Ron Lieber on Parents, College, Anxiety

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0:39Granola is an AI powered notepad built for the way real people actually meet. Head to granola dot AI slash achiever. That's granola dot AI slash achiever and try Granola for free. If you're ready to think bigger and take a few more swings of your own, check out Big Swings Only. Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Hi, I'm Maura Aarons-Mele, host of The Anxious Achiever. Today, I'm going to bring you one of our most downloaded and one of my most favorite episodes from our archives. It's a classic. The Anxious Achiever has been at it for a long time. We have over 300 episodes, And honestly, they're all still more relevant than ever.

1:24You may hear details in this episode that remind you it's from another time, but I guarantee that the advice you get will be as crisp and meaningful and the stories as resonant as before. If you have a favorite episode of the show, let me know. I'd love to air it again or even re-record it for you fresh. Enjoy this classic Anxious Achiever episode.

1:53You know, I've wanted to do an episode on college admissions and the high stakes of success for a long time. I can't think of a more potent example of how the pressure to achieve social comparison, financial means, and willpower combine to create a bubbling cauldron of anxiety for students and their parents. Right now is the time of year when many people are thinking about getting into university, and who better to examine this anxiety with me than Ron Lieber, author of the Your Money column for the New York Times and author of the books The Price You Pay for College and The Opposite of Spoiled.

2:30And today I wanted to talk about how high-achieving parents can do the right thing without putting a huge emotional burden on their young adults. I also want to address young adults who may be struggling with how to define their own success and achievement. I'm on with you right now. And usually, and I don't feel anxious, like usually with guests that I don't know, I get very like, oh my God, are they going to, you know, is this going to be a waste of their time? Is it going to be, but with you, it's honestly, it's so funny because I think I've been reading you and valuing your advice for so long.

3:03I'm like, hey, it's Ron. your sort of personal familial circumstances like i don't know if you're a parent or yes you've dealt with kids professionally or just just so i know that kind of where we have i dealt with your processing experience yeah i have three children i have a 13 year old eighth grader i have a 12 year old sixth grader and i have a seven year old second grader and I live in one of the most competitive suburbs in the U.S. probably. Now, do we want to stop and interrogate that now as if we're in the middle of the conversation or do we want to get to that or do we not want to talk about you at all?

3:45Because this notion of using, I'm always interested to hear the adjectives that people use to modify their communities. And how does one even define competitive? What does that even mean? You know, I know we're here for you to ask the questions, but I find that extremely curious and worthy of a not short amount of discussion. Let's let's do it, Ron. I always joke that my podcast is like free therapy for me. So, you know, what do I mean by I live? This is actually probably useful for listeners as well. I have the great good fortune and privilege to live in a town that people from all over the world pay ridiculous amounts of money to live in because our public school system is really good.

4:30And honestly, one of the things I love is I love being a public school parent because I love the community. My kids play sports. We all know each other from so many walks of life around town. But my eighth grader said to me recently, all my friends are already planning where they want to go to college. And like, you know, if they're not in math Olympiad, they are learning six languages and everyone goes to Russian math. And it's just a lot. And I'm sure you hear this all the time. I don't actually know what Russian math is. And I'm proud of it. Russian math. Russian math is truly a Russian method of teaching math that is in only a couple communities in the U.S.

5:12I think it's in Bethesda. It's in the Boston suburbs and it's in like Palo Alto. So there you go. Oh my gosh. And the definition of success? Well, okay, let's actually - Is what? That was going to be my first question. Because you write, stealing from a great writer as well, when in the course of human events, it becomes necessary to address the big cosmic issues that we face at all of life's turning points. I often ask friends, family, and readers the same two questions. What is the definition of success? And then how much is enough? Yeah, and it's not meant to be some big grand declaration or proclamation.

5:56These are not rhetorical questions. You know, they're designed to be centering in a way that I hope, you know, the best therapy often is. But they're not easy questions to answer, right? Because they require parents to take a step back and then like five more steps back and, you know, sort of interrogate themselves about whether they're parenting for themselves or for the sake of their children. Right. And, you know, what does success mean? I don't know. I mean, sometimes at these moments, I try to remember what Coach Wooden said. So when I was in eighth grade and playing basketball, our coach, Steve Polis, had us memorize what coach John Wooden, the legendary UCLA men's basketball coach, used to say to his players, which is success is a peace of mind that is the direct result of the self-satisfaction of knowing that you did your best to become the best that you, you, are capable of becoming.

