Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Scott Donnell on Raising Confident and Independent Children
Episode Date: August 21, 2024What does it really mean to raise confident and independent kids? How can parents instill strong values while making learning engaging and fun? And what practical steps can you take to prepare your ch...ildren for a successful future? In this episode, I chat with Scott Donnell, a serial entrepreneur and expert in family financial education. Scott shares insights from his work with the Gravy Stack app and his book "Value Creation Kid," offering strategies for teaching kids life skills in a way that is both educational and enjoyable. In this interview, you’ll learn . . . How to make learning engaging and fun for kids Strategies for teaching kids life skills during your daily routine The importance of instilling values and fostering independence Practical tips for building confidence and responsibility in children How to overcome common obstacles in teaching kids essential skills Creative ways to engage kids in learning through games And more . . . So, if you’re ready to help your children develop the skills and values that will benefit them throughout their lives, click play and join the conversation. --- Timestamps: (08:00) How did studying high net worth families help in teaching kids about finances? (09:33) The concept of "heritage over inheritance” (10:40) What are the 12 principles and can you share a few that stand out? (20:34) What is the “home economy” system? (23:55) What are the 3 E’s? (29:43) Have you encountered resistance from parents about implementing these principles? (36:19) Healthy struggles vs. unhealthy struggles (40:10) What types of healthy struggles should parents consider introducing to their kids? (46:27) What are your thoughts on the statement "If we model these behaviors, we are a lot of the way there"? (51:27) What are some of the most important skills we should teach our kids? (57:27) Why is interdependence, not independence, the goal in parenting? --- Mentioned on the Show: Value Creation Kid Dinner Table App Scott Donnell Instagram Thinner Leaner Stronger Triton Legion Training Quiz
Transcript
Discussion (0)
A lot of parents raise kids to be independent.
I think that's a mistake.
You do not want to raise kids to turn 18 and leave forever
and never come back for holidays, dinners, summers.
You want to be the first FaceTime
when something good or bad happens.
You want closeness.
So don't focus on independent.
My whole goal is to make you fully independent.
No, no, no.
My whole goal is to make you interdependent.
You're going to be a killer in this world.
You're going to be an incredible value creator,
but we're also gonna be tight.
And that's really what legacy is at the end of the day.
Hey there, I am Mike Matthews
and this is the Muscle for Life podcast.
Thank you for joining me today
for something a little bit different
than the usual programming,
something not related to health or fitness,
but related to child rearing and specifically how to raise confident, competent, independent
kids who go out into the world ready and willing and capable of bringing value into the world,
of making the world a little bit better than they found it.
And in this episode,
you are going to be hearing mostly from Scott Donnell,
who is a serial entrepreneur
and expert in family financial education,
although the discussion is going to be about
more than just family finances.
And as you will hear about in today's episode, Scott has written a book
called value creation kid.
He has started a new business called dinner table and in his book and in his
business, Scott's mission is to teach kids crucial life skills in a way that is both educational and
enjoyable in a way that makes it fun as well as insightful
But first if you like what I'm doing here on the podcast and elsewhere
Then you will probably like my award-winning fitness books for men and women of all ages and abilities
Which have sold over 2 million copies have received over
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Leaner Stronger, and Muscle for Life.
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If you are a guy aged 18 to let's say 40 to 45, Bigger Leaner Stronger is the book and
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Hey, Scott, thanks for taking the time to join me today.
Absolutely. Good to be here, Mike. It's gonna be fun.
This is this is not the typical muscle for life conversation. However, it's not irrelevant. I know that
I have a lot of parents listening, a lot of people who plan on being parents or who soon
will be parents. And you're actually the first of a few interviews that I have lined up regarding
just helping kids do better. A little bit of a selfish motive
here because I have two kids and I like to see them do well and I want to see them do
better. And today's topic is a big part of seeing kids do well. So again, thank you for
for joining us.
Absolutely. I can't wait to talk about this, man. Yeah, we got four kids as well. And my
wife and I were here in Phoenix. And this is my life. I love doing wait to talk about this, man. Yeah, we got four kids as well and my wife and I were here in Phoenix.
This is my life. I love doing it.
So there's a lot to learn.
Offline, you had mentioned that this was something that you
started because you really wanted to help and you succeeded enough at
your hobby to get forced into turning it into a business when you were resistant to
doing that because it sounds like you've achieved quite a bit in business and you reached a point
where you didn't have to do one thing or another. So what do you really want to do? And this is that.
Yeah. Yeah. So basically what had happened, we had, we've had a bunch of exits and thousand employees,
a serial entrepreneur, you and I are alike in our creative mind.
And our first big company was called Apex.
Okay. And I love that this is a fitness show,
mostly thinking about nutrition and health.
But our first company was
the largest fun run company in America for schools. So it was called Apex.
I started with my wife, Amy, because she taught first graders in a public school. And we ended
up becoming the largest school fundraiser in America for kids. And we would do, you know,
we'd go into schools and teach fitness and leadership and character traits, and they raised
money and we'd run, you know, we run 36 laps at the race for each kid with blow up tunnels.
And so we started that like 15 years ago and it just exploded because the first school
made like $50,000 net and they're like hassle free.
They loved every second.
So we just grew it and it became a franchise model.
We've served millions and millions of families.
I think there's almost a billion dollars raised.
Anyway, that was the first big company. And really fun.
We ran to the moon and back over like 90,000 times now or something crazy with kids.
But here's what happened.
So during that process, we're in 10,000 public and private schools, okay?
Elementary, middle schools.
Well, we quickly realized we're like, why aren't these kids like learning critical thinking
and like financial competencies and practical skills?
Algebra is probably great for engineering and Excel,
but what about taxes and budgeting and laundry or something?
That's really how this all started.
So the first thing we did was just a hobby.
We did a children's business fair.
So all the local kids came to the park,
they brought their products, they sold them. We brought in 500 customers and they bought
all the kids' stuff. Every kid walked away with 300 bucks. They loved it. And they learned
like profit, product, pitch, service, economy, micro economy, cost of goods. Incredible.
And this was 10 years ago now. And so that's
how this all sort of snowballed. That was the first thing we did. Now there's 2000 of
these business fairs all over the world every year. And we create a little website for it.
And fast forward, now we have Dinner Table, which is like the coaching program and an
app that helps you implement the family economy system and helping families like learn what
the best families in the world do to raise kids, to be rock stars, to blow by the parents in every way, not just money,
but values and mindsets and skill sets and all these things that matter. That's what
we teach. So yeah, it was a hobby turned into a business because a bunch of people said,
we need to turn this into a system and get it out to the world.
And this has involved studying a lot of multi-generational high net worth families, right?
And looking at some of the key differences in how those families approach teaching finances
and financial literacy compared to just your average household, right?
Right.
Yeah.
So we've had 7 million families go through all of our businesses, right?
So we've seen it all, man.
But we wanted to narrow it down to the top 100
best legacy families, we call them.
