The Sh*t You Don't Learn in College with Zander Fryer: An EOFire Classic from 2021

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation! JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire! brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like This Old Marketing. Today, we're pulling a classic episode from the archives, and we'll be breaking down the crap that you don't learn in college. To drop these value bombs, I have brought to Xander Fryer and the EOfire Studios. Xander is a best-selling author, internationally renowned speaker, and host of the Apple podcast, Crap You Don't Learn in College. Maybe not crap, though. He's been featured in Time, Forbes, Inc.

0:31on the TEDx stage, and his company, High Impact Coaching, serves over 50 ,000 people in 27 countries at more than 700 organizations. And today, Foundation will talk about how in learning, you learn the fundamentals first and then you gradually build your way up. But in today's society, what they do is go straight to imitating someone. And also how there are so many people who don't understand how these thoughts and emotions work. They think something's broken, that there's no way out. Because of that, they resort to the only thing they can think that will save them and oh, so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Xander and our sponsors.

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1:34Visit lastpass.com slash fire for a free trial and get started today. Every login lives in LastPass. Xander, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. What's up, Fire Nation, and thanks for having me, man. You know, it's interesting. I consider myself a self-development guy and every self-development guru out there you know, tells people, they remind everybody, you know, you are good enough for your dreams. You are good enough to have everything you want. Um, and frankly, I think that's bullshit. Um, I think it's a lie.

2:13I think none of us are good enough for the dreams that we want. Um, because if we were good enough for the dreams that we want, we would already have all of our dreams. Um, so I think one thing that I believe that's kind of contrary to what a lot of people are taught about success is that frankly, none of us are, are good enough. Um, and when I say that, I mean that as none of us are good enough yet, right? As long as we understand that we're not good enough yet, and that doesn't mean we're not worthy or not capable of becoming good enough, then we can all focus on the growth, getting better and all the skills necessary and actually accomplishing those dreams.

2:48I mean, Fire Nation, there's one thing to do in this world and that's put in the reps. How the heck are you gonna be good at anything when you've never done that thing? There's nothing that you've never done before that you're great at day one, step one, of course you're going to suck. Of course you're going to stink. Put in the reps. You'll get a little bit better every single day. Now, Xander, you went from being a lost and clueless kid in a very crappy nine to five job to running a multi seven figure business in just a couple of years. How did you make that transition? That's a great question.

3:26It's interesting. I actually, you know, I wouldn't necessarily consider my job crappy by most standards, but it was crappy for me. And let me kind of explain that one. So I was good at math in high school, right? So when you're good at math, when you go to college, people say, be an engineer, right? You're good at math and sciences in the world, always need engineers. So I went to UCLA for engineering. I graduated and then I went on to join the corporate world like the majority of lost millennials did. And they joined the corporate world. I worked for Cisco Systems for six years. And I would actually say compared to most of my friends, I had a pretty damn good life.

4:07I was very successful in the corporate world. I made over$200 ,000 a year. I worked with companies like Disney, Facebook, Verizon, NBC, you name it. I had, you know, those types of clients when I was 26 years old, I had a standing meeting with the Disney CIO, um, drove a BMW around, you know, uh, flew first class, uh, lived in Venice beach, like all, all that fun stuff. But you know, what everybody, uh, you know, I had what everybody kind of told me was success, but I didn't feel successful. I felt, I felt really empty. I felt, uh, lonely. I was very single at the time. And so much of that was because I was so unfulfilled at work.

4:48I couldn't even focus on, on, you know, my love life really. Um, but you know, I, I was, uh, I got to the point where at one point I just realized like I, I was fed up with doing what I was doing, going around the hamster wheel and I quit cold Turkey, uh, to, uh, to, to pursue, pursue a life as a life coach, you know, super, super cliche, uh, story millennial quits job to, start a life coaching business, even though he has no idea what the hell he's doing. But I'd been a self-development fan for a better part of 10 years. I went to Air Force ROTC in college and had been studying John Maxwell, Jack Canfield, Tony Robbins for the better part of a decade.