7:09Right. So there's nothing in there about math. There's nothing in there about the Ivy League. What there is, is a peace of mind that feels pretty closely synonymous with happiness. Right. Satisfaction. You've done your best and you feel good about it. Yeah. What's not in there is that myself isn't differentiated from all the people who've worked so hard to get me where I am. Right. Coach Wooden is assuming that you have your own sense of self and success and you've defined it for yourself. Well, so the interesting question there, right, is whose success are we talking about in this context, right?

7:56Again, success is a peace of mind, right? Direct result of self-satisfaction of knowing that you did your best, right? Who is the actor there in this context? Is it the parent, right, trying to achieve parenting success and the kid trying to achieve teenage success? And what are both those things? Right. And have you even bothered to ask your kid who is 14 year old, 14 years old and in eighth grade and thinks that they're if they're not doing junior mathematic Olympiad pre-Calc, right, that there's something wrong with them and they're falling behind. Right. Well, they may be falling behind the race to have very little chance of getting into Harvard unless you're an athlete or, you know, a legacy.

8:45But, you know, are they falling behind on the path to success? Maybe success is not playing in that arena at all. Maybe it's creating your own arena, finding something that you're passionate about that's actually different from the things that everybody else is chasing, whether they care about them or not. Exactly. So I'm recording this episode with you and I have in my mind three audiences. The first audience is definitely, I think, an audience that you speak to a lot, which is parents of people who are going on to higher education. The second audience is people who are still working out all the crap that their parents put on them.

9:26Being like, oh, my God, my parents put a lot of expectations on me and I'm still working all this out. And then the other audience is actually young people who might be listening who are struggling themselves, right? Because I feel like they don't often get asked what success means for them and what they want. So just to give you that context, because I think that these roots run deep when we come from families that have high expectations of us. Would you agree with that? Sure. Yeah, the effects are kind of long lasting. They are, right? And, you know, the thing I often wonder about, and this is something I ask myself, right?

10:09But this is definitely something I ask parents when I go out and speak in a lot of these communities that, you know, sort of define themselves as quote unquote competitive or way above average, however they define that for themselves. is to start by asking, what legacy are you embracing and what legacy are you passing on? And often I talk about this in terms of money, but you can think about it in any number of ways. In a financial context, people are often saddled by guilt when it comes time to pick a town, pick a school, pick a college for their kid. Because if their parents were not able, or their parent, if they only had one, was not able to give them back when they were 10 or 12 or 18 or 21, anything and everything they wanted, they feel like they are duty bound to do so and to make it as easy as possible and as anxiety free as possible for their kid, because they don't want their kid to experience the same kind of hardship or anguish as they did, right?

11:27And so they're a failure if they have not ascended the social class ladder enough to make that possible. And if they had everything handed to them and it was easy, and it isn't as easy for them, then they feel guilty about that. Right. So it's like the only way you win in this context is by starting really wealthy, finishing really wealthy and, you know, shielding them from any and all anxiety such that if you manage to have a clear and worry-free path as a adolescent yourself, your kid has that same path and anything else means you're doing it wrong. And I find that deeply problematic and yet, you know, more than occasionally irresistible personally.

12:14For yourself. Yes. Tell me how. How does it show up for you? Well, I guess here's how it shows up for me. So I had a, you know, somewhat mixed up background socioeconomically. I'm filled with, you know, a little bit of hardship, but also a ton of privilege. Right. So I went to one of the best, if not the best private schools in Chicago growing up kindergarten through 12. My parents were full payers for me and my younger siblings until all of a sudden they very much weren't like they split up. When I was in seventh grade and my brother and sister who are twins were in second and my dad lost his job not long after that, didn't earn a whole lot of income to speak of for the next two years.

12:59And this was a time, you know, roughly 1984, when, you know, the percentage of people on financial aid, a lot of these fancy private schools was like in the high single digits or maybe the very low double digits. So, yeah. So there was like this meeting of the board where like one of the agenda items were whether the Lieber kids were going to be put out in the street. You know, it was a lot of money that we needed all of a sudden. And it was a it was not a rounding error, you know, on the financial aid budget at that time. And, you know, the fact that they figured out a way to make it work for us, knowing that it might be years until we were anywhere back to where we had been financially is still one of the most amazing things that, you know, anyone's ever done for me.