And I'm not just saying richest families,
because there's a lot of rich families
that ruin their kids.
I mean, a statistic comes to mind,
I forget the source on this,
but I remember looking into it,
and apparently it's legitimate,
that the typical pattern is you have the generation that makes the money
and then you have the next generation that doesn't continue to grow the wealth, but actually
starts to contract. And then by the third, by the end of the third generation and the
beginning of the fourth, the money that was made at the beginning is gone. And apparently
that pattern holds with large amounts of money.
I'm not talking about $5 million or even $50 million.
It could be hundreds of millions, even billions of dollars.
That's right.
And that's exactly the point of this.
In all the studies we've done,
90% of generational wealth transfers gone by the grandkids.
But underneath that number, it's worse.
Mental health, addiction, divorce,
violence, destruction, checkout syndrome, entitlement. I mean, it's literally like a
generational version of a lottery ticket winner. Like you got a problem here. And so, you know,
one of the main things. So what we did is we tried to narrow down to the top hundred
families that what they did is they didn't just pass on money and stuff. They passed
on heritage to their kids.
So what we say is your kids needed a heritage over the inheritance.
That's a point.
They need a last name that means something.
This is one of our main lessons we learned from the best in the world.
And those families made our list because they had three or four generations of kids that
blew by the parents over and over and over.
They blow by them in their family values, their depth of relationship, their mindsets,
financial competencies, the value creation,
impact in the world, all of that.
And if you do that over and over and over again,
who cares if you're making a few hundred grand
or millions or billions?
You have wealth, in my opinion.
That is legacy, in my opinion.
So we just studied the best 100
and we codify into an operating
system basically for the family. And we're like, hey, all these 100 families did these 12 things.
Do you do them too? And then you'll have over time, even though every family has crazy in it,
you'll over time move in the right, maybe a few of the highest leverage or the, or if you want to go in another direction, maybe that that were surprising to you.
Obviously, we'll get into just where people can go to learn about all 12 and get into all the details.
But I'm curious, what are what are a few that you want to just share to pique people's interest?
Well, I just mentioned the heritage over inheritance.
That's kind of a shocker to a lot of people.
That's very Roman.
That's what I think.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, really the point is it's more
about what we leave in our kids than to them.
So a last name that means something
is so much more important than leaving crazy amounts of money.
Because then they're just rudderless.
Now they have a ton of money to be
crazy with. You have to leave them a heritage. And this is about your family values, how you set it
up, the stories you tell, the dinner table conversations. Like we go through a pattern,
right? All of this is about habits in the home, right? So it's really important how you explain
your family stories,
your background, giving your kids what we call roots
and wings, roots in your family, your values
and wings to soar in the world.
And that's how you do it.
See, if kids don't have a rudder
and understanding where they come from
and what it means to carry on their family values,
then they're gonna just get impacted
by what the world says, which is a bunch of crazy stuff. It's instant gratification, right? It's entitlement and
victimhood and laziness and anxiety and like that ego and like that's what the world is trying to
get everybody to see. And so if you don't set the standards in the home and really use the model of
sharing stories of the values you care about and building that culture in the house.
They're rudderless, right?
And so that's one of the main strategies and tools that we unpack with families that we
coach.
And it's pretty easy.
They just come in, they coach with families.
We do workshops, we coach them all.
But that's one of the biggest ones we found is like, here's my question to you.
Why is it that the whole financial industry, their whole goal is to have people accumulate, protect,
and grow wealth until they die?
How come that's the model?
And to pay large, relatively speaking,
fees for assets under management
for just essentially shadow indexing.
That's right, and never sell it, never do anything with it.
Don't give it away. We need our fees. You have to just die with as much as you're in your 70s.
And you're still hustling to grow your net worth. And that's all you've ever done really with 80%
of your life. That's right. So you can die with as much crap as possible, just to give your kids
another version of entitlement. And then even to talk about, okay,
so even if that's what you're gonna do,
the average age of inheritance,
I'm sure you know this, but people listening may not know,
here in the United States, it's like 60 something.
And so what good is that on average
when now you're in your 60s and okay,
you inherited a bunch of money,
but it might've been a lot more helpful,
even if we're just talking about money and it doesn't have to be a lump sum of inheritance, but it might have been a lot more helpful, even if we're just talking about money, and it doesn't have to be a lump sum of inheritance,
but it might've been a lot more helpful when you were 30 trying to establish yourself and
build your family to have a little bit of help, like maybe some help with defraying
some of the costs relating to, certainly now, getting a home so you can have enough space
for a family and sending kids to school, maybe to a private
school because the public schools are pretty bad where you live and so forth.
Yep.
You want to know the best investment I ever saw from parent to kid?
You ready for this?
Greatest thing I ever saw.
A high percentage of these families, they said, you know what, instead of just letting
this money sit in an account and dying with it, we're going to take out 15 grand a year.
We're going to send all three of our adult children on their anniversary.
We're going to send them on a week-long trip together, and we're going to take the grandkids.
And we're going to do that every single year, especially when they have little kids at home.
From birth to graduation from high school, that's our I love you gift to them.
It is the greatest investment I've seen.
The heritage it builds, the family values,
the connections, the relationship,
how much the adult children are so thankful
and have a sweet aroma in their mind to their parents.
Like that move is way better than you taking 15 grand
and putting it into some Schwab account
and dying with it and being stingy.
And then you have to pass it on again when your kids are 60 or whatever and maybe they've
made money so it doesn't even mean anything. Maybe they have not made money so technically
it could mean something but they have not made other, they've made a lot of bad choices
in their life. They're just not doing so well anymore because of circumstances and that
money represents a lot less joy at that point than it could have otherwise.
Well, and then they fight over it.
I've seen so many adults in their 40s and 50s thinking that their parents are gonna die and they don't for another 15, 20 years.
And they all are waiting on it. So they don't risk. They don't create value. They don't take that chance.
They don't get that investment opportunity. They don't grow.
That's a good point. I've seen that firsthand from wealthy, with a big W, even families,
where they knew, they didn't know quite how much is coming because of sometimes that's withheld.
Yeah, they know when there are billions sloshing around, there's enough coming to not care.
there are billions sloshing around, there's enough coming to not care. And I guess you could say it would take a very unique person to really make something of themselves despite that.
That's exactly it. So that's why this heritage over inheritance thing is just really powerful.
I mean, in our in our workshops and coaching, we help families literally get,
hey, let's take our family and look at
it like an investment.
So let's take what's the culture of our family?
What are the values of our family?
Let's make it into an acronym.
Let's create a crest.
Let's create the stories.
Let's not just put it on the wall.
Who cares about the mission statement on the wall?
In 30 years, your kids aren't going to be sitting around the campfire looking at the
wall.
They're going to be telling stories.
Kids think in stories.
Kids are very different in the way that they see the world than adults.
They still are pure and creative.