5:29And I was like, you know what, I can do this. So I quit my job. And the difference between all the other millennials that kind of quit their job to start a life coaching business was I actually had some really important sales skills to actually help me build a business. So I invested a bunch of money into my own personal development, mentorship over the next handful of months, and ended up building a six-figure life coaching business in about three months, and took it to our first six-figure month within about seven months. Now, that process was very important, you know, very important part of that process was like I mentioned, investing in myself and learning, you know, all the shit that you don't learn in college, the premise of my book, you know, all the shit that you don't learn in college.

6:17I spent over$40 ,000 in the first three months to learn from different mentors, different coaching programs, different gurus. And then, you know, up to this point in this day, I've spent over a half a million dollars to, to learn even more and continue to learn more as I continue to grow the business. You know, We're at somewhere between four and five million now, and I have a team of 15. So continuing to grow from there. Fire Nation, this is what you call the Horatio Alger story, where it's just like, hey, I'm in this job. And as Xander said, it's not crappy. It's crappy for him. It wasn't crappy for the rest of the world, per se, or some people.

6:52And he was just like, this isn't what I want to do. So let me do what everybody else does and just pretend that I can be a life coach, even though I haven't even lived life or even really know what life is. But hey, you've got to start somewhere. Now, I'm not saying fake it till you make it. I don't believe in that because that is inauthentic, but you do have to start somewhere. Now, you can be authentic and genuine and transparent when you start somewhere, and that's just what Xander did, and then he took one step forward, one step forward, and guess what? After a lot of those steps, maybe 10 ,000 of them, he's now looking at this multi-seven figure business.

7:27So, I did hear rumors that the government actually tried to stop you from publishing your book, stuff, we'll say for the kiddos here, you don't learn in college. Can you tell that story? A big part of this book coming out is kind of what we were just talking about. Really, the whole premise behind the book is we all know that college is not helping us get to where we want to get to. I mean, obviously, if you're, and you and I have had this conversation on my podcast, if you're trying to become a doctor or a lawyer or there's specific things that college is incredibly helpful. Well, first off, I would say, um, recheck your actual goals because why do you want to become a lawyer or a doctor?

8:10Cause it's probably for the wrong reasons. Just because your mommy and daddy wants you to become a doctor or a lawyer, terrible reasons. And if any of those people, by the way, Xander actually went and interned as a lawyer or a doctor, they would go running for the hills, sobbing and crying as they should, as I did, by the way, when I finally wasted a bunch of money in law school. You've been there, so people should probably listen. Yeah. And I, and I spent money to earn that. You can just get it for free from this podcast, Fire Nation. Goodness, save yourself from the misery. It's interesting.

8:42So there was a study that was done by the Federal Reserve that found of college degree earners, 61 % of college degree earners would like to go back and either change their focus or not go to school at all. That means nearly two thirds of people who got a college degree. And this study was done in 2019 nearly two thirds of people who got a college degree said that they either want to go back and change the degree or they don't want to get it at all. And the majority of them cited because they want to do something more purposeful and important to them. Let me tell you what I would do. This is random.

9:13You didn't ask for it. Neither did you, Fire Nation. I'm going to tell you anyways. I would go back to college because it was the best four years of my life on a fun perspective. I had a blast. I wouldn't undo it. On a social perspective, on just an absolute time of my life perspective. and I would literally have a goal of getting a D minus in every single class because I just wouldn't care. It would just be like, I just need to do the bare, bare minimum to stay in because at 22 years old, I'm going to get out and I'm going to start cracking my own whip on some entrepreneurial venture. Now, of course, that's in hindsight.