13:43Wow. And I had to, you know, sort of do the same thing as a 17 and 18 year old. It was me and my mom mostly trying to sort of crack the code of the financial aid system and, you know, figure out whether I could go to a private college and whether how much risk there was in applying early decision, you know, in order to get the financial aid that I needed to get. So, you know, it all worked out, but I still remember crossing the Amherst College quad on graduation day with, you know, my whole family there and just bursting into tears because I could not believe that we had made it work out. You know, and I was well prepared kind of, you know, socially, culturally, academically to thrive at Amherst.

14:29But the whole money thing was just touch and go the whole way. You know, my mom flew out there and, you know, begged the dean of financial aid for more money each year. And, you know, it was a whole thing. Right. So I think about that. And why would I want my daughter? Well, I have two of them now. But, you know, the 16 year old is a junior and she's kind of on the precipice of all this. Why would I want her to experience any of that? Right. I don't. Right. So, you know, the reason why I go out and hustle and write books and do other stuff on the side, The reason why my wife does too is in part so that our kids will not face those anxieties at least.

15:10Right, which is of course what being a good parent is, right, is helping to protect your child from trauma. I can imagine the anxiety and maybe even shame you felt of like, oh, are the labor kids going to be welcomed back to this place where they had been welcomed before? As a, what, seventh grader, that's a lot to take. Yeah, so I wasn't aware of it at the time. I only found out that that discussion took place afterwards. But, you know, it was plainly obvious that things were not easy. And, you know, I think eventually I clued into the fact that, you know, there were issues with paying tuition.

15:48So, you know, it was complicated. it. How do you advise parents when they're sort of anxious about how much to give their kid, right? What we were talking about in terms of your own feelings of like, I want my children to not have this pain of knowing our finances too intimately. How does a parent in our sort of age where we're thinking about college very soon orient themselves to make the best decisions about money and how they want to spend it on their kids. You know, like I hear from a lot of parents who think I feel stuck in this job, but I have to stay in it because I have to put my kids through the best college there is.

16:27That's what I owe them. Is there a process that you can recommend for parents to sort of get clarity on what success for their kids means to them? Yeah. So, you know, I find myself anchoring to your use of the word best in that question. You know, we've grown used to the idea of best deriving from, you know, U.S. news and its list for kind of lack of a better default. But, you know, in so many affluent communities, certainly a generation ago, but to a certain extent, too, and I would say especially in the Northeast, there's this sort of prejudice almost against state schools. And, you know, there is no University of Michigan or University of Virginia or University of California at Berkeley in, say, New Hampshire.

17:29Right. And that's not a knock on UNH. It's a perfectly good state institution. But I guess I would, you know, sort of stop and ask people to sort of check themselves on that, because the problem with these best colleges lists is that they're not defining the the consumer of residential undergraduate higher education in any particular specific way. And, you know, your first kid is going to be different than your second kid, and your second kid is going to be different from your third kid. And they may all want and need, and those wants and needs might be different, by the way, they may all want and need very different things from one another.

18:17So the idea that there's some, you know, best school out there, I find that notion problematic, right? And so I guess where I'd encourage people to start is to make sure, first of all, if there are two parents in the household, that those parents agree on their ability to pay for college or borrow, their willingness to do so, any gap between those two things and making sure that whatever sacrifice is going to be necessary is a sacrifice that both people can live with right now if you have an x this becomes more complicated but i would also argue more necessary to make sure that you know the two years before college and the four or five years during are not filled with sort of strife and rancor that will cause anxiety for your kid.

19:22And then if you're a single parent, I think it's essential to make sure that you've got somebody to talk to who can help you make sure you've got your head on straight because it's so easy to kind of get lost in your own misconceptions about the process or thinking that's, you know, kind of Pollyannish or thinking that's overly cynical or skeptical. And, you know, you need to find like your smartest, most level handed friend or a professional, you know, whether it's a psychologist or a financial planner or a really good college consultant or maybe all three, you know, who can help? Because this is a process that's just so infused with emotion.

