539 – He makes Success academic: Tom interviews Steven Greene

Episode 539 – Steven Greene
[00:00:09] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode five hundred and thirty nine of Screw the Commute podcast, we're talking to Steven Greene today. He's the podcast host of Make the Grade, and he's got lots of stuff to do with education. And you've heard me ragging on education, so I'm sure we'll have a good, robust conversation about what's going on in that field. And he's got some great courses we'll tell you about. So I hope you didn't miss episode 538, that was Sandy Joy Weston. What a fireball lady she was. She's a fitness expert, but she was the first female trainer for the Philadelphia Flyers, and she was on TV as the fitness guru up and I think Philadelphia for a long time. So she was a lot of fun. So any time you want to get to a back episode, go to screwthecommute.com and then slash and then the episode number, which was 538. Now I'd love to send you big checks or gold bullion or silver or whatever you want for my affiliate program. So if you're interested in making commissions, you can make sometimes in excess of five thousand bucks for one referral and lots of stuff anywhere down to 13 or 14 bucks. But just email me at Tom@screwthecommute.com. If you want details on that and we'll we'll talk to you about how best to approach people and what products are to make most sense for you to promote to your group.

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[00:03:13] We've got three people that are very inspiring going through it already, and I'm going to roll it out really big after I approved the concept and get them hired and in their own business. So check that out at IMTCVA.org/disabilities. Check out the Go Fund Me campaign and throw in anything you can afford. And if you're really flush with cash, you can sponsor a person yourself and boy, what a what a thing that you could do to be really proud of yourself for the rest of your life changing these people's lives. So, so check that out and you can see their videos. The update videos at the Go Fund Me account at that page at my school.

[00:03:56] All right, let's get to the main event. Dr. Steven Greene is a career educator and entrepreneur. He specializes in helping families and children to navigate their academic lives, and he supports entrepreneurs in their journey on the highway of success. He's the best selling author of the book Maximum Education. And he likes to bicycle. Yeah, that's really crazy when I heard that about him. He was, I think, a competitive bicycle guy, and he loves tennis and cooking, and he loves being around friendly and people and cats. So, Steven, are you ready to screw? The commute?

[00:04:34] I'm ready to rumble. Ready to rumble.

[00:04:37] Yeah. How are you doing, man?

[00:04:39] I'm awesome, man. I was. I was furiously taking notes to get involved in all the stuff you got going on so well.

[00:04:45] I have a great, great time on your podcast called Make the Grade. And was that one of the cats squeal in there?

[00:04:52] When I was, I phone. I forgot to mute. This is live. It's raw. We're just doing it now. You, you were. I mean, this is going to be a love fest for the first two minutes. Great guests. A great interview is really fun and I was excited to sort of reciprocate and come back on yours and and see what we can expand on. So the thing I like about you is, is you're such a give, you're giving right? I mean, you're make a living, but you're doing it by helping people. And that's what I've prided myself on as well for for a long time.

[00:05:23] Yeah, that's that's the only way to go, you know, help. I was given the strength to help others. And hey, you can make a good living at it and still help a lot, a lot of people. So. So I'm thrilled that we're on the same page there and I have a little advantage over you and that you had to shovel snow this morning. And I did.

[00:05:42] Yeah, I did. If we want how interesting that is to anybody else, but

[00:05:47] I was doing late for the you. That's true.

[00:05:50] I was ready and I was, you know, I was, Oh my gosh, I could change or not. But no voice only it doesn't really matter. But I got a bad hair day. I was wearing a hat while I was shoveling, and I don't get a lot of snow here, but we do get intensity very heavy. And where are you? I'm in Philadelphia. Oh yes, that's that lady I was. Yeah, the first female trainer for the Flyers.

[00:06:11] Yeah, yeah. But we don't get a ton of snow, even though we're in the Northeast. But when we do, it tends to be very wet. So it's hard, it's heavy. It's like heart attack, snow. They call because you're heavy, you know, you can't. It's hard to lift and throw and whatever. So well, who

[00:06:25] Cares if you sell digital stuff like us and products and teach people we don't have, you can let it go above your roof as long as you had no food.

[00:06:34] And that's true. That's true when you're sitting in your in your corporate headquarters all day. But my wife had to go to work, so I had to dig her out from the driveway.

[00:06:41] See, there's no there's the problem. You had a wife, so I haven't. I have avoided that situation

[00:06:48] For a long time, so. So tell everybody what you're doing now.