9:50I'm 41 now. I know what I know. At 22, I didn't have a clue. At 20, I didn't have a clue. At 18, I didn't have a clue. Yeah, think about at 18 years old when you're asked to decide what your degree is. I signed my life away to the army. Like, what am I talking about? I don't know anything. So I'm not blaming any 17 or 18 year olds. Like, I get it. I'm just hoping that some are listening to us now and being like, man, maybe it's not too late. Maybe I can really just make the most of it without getting tied up in that whole BS that is college and traditional careers. I love that. I love it too. And there's obviously stuff that you talk about in your book.

10:24So kind of keep telling you about that story, about how the government stopped you from publishing this. Oh, yes. You know, obviously the whole premise of this book is, you know, because so many of us, uh, you know, are starting to realize that college is, you know, frankly unnecessary. So Forbes did a study a few years ago that found that 87 % of all, uh, all nine to five employees are either, uh, unhappy, disengaged or depressed in their roles. That means nearly over four out of five people don't want to be doing what they're doing. right and so you know obviously the whole idea of shit you don't learn in college is a lot of what you and I are talking about like uh number one making sure there's three four major parts to it number one making sure you understand your uh who you are as a human how your brain works right I always tell people you know your toaster oven was given a uh you were given a user's manual when you got your toaster oven but you never got a user's manual for your brain for your emotions how you actually happen uh number two is getting clarity so like how to get clarity on what it is you truly actually want.

11:25Number three is how to actually execute because we're never taught that in school. And then number four, like the tactical skills that actually allow you to be successful, sales, copywriting, communication skills, productivity, relationship building, all of those things. So that was the premise for this book. And when I went to get my trademark for You Don't Learn in College, I got back a 12-page rejection letter from the U.S. Patent and Trade office that said, quote, this is lewd and offensive to the idea of higher education. So basically, this bureaucracy that I'm trying to point out that we have a huge issue with and is causing a lot of problems in today's society, another bureaucracy basically came in and shot down the whole idea.

12:11By the way, that person who shot it down has$84 ,000 in college debt. They're making$38 ,000 a year, and they're miserable. And they're taking it out on creative people that are trying to do something different in the world. Yeah, that's all they got. I couldn't allow that. And I think one of the things that we always talk about with Fire Nation is the ability to think critically. So think differently, think critically. And for me, it was like this doesn't make any sense. Literally, in the First Amendment, it has the freedom of speech. How can this be turned down? It's freedom of speech. And so I actually hired a lawyer, and I ran it by them.

12:45And they said, yeah, this is actually unconstitutional. And it started a two-year legal battle that actually ended up in the Supreme Court with the Supreme Court ruling that the USPTO's decision to not allow us the trademark actually was unconstitutional. So the Supreme Court basically said, you're good to go. You have your trademark. You have your book. And here we are actually publishing it now. Wow. I mean, Fire Nation, I hope that you believe in something that much, that you would take it all the way to the Supreme Court. Think about it. there's passion there. And when we get back, we're going to talk a little bit more detail about those four steps that you can use to build a life with more money, meaning, and freedom.

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15:18Every login lives in LastPass. Visit lastpass.com slash fire for a free trial and get started today. That's lastpass.com slash fire. All right, Xander, we're back and we kind of teased a little bit those steps and I kind of want to dive into them now. So what are these four steps that anyone can use to build a life with more money, meaning, and freedom? Before I actually dig into the four steps, I think it's really important to understand where our education actually came from, our education system that we have today. John, are you familiar with the Trivium? Have you heard anything about that before?

15:55Never. So the Trivium is essentially the education system of Plato's Republic, ancient Greece, right? So Plato, Socrates, you know, all of those guys very focused on, uh, individuality, creativity, individual contribution to the world. Um, and in Plato's Republic, uh, the trivium stood for, uh, the three most important pillars for the education system. And people would spend decades, literally decades, just mastering these three things, right? You mentioned repetitions, right? They would spend a decade just focusing on three things and that's it. And the three things were grammar, which is essentially the ability to learn on your own logic, which is essentially the ability to reason on your own and rhetoric, which is the ability to critically question and then re deliver what you have absorbed.