20:03Right. And when you bring emotion to the table, you know, when you're picking to town, picking to school, picking to college, things can go awry pretty easily. Yeah. I love talking to people who want to start their own business. You have an idea. You have a plan. How do you jump off? I have a great book for you, and it's by legendary Silicon Valley entrepreneur Mark Pincus. It's called Life at the Speed of Play, Launch Products People Love. It's a fast-paced, 170-page read created for exactly the uncertain times we live in. Whether you're working at a company or you really want to start that business, it was an instant national bestseller.

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24:04If meetings are eating up your day, Granola is a no-brainer, and you can try it totally free. Just head to granola.ai slash achiever. That's granola.ai slash achiever and get your time back. Try it for free at granola.ai slash achiever. Do you recommend that as they're starting the college process, parents and their children talk about the emotions that they feel around this decision? Because I think kids bring emotions to it as well. Yes. I mean, that's a good point. And I guess I would just say generally, right? It's almost never a bad time to talk about your feelings, right? There may be inappropriate moments, inappropriate context, but are there inappropriate periods?

24:52I don't think so. And this is something I talk about a lot in my day jobs in New York Times and in the pages of the New York Times, which has not always been the most feelings forward of journalistic institution. right but like so much of personal finance and i define that really broadly i mean anything that has anything to do with money is personal finance right so deciding what town you're going to live in that's personal finance you know deciding you know private school versus public school k-12 that's personal finance right um and obviously college is you know one of the biggest financial decisions that anyone will ever make so you know it's all personal finance but anytime you are making a big decision involving your children, it's emotional.

25:40And that emotion, those emotions can lead to anxiety. And anytime you're making a big financial decision, it's emotional. And those emotions can lead to anxiety. And the thing about, you know, this college stuff is it's the kind of most profound mix of parenting feelings and money feelings, because it's a really big parenting decision and a parenting process. And it's a really big financial decision and financial process. So that stew, I don't want to call it toxic, right? But, you know, we can see, right, where the pitfalls might be. It's pungent. Yeah, it's pungent, right? And sometimes pungent is good, right?

26:22I mean, it's really heady, right, to kind of get in that mix and really ask all the big, important kind of searching life questions about what is the definition of success and how much is enough, you know, that can make for really excellent family conversations. But, you know, they should start early, they should be ongoing, and the parents of the parents should be upfront and transparent as early as possible about, you know, what if any financial parameters there are, you know, with as much specificity as possible so that kind of everybody knows what is what's in the realm of possible. And, you know, one one easy way to, you know, create anxiety is to, you know, kind of leave the whole question of, you know, what you're willing to pay open until the very last moment, Because, I mean, there could be a lot of tears shed and raised voices in March and April of somebody's high school senior year if, you know, the terms aren't clear up front.

27:30So do you think emotions or figures come first or is it chicken or egg? Because I think one thing that might be really important is for each parent and so whoever's listening to really get in touch with their money anxieties and their anxieties around education and status. What's the process in terms of getting yourself in an emotional place and then in a practical place that you could have these conversations in a healthy way? Yeah. So, I mean, I think about it in terms of who needs to have discussions first, because I feel like if the parent or the parents haven't done work on the way in, they're not going to be well positioned to lead impressionable children through the process themselves.

28:23Right. And so, you know, I'm the parent of a 16 year old who's a junior in high school. I know a lot about the process. I know a lot about money. I know a lot about these colleges. You know, I've written a book on the topic, you know, all these schools, you know, kind of fly me around to come speak and try and, you know, kind of set everybody at ease. But my approach and I've tried to, you know, encourage this with my spouse as well. My approach with my own kid has been one of aggressive humility, which is that we don't know as much as we think we do about what goes on at these schools. We certainly don't know much as we think we do.

29:09And I'm talking about the grownups here. We don't talk. We don't know anywhere near as much as we think we do about what actually goes on, you know, in these classrooms and in these dorm rooms. Because we haven't gone to college in a generation if we want to college at all. And our kids think they know things about these places, but they know them because maybe they know two kids or four kids or seven kids who go to the school. Have they visited? If they do visit, do they go for more than four hours? Right. Take the tour. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Right. You know, I get that, like, visiting colleges is a time consuming and expensive process.

29:48this, but to the extent that you can spare the time and spare the money, I mean, most people do it wrong. It's just bananas, right? You know, you may spend more than$350 ,000 on this. You're going to base it on two hours or four hours or even a day. That just feels nuts to me. But, you know, that's an aside, right? So I think aggressive humility is the order of the day. But with aggressive humility also comes aggressive questioning, right? Parents questioning themselves aggressively, parents effectively ordering their children to question themselves aggressively, doing the actual questioning of the children aggressively if necessary, and then questioning the schools aggressively.