[00:06:54] Well, as the bio, I think concisely puts it, I have been an educator and an entrepreneur for almost 30 years. I cut my teeth and the kind of education system I have a teaching certificate and a teaching degree. I went to grad school, got a doctorate in education. But really, what it's distilled down to is I have a business that does two things and helps to verticals one or families with kids in school, middle school, high school, college and the other division helps entrepreneurs. So I encapsulate it with what you were right at the end is is helping them accelerate their journey on the path to success, which I don't define for anybody. I don't I don't know what somebody else's measure of success is. It's financial for some. It's just getting through college. For others, it's whatever, whatever it is for them. But to me, it's about providing them with tools, with strategies, in some case with mindset. Sometimes it's a little bit of the details how to do stuff. So it's kind of coaching, but I look at it more as kind of mentoring. I think of those two words as different.

[00:07:57] So you're not forcing them into this four year college debacle thing, right?

[00:08:02] No, no. I know I'm not forcing into anything, but I think what I what I try to foster is to give people as many options as they can. And to give people the tools to exercise those options. So, you know, we I live in an area, and I think many people do where the expectation is a child grows up a high school, they go to college, they get a job. It's kind of the American dream sort of thing. And I'm not opposed to that at all. But what I try to do is say, listen, in addition to all that, consider an entrepreneurial path or consider a vocational path or consider something that you can do for yourself. Take advantage of your own skills as opposed to what other people are just going to teach you. And let me be clear, I'm not Antion College. I just think that people should understand that there's plenty of other things out there. They can do that they may enjoy just as well, or maybe even more and give them a lot more independence personally and maybe financially as well. So.

[00:09:11] Well, that's beautifully balanced, you know, because I heard you say the American dream, I call it the American Brainwash because I don't I see I was kind of using it in the 50s,

[00:09:23] Sort of. Well, I know you have to kind of go to the middle of the road, but I don't because I got to have a motion for taking the bullet there.

[00:09:31] Yeah. Yeah. And they're turning out a bunch of wusses that can't do anything, can't cry at the drop of a hat and got weird ideas and an enormous debt. I mean, I have a webinar about all the crazy classes they're doing. I mean, there is literally classes like underwater basket weaving and, you know, there's a big demand for that skill, you know, so. So how do you defend that? What's going on, though? It was different than when we grew up and went to college and actually got someone here.

[00:10:05] Let me tell you an interesting story. I don't know if you know this or not caught me off if I'm gone too long on it. Do you know why or where this whole reading, writing and arithmetic thing came from?

[00:10:13] No, let no. I have good skills in all those areas, and I'm glad I do.

[00:10:18] Let me tell you where this came from. It goes back to the company town concept. Ok, so let's sort of flash back to like the the robber baron like, 1880s, 1870s 1890s. And you got people like Rockefeller who've got these big oil companies or coal mines, and they need people to work in them. So what they did was they built towns around the factories, hence the company town. And people would basically work in the factory. They would get paid and they would have to shop at the company store. So essentially, the money was never really leaving this insular community. Well, what they also do is set up schools and they taught them just enough to be good workers in the factories. So they needed to read so they could read instructions the factory needed to write and needed to do a little bit of math to get by. So this whole system, founded by Rockefeller and Carnegie and Schwab and these like big, you know, super millionaire like antitrust, eventually kind of people. This is where this all came from, and it became ingrained in the kind of ethos of the curriculum of schools. Sure, everybody should need to read or write or do math and things like this, and it's never really

[00:11:33] Apparently not in Oregon, because the freakin stupid, you know, highly educated idiot governor came out and said, OK, you don't have to know math or pass the test in reading or arithmetic to get your high school diploma. How do you defend that?

[00:11:55] I wouldn't.

[00:11:56] Yeah, I don't think a guy like you would.

[00:11:59] Look. There's always. I let me let me give a perspective. The our society, and I think you're going to agree with on this is is kind of built around the center like it's built around the average, the median kind of rate. And you've got outliers on either end. So you've got kind of the people that are sleepwalking through their lives, right? They wake up, they go to a job, they come home, they have dinner with their family and they go to sleep and they do it again for forty six years. And then they get the gold watch kind of the leave it to beaver. What the heck was it, guys? Leave it to beaver. And of course, that's stereotypical and it's dated.

[00:12:40] Ward Ward was his name.

[00:12:41] Ward Thank you, Ward Cleaver. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, but

[00:12:46] It's like, I can't help it. The old saying is the dirtiest thing ever said on TV was from that show. It was probably

[00:12:58] Ward.