They don't have all this stuff beat out of them.
They think so much more in story.
Kids only learn in two ways, fun and real life experience.
When you mash those together, it's powerful learning
and there's no school in the world that does that very well.
So that was a big one, is that heritage over inheritance.
And I know we have like 12 of these, but we only have time to go into a couple, but that's
a big one.
Like we got to think that way.
I'll share with you probably the first and most important one that we saw as a pattern.
These families, they didn't just go straight to money. You think like wealthy,
successful families, oh, we're going to teach our kids to make money. Let's teach them money.
There's so many things that have to be done before that or else it becomes achievement,
status, identity. That's what money becomes. Or on the flip side, kids actually report
to us that money is the biggest fight in the home that they see and they don't want to talk about money.
So it becomes a negative to them, which is a poverty mindset.
So what do these families do?
They actually, they took it a step back and they said, what is money?
Money is a store of value.
Okay, let's take this back to first principles thinking.
Let's take this back to value creation first.
And money is only a store of one type of value.
It's called material value.
So what they said is,
let's teach our kids to create value first, not money.
Money is a store of only one type of value.
So then when you take that lens
to see your family and your kids,
this value creation lens,
now you're turning them into value hunters,
where everywhere they go,
they're learning to create value in the three different ways. The first one is material value, right? Like that's
what you think of as business and solving problems for a profit, doing gigs around the
house, you know, wants and needs. Money is usually the result, the reward for creating
that kind of value. But the second kind is emotional value. Emotional value is the kind
of friend you are, the mindsets, how you feel,
how you make others feel and think better, right?
That's a whole different type of value,
but it's still creating value.
And this one is what makes for amazing siblings.
Great sports teammates, great classmates.
The captain of every team is the emotional value driver,
the leader.
This person gets the job first and the promotion,
most likely,
not just material value. And then the last one, spiritual value, which is kind of a wholly different
bucket than the other two. Spiritual value is basically how you get outside of your own ego
and pride and connect to something bigger than yourself. Connect to a higher calling, a mission.
You know, for me, it's God, right? Like connect above yourself, stop being selfish and ego and pride
and woe is me and anxious because of it
and get out to something bigger than yourself
and be of service to others.
It creates spiritual value in the world.
When we said we were gonna go to the moon in the sixties,
remember that?
Well, you and I weren't alive,
but when we said we were gonna go to the sixties
and bring a man safely home from it
by the end of the decade,
the whole country rallied, everybody rallied. It was like the last time we were also connected. Immense spiritual value, very different than the
other ones. So those are the buckets, material, emotional, and spiritual value. And these families
were extremely intentional about helping their kids learn to create those types of value.
And so they measured it, they talked about it, they asked their kids every day,
what value did you create in the world today? Who did you create value for? And then
the kids had a worldview to see it that way. Not just going after making money. Kids don't
even care about making money. Only one in 20 kids does. You don't even want them to
think that way. You want to think about value creation first. So that is like, that was
the eureka moment. The first big eureka moment from all of these interviews,
hundreds of interviews and tons of,
hundreds of pages of notes,
traveling all over the world for 10 years,
meeting these people.
That was big.
Yeah, create value first.
You've talked about the home economy, this system.
What do you mean by that?
Yeah, that's actually one of the most practical ways to create value in the
house. It's the whole point.
We call it the family economy now because we found out that Vanguard owns home
economy and they don't do anything with it,
but they're squatting on the trademark. So
that's funny because a software company called Bentley owns Legion.com
for my sports.
And it's possible that it could be purchased because that actually just forwards to some
software product of theirs over at Bentley.com or whatever.
But it's a big company.
At last, I looked close to probably a billion dollars in revenue.
And so unless I'm willing to pay, I mean, it's going to be a small seven-figure sum,
it's not even worth talking. And so unfortunately, I love it from a
branding perspective, but ironically, we have SEO has been a big part of at least brand awareness
for us. Like our website, we've received probably, I don't know, over 40 million visits since I
started the company. And we have thousands of articles. And so unfortunately, at this point,
it probably would be a bad idea.
And I've spoken to SEO experts and basically the consensus is,
don't buy the domain,
don't 301 everything because it could actually significantly hurt your SEO.
And so now I'm stuck with this URL that I hate,
Legion Athletics, it's too long and athletics is unnecessary.
And anyway, random URL rant.
And link tagging and algorithms have
changed so much because nobody can get the exact domain they
want anymore. It's so difficult to do. I mean, I literally just
saw dinner table.com when we started, it was just sitting
there. And I'm like, what? And I just grabbed it in like 10
seconds.
Wait, you mean, you didn't even have to buy it from somebody who
was you just registered it? No, it was wide open.
I got so lucky.
So lucky.
So somebody's auto renew,
like the credit card bounce or something.
That was a mistake.
Yeah, it was never there and 12 grand and bang.
I'm like, it's not.
Oh, but no, so you did have to pay from somebody.
You had to pay to somebody who was squatting on it.
Nope, GoDaddy. No, go daddy.
Well, but go but go daddy.
They were there. They're a broker, right?
Well, no, I think.
Well, they owned it.
It wasn't a broker. Yeah.
Oh, so. OK, good.
But regardless, I mean, you got it for a very reasonable sum.
I mean, it was a steal.
Anyway, you get the point.
Any entrepreneur who does lapse about what we're talking about,
because it's so hard to get that right.
Okay, so yeah, the family economy is what we've changed it to.
That is basically this system in the home
that helps kids learn financial skills by creating value.
Because allowance doesn't work.
Allowance is all of the studies that we've done and read
link allowance to a lack of motivation
and an aversion
to work for kids.
It's codependency.
I mean, some would say it's socialism, okay, in a box.
UBI, which continues to fail at least study after study that I'm seeing.
Yep, 100%.
And some people go, well, I pay allowance for chores.
Okay, well, now you're giving them a salary and you still fight over all the chores every
week and half those chores you should never pay for. I pay allowance for chores. Okay, well now you're giving them a salary and you still fight over all the chores every week.
And half those chores you should never pay for.
That's their role in the home.
And the other half those chores you should pay one off
so they understand the value created for the reward.
So that's why we came up with the home economy,
the family economy.
So it's three E's, okay?
So expectations, expenses, and extra pay kicks.
That's the three E's.
And if you do this system, your kids learn budgeting, they learn delayed gratification,
price of goods, they never ask you for money and stuff.
No more conflict over chores.
Five massive wins in one.
And so we have an app inside of Dinner Table.
People join, they get the app for free, and they just implement the home economy with
a printout for the fridge. So first thing, expectations. This is your role in the family,
kids. There's no money attached. It creates emotional value and all the other values for
our home. And it's just part of being in our family, making you should never pay your kids,
like make their bed, clean their room, you know, homework, do your homework first when you get home
or dishes trashed.
Like that's kind of your role.
This is to live under our roof.
Here's what you're doing.