30:35You know, we tend to treat this whole process like we're supplicants. Yes. And, you know, enough of that, right? This is a consumer experience, right? We are about to spend potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars. And these schools, you know, sort of think that they answer to no one, at least, you know, the most rejected ones. And I'm sort of done with that, right? I mean, they owe us a lot more information than they currently provide. And they're not going to give it out unless more of us start asking for it. Why are we so anxious in the face of these institutions? I mean, I think a lot of it is that we do.

31:13We feel humbled. We feel uncertain. We're anxious. These famous institutions, you know, everything's on the line and we better not mess up. Where does that come from? Well, I think it comes from snobbery, right? Snobbery, really? Yeah, it comes from our own perception, kind of rightly or wrongly, and I would say mostly wrongly, but not completely. that the name on your kid's degree is going to matter so much to somebody else that this is worth being anxious about to make sure that you can afford private versus public or super rejective private versus slightly less rejective private. Or maybe it's not, it might be your own prejudice or pride that you want to have that sort of sticker on your windshield.

32:08Or maybe it's just sort of a practical snobbery. Know that there are out there in the world people at graduate school admissions offices or people at investment banks or venture capital firms who will sort of look askance at resumes with degrees from anywhere except literally like 10 or 15 or 20 places. And so you worry about other people's elitism, right? You're not the elitist. It's just you're trying to protect your kid from the other elitists, right? Well, I was going to ask you because, you know, I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn. This podcast is sponsored and it's a LinkedIn podcast. University is a tremendous tentpole.

32:51It's something that really anchors a lot of our professional selves and our professional lives, both from a symbolic sense. My husband is a William and Mary alum. And, you know, I always joke, we make a pilgrimage down to William and Mary. It's like a holy place in his mind because it really, it really changed his life profoundly. And so he has a lot of his own personal symbolism in that university. So we think about our universities in retrospect in that way with with pride and love and joy. And we want that for our children. And then sometimes we have kids who are like, nope, I am an elitist.

33:27This is what I want. And we're like, OK, well, I'm on board for that. We're going to make it happen. Like, I think a lot of this has to be about being honest about what you really want and what is important to you and then maybe separating it from what's important to your kid. Like, can you talk about that a little bit? Like, there's so much symbolism in university around the world. Sure. I mean, there's a part of me that wishes that some or another name brand institution, whether it's a graduate school or a place that's a really popular place to work for 22 year olds, would just up and announce one day that we are no longer going to hire 22 year olds who put their undergraduate institution on their resume.

34:14And if your undergraduate institution is on LinkedIn, we're not going to hire you either. Wow. Right. What if it just ceased? What if it just ceased to matter? Oh, my God. What an experiment that would be. Yeah. Look, you know, part of I mean, here's something to think about in that regard. Right. If you're trying to think about in a college context, like what the definition of success is, what you're seeking or shopping for. I mean, you can apply this in the same way, you know, if you're shopping for a town or a suburb or shopping for, you know, a sleepaway camp or, you know, shopping for a house of worship, right?

34:54When I think about college and when I ran around the country trying to, you know, get parents to explain themselves to me, you know, when I asked them, like, what is college for? It was pretty clear that nobody ever asked them that question before. It took a lot of like hemming and hawing and drawing out. But what eventually emerged was there's sort of three things, right? You go to college for the learning. You go to college for the kinship, right? The people who will pick you up and carry you through your life, whether that's your friends or the mentors you meet along the way. And then you go for the credential, right?

35:29The credential is where the snobbery comes in, right? Because, you know, Goldman Sachs will, you know, hire from Penn. But I can guarantee you they don't have anywhere near as many people at Goldman from Penn State as they do from Penn, particularly in the first year analyst program that hires all the 22 year olds. Right. Right. But learning. Right. You know, the University of Michigan, Berkeley, like these are storied institutions. But how much access are you really going to have to a professor as an undergraduate there? How much opportunity are you going to have to do real hands on research and forge, you know, mentor mentee relationships at places like that?