[00:12:58] You're being a little too hard on the beaver. All right, back to news story.

[00:13:07] All right, so but anyway. Oh boy. So here's my point is and I'm not not I'm not knocking any of this because I'm about helping people and about giving people options and opportunities. But there are a lot of people that are very happy with that. So I guess if you can make it through life without having what would otherwise be considered requisite baseline skills? Who am I? Who is anybody else to scold you for that right? And there's always the example the guy who never graduated from fifth grade, that's a trillionaire. And then there's the guy who's got four PhDs who's in the food line. But I think that to answer your question, I think the way it gets defensible. Not that I'm defending it personally, is that we're training people to be in the middle. We're training the term in the 50s. I hate referring back to it. It was a company person, company man, and that's what they wanted. They wanted people that fell in line. They kind of did what was expected of them. They were happy doing it. They had a comfortable enough life and they were afraid of communists. So flash forward 50 years or 70 years, and we still have that kind of in the background. But there's so much more individuality that it kind of gets swallowed up. You don't. I don't think you notice it quite as much, but I think what you and I share is is a vision that there can be a lot more than that, right? There's a whole world of being able to create your own products, your own services create your own little universe where you can have a community of people that are interested in what you have to say or what you have to offer. You can support them and you can help them to become successful. That's, I think, without putting words in your mouth the theme of screw your commute or at least one of them. Yeah, and

[00:14:54] It's certainly Steve, and I'm all for that, and I'm all for the person that just wants to, you know, kind of go through life on an even keel and just get by what I'm vehemently against. And you know, I have a TV show at antifraud antispam TV show and development is I believe that the administrators of colleges and universities would be in jail if they weren't universities and colleges. Now you can't. I get where you're coming from, you can't go along with that. But but I can, because the least not publicly. Yeah, yeah. The outrageous fees, the increase in fees compared to the cost of living is like, I don't know, eight times the things, the tricks they're pulling with textbooks so that you can't resell them or buy them used unless you have some really insider connections to know where to find them. So they circumvented all these government regulations so they would be in jail, you know, they would be in jail. And then plus they all teach people to be idiots, you know, and to protest and never do learn anything about how getting by in life. So that's that's my my push on it. But but thank God, I got somebody on here that at least sees both sides of the coin. And you can you know this stuff you were just talking about, you actually have courses that help people actually get skills right? Tell them about it.

[00:16:26] I have within my business make the grade what I call my my, my entrepreneur academy, and it's an auspicious sort of title, but that's what I like to call it. And I basically like to teach people skills that they can just put to use right away, creating their own content.

[00:16:44] Wait, what kind of crazy ideas that.

[00:16:48] I don't know. Just I woke up one day in the middle of the night or one night in the middle of the night, and it's like, let me teach people things they can actually utilize.

[00:16:55] You're a genius. Geez.

[00:16:57] Thank you, Tom. So, for example, so I have a workshop called Seven Steps to Creating Your Own Course, and it is exactly what the title sounds like. It's a seven step process, and in the end of it, they're going to end up either with the course or an e-book and an audio book, whatever they want that they can then market. And the purpose of marketing is very simple. They can either monetize it and or use it to build up their stature as a subject matter expert and or use it just to build brand or all three. And depending on how I run it and I can do it one on one as well, but it's usually about a four week process twice a week for four weeks. And then what I do is I say, Look, let's amplify that. Then I was doing six and six. I had a mastermind who would make six of these in six months. So what it spawned is a community of people who've created marketable products and mind you somebody, they're selling for $10. These are not necessarily big ticket things, but it doesn't matter because it gives them an entrepreneurial spirit and it gives them a track record of some level of success. And then once people have success, they typically want more and they want to grow and they want to learn more and they want to invest in themselves.

[00:18:05] I have another workshop called Take Your Business Virtual, which, contrary to popular belief, was not founded in the middle of the COVID shutdown. I've actually been teaching about four years, but it blew up and, you know, in terms of popularity then. But but it really what it addresses is the differences in how you have to do business and run a business in a virtual space compared to the conventional face to face sort of circumstance. They overlap. They're not mutually exclusive. But in the virtual space, there are some significant differences that I've been in that space for a long time, so I was able to convey to people. But these are just two of the things that I do for the entrepreneurs on the student side, it's how to navigate the academic world. But what I try to do is intertwine life, life skills, time management, information management, communication skills, setting goals, having daily success plan, which I don't care if you're in fifth grade, 8th grade, 12th grade college or senior suite C-suite person. They're all valuable. So that's really what my book is all about. Are those things? No, I mean, this is my mission. Yeah. Let me ask you,

[00:19:17] You've been doing this a long time and you may not be able to to answer candidly, right? Because I'm, you know, I've just so ragging on this whole arena. But how have the kids changed over the years? You've been doing it?