Table stakes to stick with the table stakes, the dinner table stakes.
There you go.
So that's the expectations because kids need to understand not everything they do is going
to be for money.
There's things that create other forms of value.
Well then the second E is critical.
It's the expenses.
Because then what people do is they try to, they think that their kids care about money
as much as they do.
Kids don't care about money unless they have a motive.
And the motive is give them expenses to be in charge of.
So when you give them expenses that they're in charge of, it's an act of love.
It's a greater act of love than buying everything for them and entitling them.
So when you give them expenses, it's like birthday presents for friends' parties.
That's how they actually learn generosity.
Social outings.
If they're gonna play baseball, guess what?
You're in charge of the helmet.
You're gonna buy the bat.
You're gonna buy the cleats, whatever it would be.
Like, you know, toys,
or if we're gonna go to the movies as a family,
we want you guys to be in charge of the popcorn, right?
Make your kids responsible for certain things,
and then they rise to the occasion
because they want to get those things,
and they need those things.
You know, you want to go to your friend,
out with your friends on the fun thing
when you're 12 years old?
Okay, well, you need to have that money set aside.
So that's where, and then when parents do that, by the way,
they save hundreds of dollars a month,
because now the kids are in charge,
and then they can use those that money
to help the kids with the 30 which is extra pay. So this is a list of things the kids can do called
gigs. Don't say chores, that's a cuss word because gigs are way better than chores anyway
because we add in brain gigs to it. All right so gigs are it starts with what you'd think maybe
chores but sweep the garage, wind, wash the windows, clean the bathroom,
make a meal, laundry, something in the yard,
pool, pet, you know, whatever, yard work.
Those are hands and feet gigs.
But then you add in the secret sauce, which is brain gigs.
This is where kids use their brain to create value,
which is what you and I do every day as adults.
Kids need to learn that.
So this could be like a podcast or an article
or a Ted talk or a book or no sugar
for a week. And the kids like do it and they tell you what they learn and what they're going to
apply to their life right now. And they get a few bucks, three, five bucks, two bucks, whatever you
want. And it's a way for them to make the whole list of gigs really fun. Like they just get
self-motivated for the whole thing because it's really fun. And they learn a bunch of capabilities
and they learn confidence from it. And then you can get them ready for the real world by giving
them those gigs. So like we just gave our daughter Reagan the family vacation challenge.
She was in charge of budgeting the summer to the lake. So figured out how we're going
to get there flights, best deal, three flights, get the best deal. We're going to eat, we're
going to do. She saved us like two grand, dude. It was awesome. She's
eight. She learned all these skills, all these skills. And guess what? She owned the trip.
Lifetime memory because she owned it. So that's just one of a hundred examples of like brilliant
things to help your kids that they're never going to teach in school. So if you do that model,
a lot of the families did. Many of those hundred families, many, many, like a significant majority did that. And it just makes it really easy for them to learn the right skills,
understand the right view of money, and create value. And it's just way easier as a parent,
less stress, more fun, you feel more confident. You know, we have everyday parents like, yeah,
my kids went from arguing over who has to do chores to who gets to do gigs. That's a huge win for us. They never ask us for money and stuff. This is awesome.
So that's one of the 12 as well.
And these things, they make sense when you say them. It's just not the common way of doing any
of it. And part of it, and I'm guilty of this as well, and my excuse, if I can offer an excuse,
is I suppose being very busy with work and then not having,
although I guess I haven't maybe looked enough for one resource I could go to,
to just tell me what to do.
I could take the time to read 25 books and piece all this together.
I could. I'm not saying I couldn't,
but I have not, and that's one route.
Because getting it all put together in a way that really works, it's
not something that we can just muddle our way through as parents.
Like, let me just sit down and think about this, and I'm just going to figure this out
here in a few hours, and then I'll implement my system.
No, you have to go to people who have already done a lot of this work, and somebody like
you, who's spent years and years and years putting all this together and then packaged it up and say here it is.
And then you gotta be able to find that and then implement it and so that's one element of it and then there is that element of implementing it which I'm sure
for people listening who are very busy they feel a bit of friction I mean I, I can see that myself, although I'm quick to diffuse it just because
I know what that really means. It just is, you have to be willing to change what you're
doing and go through a process of where not everything is perfect and it does take a bit
more work on the front end and you have to commit to that mentally. I don't know if you
want to just comment on
that, because I'm sure you've run into that a lot where parents, they know they're not
doing a great job in this regard. Maybe they're not egregious and they're not ruining their
kids, but they haven't been very deliberate with any of this and they like what you're
saying. But again, run up against that friction of, is this going to add another, I don't
know if I have another five hours a week
or 10 hours a week to give to another thing
that I have to manage.
Yeah, well, I'll tell you this.
We deal with parents every day who are busy,
stressed, worried, and they've got just so much going on
that they barely have any time for anything.
So our whole goal was,
let's create a 12 month operating system that is like the littlest amount of time possible. We just check in with families
every month in groups. We give them the smallest amount of like goals with a simple lesson and
they unpack it with other families. And it's like little tweaks, little changes, 5-10 minutes. And
then once you get the thinking, you share with other parents, learn best practices and you're often doing it. So tiny momentum,
tiny goals that build over time.
So we take that approach to it because parents are just busy.
And so every month, you know, and then every six weeks we do like a deep dive.
It's like, Hey, we're going to go get together on a Thursday night or a
Saturday afternoon. And all the families,
we're going to deep dive for a couple hours into this specific results based thing. And you're going to walk away
with it done, ready to go, how to talk to your kids about it and you are set. Right?
So it's very results driven for families. And then we celebrate the heck out of families
because it's hard, right? So everyone, everyone's celebrating and sharing what's working, what's
not asking questions. That is how the needle gets moved because we launched the book and
it became a huge bestseller. And then hundreds of parents would come to me
and be like, I loved your book. I read it three times. I'm like, well, did you do it?
And they're like, no, we were still in the fun time. Not yet. I got the app. I downloaded
the app. I'm like, okay, are you doing it? They're like, no. Families just need accountability.
Everything that we talk about with transformation in life, you need tiny habits and you need accountability. So that's what we're there to be. We teach you the little
movements, little habits, you can get them right away. And we encourage you and keep
you accountable to actually do the change in the family because your family is your
number one investment. It has to be. And you are in your family. You and your family are
your most important investment. And unfortunately, so many families don't think that way.
They're just trying to keep everybody alive and fed and to bed on time and get to basketball.
And so that's what we say is, hey, if you're a family man with a business, not a businessman
with a family, then come this way.
We'll help you.
Same with women, right?
If you're a business woman with a family, we're probably not the right fit.
But if you're a family woman first with a business, you work in a business, we're the right fit. So that's the
thing here is you have to you have to enroll mentally like, yeah, we want to make the little
changes that help our family thrive. And all it takes is one pain point, man. One issue with an
estranged kid when they're 23 years old, or a kid that doesn't care about the money, or they're deep
in debt, or they give up or they struggle or they fall away or whatever.
