma. Steve Jobs was a big believer of Karma - and even addressed it in his iTunes product reveal. 

This has been proven true in my experience as well. The more I wish well for others - the better my life is. The more I aim to be of service - the better my life is. The less I do unwell to others, even in small degrees (such as streaming a movie instead of buying it) - the better my life is. 

So treat other people nicely. Tip well at restaurants. Give to the people in need. In some way or another - it will come back to you.