[00:19:35] Oh, boy,

[00:19:37] I think and I know you're not supposed to say things like worthless slugs.

[00:19:41] No, no, I don't think it's that extreme, I think. Well, listen, I think the biggest change when I started my business. Ok, let me let me put this in perspective. When I started my business, they didn't have websites, OK? I mean, at least not everybody did like like big business like Microsoft had. Right, right, right. There weren't cell phones. There weren't tablets. There weren't Chromebooks. There was barely even the internet. So there was a much greater dependency on actually learning, knowing how to do research, knowing how to communicate, using a telephone, speaking to people, going to the

[00:20:18] Library, reading

[00:20:20] Your library. What's that? Yeah, I'm

[00:20:24] Surprised they're still around. I was very surprised. Libraries are seemed to be thriving. I guess a lot of

[00:20:31] People go there. You know, it's interesting. They the ones that are thriving are the ones that have morphed with the times and it become tech centers. We have a library in my township that's actually very they got a huge grant from the county in the state to bring all these computers in, and they do a lot of classes on teaching you how to use them. So the ones that become sort of I.T. ish, not it like from the support stand side, but from the teaching stand side have actually done quite well. But but I think the environment that students and people have to navigate has changed so radically in 30 years. And the biggest one is the is the present availability and expansion of the internet. Now you could also throw into that the whole social media piece, which I'm not going to trash social media, but I think the presence of it has certainly affected how people interact. I think that's a fair statement most people aren't going to disagree with. So, you know, I don't have any students like, let's say I have a student supposed to see it 11 o'clock today in the past. Well, no, no. What I'm saying is in the past, let's just say I was supposed to see somebody 11 o'clock and they got sick or they were running late. They would call me, Hey, OK, now I haven't gotten a phone call from a student in six years. Right? They text me. They chat on Instagram. I'm not on Snapchat. They're probably would do it there. So this is how it's really more so. The biggest change I've seen in the education side is is the utter reliance on technology, not just to teach and not just as a resource for information, but also as a way that a lot of students submit their work.

[00:22:10] But their people are promoting this. But what happens when your battery is dead? Are you just you just now a just a, you know, skin and bones and you just can't do anything for yourself? That's that's my problem with it.

[00:22:26] Oh, I don't, you know, that would be the sort of the easy answer. I mean, look, I look at it this way, I kind this is the analogy I would make like, let's say you were hungry and you didn't have any electricity. You got to kind of figure out where to eat, right? So instead of cooking the food, maybe you got to do something else. So in the biggest picture, we all have a survival ability, but it's not the greatest metaphor for trying to use technology. I just think that call what you may a Generation X. I don't know where all these terms begin and end. But I think the biggest change is just the ability for people to communicate clearly and to be able to interact effectively with other people. It doesn't mean nobody can. It's not. This is not an absolute. But I think I think that's what's been the biggest casualty of this kind of expansion of the whole tech world. Now that said, there's pluses to it too, right? I mean, we're sitting here. We're, I don't know, 300 miles apart on that far. It is to Baltimore, you know, we're able to have a basically face to face conversation that anybody in the world can eventually listen to. We can both sell products remotely without any intervention of us actually have to do it passively. So we you kind of can't knock it on and take advantage of at the same time, completely, right? So I appreciate the values the technology affords. I just wish sometimes that the communication piece of it wasn't so affected or people didn't rely on it quite as much.

[00:23:59] Well, yeah, because I mean, I have some kids that I on Sundays. I give them some work at the house here and. You know, I go pick them up because, you know, they're they're 14, 15, 16 years old. And so I pick them up and on the way. I always talk to kids and I say, Hey, you know, we're going to be getting leaves around the pool. The deep end is nine feet. How many yards is that? They can't tell me. They say how many inches in a foot 10?

[00:24:36] I mean, this is close. Yeah. Didn't say one.

[00:24:39] Yeah. Maybe he was thinking metric. Maybe? I don't know. Maybe thought as to how much centimeters, but

[00:24:43] That's the thing they use in Europe.