One of those, everyone would give everything they have,
all their money, all their stuff,
all their time to change that one thing.
Same with grandkids, same with cousins, same with siblings.
You've got to put that investment in your family.
And so we just made it super easy.
It's cheap and you just come in, stay accountable,
go through the operating system.
And then it's like a dashboard.
We teach you how to do the family meetings.
We teach you how to do the pay to a point plan,
the family economy system,
how to work on the relationships of the kids,
you know, the sweet spots and love language stuff.
Like we do all that to help families thrive.
And it's super fun.
And where is all that?
That's separate to the app it sounds like,
or this is all in the app?
The app is part of Dinner Table now.
Okay, so once you join our Dinner Table,
people can go, I'll give you a link.
It's like the scott.dinnertable.com is my personal link.
I'll give you a specific one for your audience
that gets them in to just see how this works.
And then we coach everybody up.
I got a team of people.
We do mass calls, fun workshop style,
and we give everybody the dashboard to work on.
So that's, yeah, scott.dinnertable.com.
And they get the app, they get the book,
everything's a part of that.
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Let's talk about healthy struggles and the topic of allowing kids to bump themselves around without breaking themselves and not giving in to the urge to coddle and overprotect.
Yeah, the coddling of the American mind, John and Nate.
Okay, so let's think about this just practically for a second.
The only way a human grows is through struggle.
The only way they grow is through overcoming and learning
and growing and being like stretched.
Okay, nobody wants to, it's very difficult for someone to create the
habit to do that on their own. You need that transformation moment. That is just human nature.
People get healthy when they're near sick or well sick. Right. And don't even realize. Yeah.
That is what it is. Healthy struggle is the catalyst for all growth. And it's the catalyst
for creating value in the world.
You've got to be able to be unshaken by the things that come your way in the world. And
that's what all parents want for their kids. That's what we want for ourselves, for God's
sakes. It's resilience. It's grit. It's all about healthy struggles and not unhealthy
struggles. Unhealthy struggles, we should never put on our kids and put in our family and
make them
happen. That's like trauma and addiction and abuse and neglect and tough love, all these
things. That should just go away from one generation to the next. But you know what?
Healthy struggles are great. Any athlete or academic or kid overcoming something to learn
a certain skill, emotional skill, practical skill, business skill. These are all healthy struggles. And we have this cycle that we have in our book. And we teach it in dinner
table. It's the value creation cycle. And here's the cycle. It starts with a healthy
struggle, which has two rules. You are on the kids team, and it's a safe environment.
Mostly. Jordan Peterson, make kids do dangerous things safely. That's always fun.
But yeah, you're on their team, you're not against them, and it's a safe environment.
And then kids learn to overcome and they learn like all these awesome skills. Well, when they
do that, they get capability. That's the second piece of the four in the cycle. When you overcome
a healthy struggle, you learn a capability. And then when you learn the capability and you apply
it, you get confidence, inner confidence, not outer confidence.
Like patting your kids on the back every day is fine.
I love you, you're smart, you're brilliant, good job.
But inner confidence is the lasting kind
and it comes from the inside.
When kids are overcoming things and learning skills.
And that ultimately when those three things happen,
now they're ready to create value for other people.
That's the value creation cycle.
Healthy struggle, capability, confidence, value creation.
And the more that we can help our kids go through those healthy cycles on their team,
cheering them on, we're their coach, not their caretaker.
The more we can do that with kids, the stronger they become, the more value they create.
So a lot of parents shy away from this.
They fight the teacher for better this. They fight the teacher
for better grades. They fight the coach for more playing time. They bring the lunch and water the
moment the kid has myth forgets it. You know, they clean up all the messes. They buy the stuff for
the kids. They don't have to have the fight, you know, or the tantrum. These are all not letting
the kids go through healthy struggle. And if you solve that kid's problem for them all the time, they will grow up into what we call a lazy victim. It's worse than entitlement.
Like entitlement slides into lazy victim because, you know, when they grow up, they reach an
obstacle, you're not there anymore. And they give up or they blame everybody else. Right?
It's my parents' fault. It's the employer's fault. It's the government's fault. We got
millions of those people. And the way to protect them against that
is to go through that cycle.
So that's why struggle is so critical.
It's how you grow muscle.
It's how you grow everything.
And what are some examples of healthy struggles
that are very productive?
That it sounds like you may want to intentionally include
in your family and in some of this stuff that you've been talking include in your family
and in some of this stuff that you've been talking about
in your system, so to speak,
that you're using to run your family.
Yeah, so the home economy is one version, right?
Every gig that a kid gets,
every expense they're in charge of is a healthy struggle
because you wanna give kids specifically things
that they can do that learn a capability, right?
So like my daughter just did the coupon hunt.
She found a bunch of coupons for groceries, saved like 28% on the grocery bill. That's a healthy
struggle. Now she knows how to get groceries and save a bunch of money. You know, she saved us 50
bucks. So that's a healthy struggle that now she has a capability for life and confidence to go
repeat it and do it again in her own family or with her friends. So here's a healthy struggle that now she has a capability for life and confidence to go repeat it and do it again in her own family or with her friends.
So here's a crazy little controversial idea, but I think that skills beat degrees hands
down.
Like I'm saying college is fine for certain trade, like certain things, not trades, like
certain like a doctor, lawyer.
Yeah, no, but but trade schools would make a lot more sense for a lot of people. Way more, way more people, you know, or do a gap year and don't just travel the world,
do apprenticeships and go create value and see what you love and let that dictate.
Do you want to go back to college?
You want to go to trade school?
What are you going to do?
I saw a news article semi-recently that apparently there's a bit of a trend among Zoomers in
this direction because apparently there's a segment of them at least who have realized that there's very little commercial value in so many of these
degrees that they could go get that would entail burying themselves in debt. They could do that
or they could go this other direction and actually get their education paid for at one of these trade schools, learn to be an electrician or something that even if AI develops, even if it delivers on what some
people think it's going to deliver on, there are trades that are very future-proofed, even in an
AI-dominated future, even 30 years from now. Again, because these trades are so in demand, they can go find a potential employer and agree to work for that
employer for a period of time, get their education for free, and then learn
something that allows them to come right out of trade school making
anywhere from what I was reading $70,000 to $100,000 a year with no debt.
And then they go and work and they make money and they also now are learning how this business
works.
So if they're entrepreneurial, they don't have to go start a business, but if they have
that spark in them, they're now seeing they're getting paid good money to see from the inside
how this business works.
And then they can start their own HVAC or electrical
or whatever business if they're so inclined.
And they can ride that to becoming a multimillionaire.
Exactly right.
Exactly right.
And if skills beat degrees, then we
should be working with our kids to build
skills and capabilities.
And these are not taught in school.