16:46Right. So grammar, which is the ability to learn logic, which is the ability to reason rhetoric, which is the ability to think. So to be an individual contributing member of society in ancient Greece. You had to master those things. Now, what happens when you have Rome come along, imperialistic Rome comes along, and it's very expansionist. It's very militaristic, right? Well, what makes terrible soldiers, right? John, do you know what makes terrible soldiers? It's people who learn on their own, people who reason on their own, and people who think on their own. They always ask, why? Why? Why? Why would you want that as a soldier?

17:26It's a terrible thing, right? So basically, as imperialistic Rome rises up, they do away with the old education system and implement something called objective-based learning, which is essentially the rote repetition to create a specific outcome that we have today. You're never learning the fundamentals of how to learn on your own, how to reason on your own, and how to think on your own. Instead, so the analogy that I always give, it's like, uh, it's like learning piano, right? If you wanted to learn piano, you would, you know, in the very beginning, you'd learn how to read sheet music. You'd learn your scales.

18:02You'd learn all the fundamentals first, and then you'd gradually build your way up to being able to play a piece by like Mozart or Bach. Right. But in today's society, what we do is we go ask, screw it, screw the fundamentals. We're going to go straight to Bach. Right. So they give you a, A video of somebody playing Bach, and so you can watch them playing Bach on slow motion over and over and over again for, let's call it three months. And eventually, you will actually be able to play a piece by Bach, right? But could you then go read a piece of music by Mozart and play it? No, because you never learned any of the fundamentals.

18:40You're a one-trick pony at this point. You are a cog in a wheel, and if you try to pull yourself out of the wheel, you can't do anything else. So that's where our education system essentially came from. And if you look at the Industrial Revolution and where we are in today's society, well, the Industrial Revolution isn't necessarily militaristic and expansionist, but capitalism is a form of economic expansionism. And don't get me wrong, I love capitalism because it's allowed so many opportunities. It's allowed technological progression that could have never happened. But essentially what we're seeing now is we're seeing the rise of the corporation, the rise of the corporate entity, and the individuals themselves are being left by the wayside.

19:28That's why depression is at an all-time high. Suicide rates are at an all-time high. Anxiety and stress is at an all-time high. Autoimmune disorders are at an all-time high. And they're not going down, right, because we're trying to put individuals into cookie cutter boxes. So that's kind of an understanding of why the old education system doesn't work. And I think it's really paramount to understanding, you know, the four things that we actually need to be focusing on to actually be successful. So the first one is essentially the foundation of how you work as a person, how your brain operates, how your emotions operate.

20:05You know, most people don't know this, but 95 % of your brain is actually subconscious. So 95 % of your brain is your subconscious. And I basically tell people that means you're about 5 % of a real person. The rest of you is like subconscious programming. It's like a supercomputer. And it's not being programmed to be successful. It's being programmed by society, by media, by your parents growing up. It's being programmed by your school growing up. And none of them are programming you to achieve your goals, right? So I always tell people it's like, imagine you had five horses and those five horses were like, they were like thoroughbreds and they were just like built.

20:44And you want those five horses running towards your goals at full speed, right? But those five horses are chained to 95 donkeys that are trained to go the other direction or even just sitting there, right? Those five horses are never going to be able to make it towards your goals. So really the first step in being successful is just understanding how you work, how your brain operates, how your emotions operate. Because if you're never taught, if you're never given the user's manual to how to operate your body, your brain, the most powerful tool in the world that you have, how are you expecting to be successful if 95 % of your brain is going to be programmed to do that you don't want it to do, right?

21:26That kind of takes us to step number two. So step number two is basically getting clarity. So getting clarity. And this is kind of what you and I were talking about earlier. Right. So, you know, we make a decision on our degrees on how we want to spend the rest of our life when we're 17 and a half years old. Right. So I don't know about you, but, you know, when I was 17 and a half years old, I was more focused on like where the next party was. And, you know, if that cute girl from Spanish noticed me. Right. Like those are the things that I cared about when I was 17 years old. Yet I'm being asked to make a decision around, you know, I'm going to spend$100 ,000 on my degree and then go this direction for the rest of my life.