36:14You know, maybe not so much. Right. But kinship, I don't know, you know, the University of Michigan. I mean, that's an extremely strong alumni network. You know, alumni go back there all the time. And there are all sorts of ways, whether you work at the Michigan Daily, working on the newspaper or are in a fraternity or sorority, you can forge lifelong bonds at that place. And, you know, I know all sorts of people who have, right? And, you know, the credential, you know, maybe, I mean, let's go back to New England here, right? Maybe that, you know, the credential from the University of New Hampshire is not going to mean as much on Wall Street as the credential from, you know, Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire might.

37:00And I can also tell you that there is a slow but growing number of employers, and I talk to them from time to time, who don't want to hire entitled kids from Ivy League institutions. There is a form of anti-snobbery snobbery sort of growing up. And I only think it's going to grow, you know, as this affirmative action case over, you know, legacy admissions and racial discrimination, you know, kind of winds its way through the Supreme Court this year, where people sort of feel like, you know, that game is rigged, right? That Ivy League game. And it's a lot of, you know, rich athletes and legacy kids and, you know, people with various privileges and advantages.

37:39And, you know, there's resentment towards that. Right. And it may start to show up in hiring. So, you know, it's just hard to know. Right. Like if you think it's worth all of this money and time to, you know, chase the gold plated credential and whatever sacrifice, including emotional sacrifice is necessary to get there. Like, what if it isn't actually going to give you the things that you think it will in terms of, you know, credentialism? What if it does the opposite of that? You know, the world is kind of an unknowable place. I love talking to people who want to start their own business. You have an idea.

38:15You have a plan. How do you jump off? I have a great book for you, and it's by legendary Silicon Valley entrepreneur Mark Pincus. It's called Life at the Speed of Play, Launch Products People Love. It's a fast-paced, 170-page read created for exactly the uncertain times we live in. Whether you're working at a company or you really want to start that business, it was an instant national bestseller. And the thing that I love about it is it has a battle-tested, easy-to-follow framework to rapidly test and assess new ideas, right? So you can separate the great ones from the bad ones. Mark is offering our readers two books for the price of one.

38:54Go to getmarksbook.com slash anxious. And that's Mark with a K. Getmarksbook.com slash anxious. It's just$16 a book for you and a friend to get the book that Y Combinator's Gary Tan says will, quote, change your odds of success because it teaches you how to kill your losing ideas. Or as my editor is always telling me, you gotta kill your darlings. That's a pretty big endorsement from the head of the number one startup accelerator that's twice as hard to get into as Harvard. Once again, if you go to getmarksbook.com slash anxious, Mark will send you a second copy for free that he's paying for. Just go to getmarksbook.com slash anxious.

39:35When I talk to professionals, here is the number one complaint I hear. I'm in so many meetings, I don't actually have time to do work. And at the end of the day, everything we've talked about in all those meetings is just a jumble in my head. And I feel kind of stuck. If you can relate and you know the struggle, try Granola. Granola is an AI-powered notepad built for the way real people actually meet. Here's how it works. You can take rough notes like you normally would, and in the background, Granola securely transcribes the meeting. And then it turns everything into clean, structured, actually useful notes when the meeting ends so you don't have that end-of-the-day swirl.

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42:13That's 50 % off your first year at Monarch.com with code Achiever. I guess my question though also is, and is it true that high achieving parents tend to create these more pressurized situations for their children? I mean, is there data behind that? there is good data on the prevalence of anxiety diagnoses and more affluent communities and you know this was something that people sort of looked at with arched eyebrows 10 or 15 years ago when the research first started to emerge because it's like what do these kids really have to worry about so much or you know it's also possible that there's just like better and more diagnoses because they're more practitioners who service, you know, more affluent kids.

43:01But, you know, there is a fair amount of pressure that is put on these kids by their parents, or they just feel it, you know, being in more affluent communities where there tend to be more sort of, you know, hyped up college admissions trials. But, you know, that's not to discount the amount of anxiety that exists and is pervasive in, you know, all sorts of low-income communities where, you know, kids face, you know, kind of pressure of all sorts, right? So, you know, it's possible to place too much emphasis on this, but, you know, I do think it's real. But again, you know, when we're talking specifically about college pressure, you know, there are certain relatively low-income but, you know, super-striving immigrant or, you know, first-generation communities where, you know, the pressure to succeed, you know, as its own emotional roller coaster.