School is an assembly
line model. Like you can't outsource your parenting on this. I want my kids to go learn
as much as they want and can about cars and tech and IT and lawn mowing and art. And like
what your goal is to take what your kids are good at and what they love to do and throw
fuel on it in any way it comes alive. Go to the museum on it, watch YouTube videos on it, give them gigs
on it. Just let them run with stuff and they will learn a hundred times as much as they
learn in school. Literally 100 times as much. So that's the thinking here. And I don't want
to go on a tirade about college. I went to college, you know, I had a good experience now since 20 years ago, but I had
a good experience.
But it's crazy to think that, you know, 56% of college students get debt and don't graduate.
They don't get the degree.
82% of college graduates is the last staff that I heard.
I could be a little bit off, but it's not far off.
They don't use their job.
Their career doesn't even relate to the degree they got. It's like, what are you doing here?
You pay four years and a hundred grand to show that you can complete an assignment and learn how
to drink from your friends. It's like, wait a second, let's think twice. Not saying it's a
bad thing, but think twice. So yeah, these are all healthy struggles that we want kids to do.
And the more healthy struggles that kids go through, the more they'll be unshaken in adulthood, right? The more they'll learn delayed gratification,
which is the cornerstone of all financial competency, value creation, delayed gratification.
That's how you become an investor. That's how you become a giver. That's how you become
smart at saving and spending. So that's why this is, this is such a critical category.
But a lot of parents out of love, they want their kids to have all the things they never
had. They want their kids to have all the comforts and not have to deal with the problems
they had growing up. This is what happens with a lot of parents because they love their
kids. But that's why I said earlier, it's a greater form of love to help them become
the person you see that they could become. There's a lot to be said for how that approach can help with anxiety, self-doubt, which,
according to studies I've seen, are at all-time high levels, especially among younger people.
That's right. We see it as if a kid has high capability but low confidence,
it immediately breeds anxiety and self-doubt. A lot of mental
health issues when there are so many teenage girls, they're so gifted, they're so talented,
they're so capable, but they're terrified to ever use it in the world. They're so scared
of bullying and clicks and popularity and social media that they'll never branch out
and use it to serve others and create value. And then they just get riddled with anxiety.
What are other people going to think? That's what happens. That's why the full cycle is so critical.
I was just on the phone with Laura Morton. She's created Anxious Nation, the documentary.
She's friends with Jonathan and the Anxious Generation. That documentary is powerful,
powerful documentary. And I encourage everybody to go watch it. It's such a...
It basically takes the book that Jonathan did, brings it to life in a documentary. And I encourage everybody to go watch it. It's such a, it basically takes
the book that Jonathan did, brings it to life in a documentary.
Do you want to speak to a statement that I'm sure you've heard many times, but it just
comes to mind that I've heard from parents and it's that if we, if we model these types of behaviors,
then we're a lot of the way there.
Meaning, we don't need to be as deliberate
as what you're talking about and implement a system per se.
But if our kids see us living out the values
that we want to instill in them and see us bringing
value into the world and being a good person and so forth that that's enough. What are
your thoughts?
Yeah, it's true that more is caught than taught. Okay, I do. Kids are way smarter than we give
them credit for. They're watching all the time. But I think far too often parents are outsourcing
their parenting when they shouldn't be.
We outsource kids to school to learn,
sports to learn discipline and character traits,
to camp, to learn extracurricular,
to church to learn about God.
Like you just outsource it,
hoping they're gonna get all the information
and experience and they just don't, right?
I talked to countless older parents.
They're like, where did I go wrong?
What did I do wrong?
We thought we did everything right.
Paid for all the things we needed to.
And it's like, you can't outsource parenting.
But I think a better way to look at this is
let's do more with our kids instead of for them.
That's the way to look at it.
Of course we want our kids to see us doing the right stuff.
Working hard, being loving, being a great spouse to their other, you know, their mom or their dad,
like living out, practicing what we preach. That's a good thing. But more important is like,
let's do more with our kids than for them. So here's a good example. We just got back from a
trip and my five-year-old Sawyer, we get to the airport and we were taking a commercial flight
because it was kind of last minute and we walk in and with our bags and we're like, okay, so what now?
He's five.
He's like, we got to go to our plane.
We're like, what do we got to do before the plane?
He's like, oh, we need tickets.
I was like, yeah, okay.
We're, you know, he's like, okay, what airline?
We're like Southwest.
And he's like, oh, okay.
So he finds Southwest.
He goes up there to the lady.
He's like, hey, we got to take a flight.
And she's like, hey, what's up, man?
How are you?
He's like, we're late.
She goes, okay, well, I need your ID.
He goes, what's an ID?
Right?
So he gets our IDs, gives them to her.
He goes through the whole process.
It takes three minutes longer.
And everyone around us is smiling.
They're not mad.
And the lady's happy.
Well, he figures it out.
We get our tickets. It's like, okay, now what, buddy? And the lady's happy. Well, he figures it out and we get our tickets.
It's like, okay, now what, buddy?
So now he's got to take us through TSA.
He's got to find the gate.
He's got to figure out when we board.
See, we could have done all that, saved five minutes, but he does it and he learns.
We're doing it with him.
There's a thousand opportunities like that that can be coaching moments for our kids,
rather than doing it for them to be efficient.
That's critical.
See, cause you're gonna do stuff for your kids
until you do it with them enough
where they can do it on their own and then you're free.
Any other just high leverage examples
of doing with rather than for that you recommend?
Oh, we hunt for this all the time.
Lawn, like it's a mindset, but here's another great idea.
We got this from one of our hundred families that is in dinner table.
They're now in dinner table, but we studied them.
They own a hundred Burger Kings, amazing family, four generations in a row.
They said, we always treat our kids two years older than they are as they grow up.
Because when you give them more responsibility, they always rise to the occasion.
A seven-year-old can cook occasion. A seven-year-old
can cook dinner. A six-year-old could do laundry. Full. An eight-year-old can chop food and
manage the pet fully. A nine-year-old can do the whole trip. Family trip. Plan it all.
I was driving at 12 years old, not on the streets, but off-road to get ready Okay, like we should be treating our kids two years older and talking to them that way. So many
parents baby their kids and they keep them stuck. Yeah, I was gonna say, unfortunately,
probably usually the opposite two years younger. Parents don't realize they're doing all these
things for the kids that the kids could be doing on their own. When you're getting up,
you know how many parents come into dinner table and they're like that 30 minutes before doing all these things for the kids that the kids could be doing on their own. When you're getting up,
you know how many parents come into dinner table
and they're like,
that 30 minutes before school in the morning
is terrible for us.
So many reminders, so many arguments,
so many frustrations.
I'm exhausted by 9 a.m.
Well, one of our tools literally makes it
so the kids are literally doing everything in the morning,
starting at age five or four even.
They're doing every single thing and doing it right.