22:05Right. And so, you know, the truth is like we have no idea what the hell we want and we have no idea what will what will help us feel successful in the future when we're 17 years old, because we've never really put in the work to actually figure it out. So what I tell people is figuring out clarity is really like a jigsaw puzzle. it's uh you know there's a there's a lot of different exercises and conversations and and pittable life life-changing moments that you kind of go through that are each one of these is a little jigsaw puzzle piece and as you get more and more of them you start to get clearer and clearer right now you don't need you don't need all of them to have a perfect picture and know which direction you're going but you start to get 30 40 of these images and you'll you'll get a pretty clear idea now the problem is most people think that these puzzle pieces are they're going to find them like while they're doing their emails at work or they're going to, you know, they're going to find them while taking out the trash.

23:01Um, but the reality, that's not how it works. You know, it happens when you have life changing moments, right? So I lost my best friend to suicide from PTSD and that was a life changing moment for me. It caused me to ask a lot of questions about what was really important in my life, how I wanted to spend the rest of my time, right? That was a major reason why, you know, quitting my job and focusing on something, something that really mattered was so important to me. I had a lot of exercises that I'd been through, specific exercises, and we have about four or five of them in the book that when we take people through these four or five exercises, you're not going to get 100 % clarity, but you'll get 30 or 40 % of a clear picture and have a much better idea of where you want to be going moving forward.

23:43And as you move forward, you get a lot more clarity along the way, if that makes sense. Well, I want to say that I'm very sorry about your friend, and I can definitely resonate because Fire Nation, you actually almost lost me to PTSD. It was actually when I was in college, not college, law school, that I was in the throes of PTSD from my 13-month tour of duty in Iraq, and was dealing with depression. And there was definitely some times when I was considering some things that I prefer not to talk about and consider right now because it's too dark of a place. And that's just a reality of what a lot of people in this world are dealing with, whether they've been to war or they've had some other traumatic experiences, a lot of traumatic experiences in this world.

24:25And PTSD is a real thing. Depression is a real thing. So my heart definitely goes out to you, Zanna, for that loss. And, you know, I definitely commend you for overcoming that. And I just wanted to kind of interject there and say, uh, I definitely resonate with you. It's super interesting for me because I think of, you know, I think of my buddy, AJ, and he served in the Marines and, you know, for him, I always, I always wonder, you know, What if he had been taught how his brain and how his emotions really worked? Would he have ended up down the path that he had ended up down? And he's one of the major reasons and driving forces behind this book is because I realize there are so many people that just don't understand how to handle these thoughts, these emotions.

25:07They think something's wrong with them. They think something's broken. They think there's no way out. And because of that, they resort to the only thing that they can to really save them from this situation. And it's heartbreaking. Because, you know, I look at I look back at AJ and he was by far he was my first mentor. He was the guy that when I was the nerdy high school kid, he took me around and helped me make friends. He introduced me to my first girlfriend. He helped me learn how to be social. Right. He was he was the guy that everybody loved. Yet deep down, he was tormented and broken because, you know, of so many of these reasons of not being able to understand what was really going on inside him.

25:43So, you know, that is and I appreciate that. And thank you for sharing as well for you, because I think there's so many people that it's hard to just be able to express that. And because of that, they suffer in silence. And that's really an issue and why so many people actually end up down that path. They do suffer in silence. And it is really sad and devastating to think about what would AJ have done? Like what impact would he have had on this world, on people, on things, on situations, on companies, on, you know, fill in the blank. Because again, you know, like if I had chosen that path, which again, I wasn't that far away from, I wasn't like on the brink, but I was dealing with PTSD and depression.