43:52And so I don't know if the affluent kind of have a lock on this, but I don't think so. I mean, not discounted. That's interesting. I mean, sometimes I think that people are just in pursuit of excellence and that's who they are. And maybe their parents were, maybe their parents wouldn't. But if you have that kid or if you are that person, that kid, and you're listening, is there a point in which you say, you know what? I want to pay the price. I want to go for this. I want to go into debt because it means that much to me. What do you say to those people? I don't know. And I'm reluctant to give one to many advice.

44:29But the best generalized advice I can give is what exactly are you seeking to achieve in your definition of success? Because if you know that being the best soccer player that you possibly can be will bring you the most joy overall, then chase that, right? As long as it doesn't put you into an obscene amount of debt getting there as a parent, right? If your goal is to be a conservation biologist in the field with a PhD, but also a tenure track teaching job, I mean, you know, it's probably harder to achieve that than it is to get a job at Goldman Sachs. I mean, the odds of not just getting into a good PhD program, but also getting a tenure track job and then getting tenure.

45:24Those are all really hard things to do. But there are ways to chase that dream that don't require$350 ,000 over four years. And so I guess I would just encourage people who have certainty around particular goals to ask a ton of questions, right? To be unafraid of, you know, sort of building the spreadsheets and making the question less than reaching out to dozens of people as opposed to two or three, you know, before they get themselves into a whole pile of debt because more often than not, it's not necessary. What is your number one piece of advice? And I know that much of your work and many of your books have been about raising kids who are good with money, who aren't spoiled, who understand the value of money.

46:16It wasn't until I became a parent myself that I realized how much my own emotions and baggage about money infected my kids. What's your advice for parents who through this process realize I have a lot of anxiety about money that I don't want to pass down to their my kids yeah i you know i guess it has to start with you know sort of conversations that take place early and often i you know it still amazes me it doesn't surprise me but it amazes me and saddens me that people who are getting married or thinking about entering into long-term partnerships, that there is not as much discussion about like sort of money baggage and money habits and establishing money habits and money goals going forward before you make a long-term commitment to someone, whether it's marriage or, you know, becoming a parent with them as there might be.

47:13I wish clergy, right, would make this part of premarital counseling, you know, more interesting yeah yeah i wish there were more people in the financial planning community who you know would hang out a little sign saying you know for 500 i can help you and your fiance you know kind of get your act together and your heads together around money and you know 96 of the people who have you know come and talk to me for two hours you know have not gotten divorced in the first 10 years or something like that, right? But I also understand why there's so much residence around this, right? Because there are very few couples who are 100 % compatible financially.

48:00And almost any conversation about money is ultimately, eventually, about limits, right? Or I guess it's better to say about trade-offs, but trade-offs feel like limits. And if you're flying solo, it can be easy to just sort of like put it all off for the next day or the next year, because you don't have somebody else sort of whispering or shouting in your ear, like, hey, we really got to have this conversation. So, you know, what are the forcing mechanisms that get you to, you know, kind of have conversations on an ongoing basis with yourself or with your spouse first, and then with your children, if you have them at, you know, kind of the earliest possible age so that, you know, when it comes time to make this incredibly large decision about money, it won't be the case that their only experience with a large sum of money is like, you know, the cost of a bicycle or a phone.

49:00Ron, thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

49:06That's it for this week's show. If you like the show, follow us and tell your friends. And please leave us a review. It really helps the anxious achiever get found by people just waiting for our content. I'm your host, Maura Aarons-Mele. Lots more to come in the next episode.

49:41Hello, Anxious Achievers. I want to tell you about another podcast that I think might inspire you to take your next big swing. It's called Big Swings Only, hosted by negotiation expert, author and entrepreneur, Kwame Christian. It's part of the Yap Media Network. Big Swings Only explores what it takes to overcome fear, take calculated risks, and make bold decisions that can transform your career and your life. Kwame speaks with entrepreneurs, leaders, and high achievers about the pivotal decisions and experiences behind their biggest breakthroughs. The show goes beyond celebrating success, and it digs into the mindset and psychology, and you know we're big fans of that, required to pursue ambitious opportunities.

50:24It's designed for professionals, entrepreneurs, and anyone who wants to challenge their limitations and approach big decisions with big confidence. If you're ready to think bigger and take a few more swings of your own, check out Big Swings Only. Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.