Not just mailing it in so you gotta fix all doing every single thing and doing it right. Not just mailing it in
so you got to fix all of it. They're doing it right. Or intentionally doing it wrong. So you
learn your lesson that you just need to do it. But I think you need to do everything again for them
until they're 15. So yeah, it's this is the thinking that is important. Treat them older
than they are. They always rise to the occasion.
Our job is to raise future adults, not more children.
Looking ahead, what do you see as some of the most important, we could say, financial
skills, but maybe value creation skills, and that's one area of value.
But I think going back to these three different areas of value
maybe would be an even better question.
Looking forward to the future for this generation that's coming up that is going to be inheriting
the world and that we're going to be counting on to hopefully bring humanity into a slightly
better state than it currently is.
What are some of these skills as you see it that are going to be crucial,
that we want to instill in our kids? You know, this is just subjective, but there's,
you know, there's high level things and then more intricate things. I mean, the high level thing is
the value creation mindset is the one of the greatest superpowers you can ever give your kid.
Because now they're going to go figure that answer out for themselves to create the biggest value, the most value for everyone around them for the rest of their
life. I mean, that's the superpower. But you know, with that, it's delayed gratification,
this idea of waiting for something greater in the future, compounding interest, it's
all abundance, mindset, self-reliance. Like these are high level things, character skills,
financial competencies. Now, I think the future, the truth of the matter is,
in probably 10 to 15 years, half the degrees people get in college will be obsolete,
and there will be millions and tens of millions of more jobs that we've never even thought of
right now. If you asked me this question six months ago, I would have said, AI prompt engineer.
I'm like, no, the AI is going to be figuring that out on their own. But there's all these different things like understand machine learning, you know, quantum field,
IT, technology, but a lot of different trades are going to be still critical for the future.
They might be some of the most powerful skills in the future. But I boil it down to this,
teach kids to learn how to learn. You've got to learn how to learn because information just comes faster
and you got to be able to weep through it.
It's critical thinking.
And I would say you have to learn how to enjoy learning
if you have high standards for yourself
and what you want to achieve in your life.
Just because being able to grit your teeth
and get through it is fine,
but that's only going to take you so far in my opinion.
That's correct.
And I think kids only learn through fun
and real life experience, which I mentioned before.
And so we need to make learning fun for our kids.
You know, we have this saying in our home,
when we talk about our values every day
with the kids at dinner,
it's not some miserable experience, it's awesome.
We now have a system and a culture in our home.
Our kids say it to each other.
They call it out, they cheer each other on.
We have this saying, until further notice,
celebrate everything with your kids.
It's such a critical thing.
Throwing fuel on what they love to do and what they're good at
is going to set them on fire to learn.
They need to fall in love with learning.
Our daughter read 80 books this summer,
and we did not push her to do that.
I'm jealous.
Yeah, me too. It was amazing.
Many of them were awesome fun gigs that she loved to do.
She gave us all these presentations on
Tuddle Twins and all these awesome books.
But my sons did a bunch of engineering stuff,
learned all about boats.
They were picking up wood at the lake.
They're making giant piles of wood every morning because they knew that was their
gig and we never told them to.
So this is the power of making things fun and mixing them with real life.
And I think the more we can do that with our kids, we'll just enjoy the experience.
Kids are a joy, man.
So many parents, like if you have kids right now and you got some pain points, screen time,
conflict over chores, behavior issues, they ask you for stuff, you're worried about entitlement,
and you just want the structure, literally click and find me.
I want to help you not for your money,
but because I want to solve your pain.
Like, I don't want you to feel that way,
because you only get 18 years with them.
93% of all the time we get with our kids is gone by 18.
And unfortunately, another common experience is they're almost gone before that. There's
a day before they're 18 when they no longer ask to do anything with you anymore. And that's
it. That's the end of that. And they will never ask again. And I've had this discussion
with a number of people who are older now, and this, in some cases,
very, very financially successful in their career
and prestige and everything.
But this is a common regret in discussions that I've had
is I should have just paid more attention to my family.
I should have done some of these things
that you're talking about,
because, and you had mentioned this earlier,
now I have all this money and I'm so cool
because I've done so many things, but I'm only as happier, as satisfied as my unhappiest
kid.
Yeah.
I mean, that's a painful reality.
And I know a lot of really rich people, man, they would give it all back for that fix with
a marriage, fix with a kid issue later in life.
You have to actually
believe that you, your family is your number one investment.
And if you're going to treat your family like an investment, you need to invest in them.
Kids are not an expense, they're an investment.
Just like employees are not an expense, they're an investment.
You've got to think of it that way.
And with kids, I mean, I guess the return, as I see it, if we want to look through the
lens of value that you shared is it's emotional and spiritual.
That's the real return.
If we're talking about why make this investment very selfishly, what's the ROI for me?
Well, that's what it is.
Aside from maybe contributing to society and we need people or everything collapses.
But again, coming back to what's in it for me personally.
There will come a time later in the kid's life,
well, they'll reach their hand back up for yours.
If you do this right, like you want a sweeter relationship
as they grow older and you're older than them,
you want that sweet coach turned into wise counsel,
turned into sage.
Like, you know, in fact, I'll say this,
this is controversial, okay?
So maybe clip this out,
but a lot of parents raise kids to be independent.
I think that's a mistake.
You do not want to raise kids to turn 18 and leave forever
and never come back for holidays, dinners, summers.
You want to be the first FaceTime
when something good or bad happens.
You want closeness.
Not just 18 is not the goodbye cutoff. Maybe it's where you close the bank of mom and dad. That's
a good idea. So there's no more of that weird attachment and entitlement. But what I want is
interdependence, not independence, interdependence. You want kids to have that's where the roots and
wings come from. Okay, you want kids to fly in the world, like just soar and succeed and make a huge dent and
create a lot of value.
But you also want them interdependent with you, where they're just tightly connected.
They want to be with you.
They want to connect.
They want to bring their kids around.
That's a sweet grandpa and grandma time.
So don't focus on independent.
My whole goal is to make you fully independent.
No, no, no.
My whole goal is to make you interdependent.
You're going to be a killer in this world.
You're going to be an incredible value creator, but we're also going to be tight.
And that's really what legacy is at the end of the day.
Right?
I heard a guy, a really old guy say this.
He goes, this is last year, we were sitting and he was a billionaire.
And he just goes, man, Scott, I'll tell you what,
you can raise your kids right.
And then you can have some fun as a grandpa,
spoiling them.
But if you spoil your kids, you're gonna,
I guarantee you, you're gonna raise your grandkids.
You're gonna be the parent to your grandkids.
He goes, it's one or the other.
There is no middle ground.
It's one or the other.
So pick it wisely, right?
I'm like, I'll do the first one.
Yeah. Yeah.
Because when he says race, he means race.
He doesn't mean the fun grandpa stuff where you just get to have your fun time.
And then once they get a little bit cranky or like, OK, I've had enough.
Back to the. That's right.
He means scoping.
He means, you know, zooming in and taking care of them
because there's a nightmare
with the entitled spoiled kids they raised that are victim mindset, anxious adults and craziness. Right? That's what happens. So, all right, I digress. I think we get the point. I think we just
want to help families all over the place. And just like you focus on your health, you focus on your
business, you focus on all these different quadrants of your life, you got to put your family right there at the
center because nobody at their deathbed cares that they like lost one more percent body
fat or made that extra million or may spend that extra time and work. They want the people
that love them. And they love right around their bed, holding their hand. That's all
they want. Everything they ever owned,
they would burn it all in a fire to have that.
With a bunch of shared positive memories, experiences, right?
Here's a thought to ask yourself.
If you could pass on one thing to your kids, what is it?
All your stuff, all your knowledge, or all your experiences? Pick one.
Like if you just thought about it from that money and stuff, your knowledge or your experiences, which one is it?
It's a powerful question at dinner to ask your family. I love dinner table combos. I got 200 of them that are just all killers like that.
But yeah, like it's a lot of people say some say knowledge,
no one says stuff. Everyone says most everyone says experience because that's where wisdom
wisdom comes from experience. Kids learn through story.
You could you could say though that I guess it depends how you're defining knowledge,
right? Because a lot of knowledge can come from experience too. And wisdom is just a
form of knowledge. So that's my thing is like, I think knowledge is the high that's the highest leverage one there because it incorporates experience at least
to some degree. Well, this we're coming up on time. So I want to be respectful of that.
And again, this is a great discussion. I'm going to sign up myself. I'm inspired. And,
you know, it's actually funny that this is that we're having this conversation now because I read books on a
rotation of genres depending on what is relevant to me now. I like to treat my reading and my study
in a just-in-time manner rather than just in case. What is in front of me right now and
what do I want to learn about? What do I need to learn about? What am I trying to do?
And so parenting is in there and it's not... I read a lot more about other things than parenting, but it
is in there. And I do come back to it. And I was thinking recently that it just, I don't,
I feel like I'm not doing a good enough job. That's just being honest. I don't think I'm
doing a bad job by maybe some standards, but so this is, this is serendipitous for me personally.
So I'm sold.
I'll be signing up.
Awesome, dude.
Well, love to have you in there.
And yeah, I think most parents feel that.
I feel that.
And I've been learning this and doing this
with millions of kids for 15 years.
I feel the same way.
I think a lot of it is parents don't.
All right, in your business,
you have metrics, you have EBITDA, you have revenue goals, you have CAC, you know, cost
per acquisition, you know how to track success. I don't think any parent, number one, no parent
has ever been given a roadmap to follow. You just get a kid and you leave the hospital
or your or your bedroom pool or whatever, your hot tub with a kid and And you just, there's no roadmap, there's no playbook,
and there's no success metric.
And I think that's a difficult thing
because parents always feel like they're not doing enough.
They always feel like too busy, not enough time,
we didn't get to everything on the list,
they're in the gap, not the game,
and they don't have those metrics.
And I think that's why our operating system
for dinner table is so good.
Because our whole goal is to be like, Hey, there's little things to track.
You don't have to do everything.
We want tiny movements in the right direction that we can celebrate together.
And then that creates compounding, right?
Consistency compounds.
You just need to know which levers to work on.
And then the needle moves big time.
And that's really what I want for
parents is like, there's no amount of work you can do for your kids or all these things
that are going to make you feel, oh man, we nailed it, right? You're not going to know
for 30 years. So our whole goal is to help parents get that confidence, like get that
peace. Like I know my kids are going to go to the world unshaken, they're going to crush,
we're going to be tight. I'm going to have peace and it's going to be joyful, more margin.
That's the kind of stuff parents need, man, because my highest respect goes towards parents.
Highest respect.
I've met all these amazing people, business people, billionaires, founders, all these
incredible people.
But parenting is that one thing where I go, man, hats off.
You're carrying the torch.
We need more humans. We need a billion more. That's right. We need holistically value creating
humans that enjoy life and they carry the mantle forward of our universe. That's an
important mantle to hold as a parent. So I've seen so much go on with families. It's a thankless
thing. You're planting seeds for the long haul. You don't seen so much go on with families. Like, it's a thankless thing, right?
You're planting seeds for the long haul. You don't know how it's going to go. And you want to make
sure that like, you get it right. Because it's such a critical thing. But I'll say this, parenting is
good. It's hard in all the right ways. So anyone listening to this, it's like, I don't have kids,
I can't bring kids in this world. Forget this. Like, it's a terrible place. No, no, no. Being a
parent is like so good for you in all the ways that you wanted to become. Forget this. It's a terrible place. No, no, no. Being a parent is
so good for you in all the ways that you want to become an awesome person. It's the best way to
learn sacrifice and selflessness and care and the character traits, responsibility. It lifts you up.
Resilience, not just making excuses.
That's exactly right. It wakes people up. It's such an incredible opportunity.
So just like sleeping eight hours is not easy.
You got to plan it, eating the right nutrition, like staying healthy.
You got to work.
It's hard.
It's a struggle.
I was just going to say it's a healthy struggle.
It's a healthy struggle.
Parenting is one of the greatest healthy struggles in the world.
And so that's why my highest respect is for family people.
So there you go, man.
That's my hobby turned business.
And again, dinner table dot com, right?
Is where everybody that that's where people should go.
Is there is there anything else you want people to know about?
Are you going to get me some links? Those go in the show notes.
Yeah. So Scott dot dinner table dot com.
We'll send people there.
I'll give you a link in the show notes to give to
everyone. They can follow me on social. I'm Scott Donald. We give content every day for families.
Our book is Value Creation Kit. It's a Wall Street Journal bestseller. We got another one coming out
soon. I'm working on. Maybe I'll tell you off screen what it's about. But yeah, those are the
main places people can find us. And then last thing too, is we have corporate where we're launching our school and business
corporate training program. So all of employees of businesses get to go through our coaching
for cheap. It's I think it was like a benefit, but it also works on their family. It works
on their personal finance. And then we coach them through their actual jobs, how to create more and more value in their work.
So we call it the value creation team.
And it really is like, it's the best coaching I've seen in terms of getting people in unique
ability, getting them to go through the next healthy struggle that adds the highest value
to the business, driving on all three buckets of material, emotional and spiritual culture
build.
So it's like half family, half value creation at work.
And I think a lot of employers have loved that
because they really wanna let their teams know like,
hey, you're my goal, right?
Like I've had a thousand employees, they're my focus.
If I serve them well, train them well, support them,
give them everything they need, they go crush it
for our company and our clients and they change the world. And so that's what we put together
to help businesses. So anybody that's listening that wants to be a learn more about that, they
can just message us and we'll have a call. Love it. Well, thanks again for taking the time,
Scott. Great talk. Thanks, Mike. This was awesome. Have you ever wondered what strength training
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more muscle and strength. Well I hope you liked this episode. I hope you found it
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