[00:24:45] To me, that is that's child abuse to me because I kid doesn't know the basics of life. I mean, you know, it just drives me crazy. And I was talking to I had a millennial expert on here and she's saying, Well, you know, I'm talking about being on time and how that's appreciated by older people. And she said, Well, you know, time to us is just that's a variable thing. As long as we get the job done, I said, Well, what about a store owner that puts a sign on their door that says, OK, we're open at 10. If the people working here kind of feel like coming in, you know? Yeah, right, right, right. Yeah. So and I got to tell you any young people listening, you do a little bit and you'll pass up all you're more on friends and get great things from guys like me who will promote the heck out of you. All right. So so it doesn't take much nowadays to really stand out and be a, you know, because like I said, the people with the money are usually older and they appreciate the those kinds of things, but it just drives me crazy.

[00:25:56] So thank you. I couldn't tell. I couldn't

[00:25:59] Tell. No, I know. You know, it's this

[00:26:02] Doesn't take much to get you fired up like that. That's definitely one of the things that pushes your buttons.

[00:26:07] Absolutely.

[00:26:08] Because you know what? I think I think you're not talking about as much, but but I know you are also a solutions provider, right? And I think I look at myself, so we both see issues. We both see problems. We might see different ones, but we certainly see some that are overlapping. And I think one of the things I've spent a long time doing years of my career doing is try to be a solutions provider for people. But but at that point, I could have the greatest courses in the world. I could be the best educated in the world. It doesn't necessarily mean people are going to listen. And even if they do, I have. Has this ever happened to you? Somebody buys your class comes to the first lesson and never shows up the next night or buys an online Class II video based self-paced classes. They pay the money for it. Ninety seven bucks or whatever, seventy nine bucks, and then they never even activate the class.

[00:26:56] Yeah, there's plenty of shelf help people you used to call them when they would buy a physical course and it never would get off the shelf, you know? So, so yeah, we we see that. But but just think where you would be selling your great courses and they are great if the people couldn't read, read them or see.

[00:27:17] Well, I do have some that are video when I'm speaking. So hopefully at least if they can understand, well, yeah, I get your

[00:27:22] Point, though. Yeah, except you probably don't talk in emojis. So, yeah, so yeah, I'm pretty fired up about that. But but the book Maximum Education, where do they find that?

[00:27:38] And is it absolute education there? It's sold on Amazon, which I know you're a fan of my physical or digital or both.

[00:27:46] Both both are a physical copy you can go to. You can go to Amazon and search maximum education where you can go maximumeducation.net. And it'll take you basically to a page that says how great the book is and it gives a link to the Amazon site. There is a digital version, there's a Kindle version, it's priced to sell. It's only $10. Frankly, I don't make much on it. It's not about making money, it's about getting the info out. But that's how people could get it.

[00:28:13] You're going to come out with the audio version pretty soon.

[00:28:16] There is a video based there's actually four video courses based on the four major premises of the book Time Management, Information Management Really Action Plan.

[00:28:27] I manage restless imagination management. What's the other one?

[00:28:32] Daily Action Plan,

[00:28:33] Daily Action Plan

[00:28:35] And Success Principles

[00:28:37] Success Principles. So give us an example of just the one thing out of each of those sections.

[00:28:44] The key to time management is prioritization. Ask yourself this question, I got an hour to get stuff done. What is the most important thing I need to accomplish? And then do it. Because it's a right out of thinking grow rich.

[00:28:59] I have a time management tip. Go ahead. See if you can figure out what it is. Half equals empty.

[00:29:08] F equals empty, yeah, so don't do it if you don't do it all the way, it's as if you didn't

[00:29:13] Know the good thought. Good try. No, if my gas tank hits half, I see that as empty. Nah. Because if you wait till it's almost empty and then you're desperate to get somewhere on time and you got to stop for gas, you're screwed. So, yeah, so happy.

[00:29:32] I like both of analyses, actually. Yeah. So that's time information management. I that's a little more deep, but I would say find there are many systems I have like eight in the book, find one that works for you. Whether it's a flowcharts concept, maps outlines to do lists there's or some hybridization of all of them get one that works and stick with it, don't keep changing them. And secondly, you don't. You don't need to have it for places I know people have to do list on the computer, on their phone, in a notebook, on a pad, in a diary and tattooed to their ankle. No, I need one. Whatever works best for you, that's a time management thing to daily action plan is is really just self-discipline is do what gets you the most progress. It's it overlaps. They all overlap. But any given day we got plenty of things to do. And you know, kids would say to me, I don't know how I got at eighty or seventy five on this biology test. I studied for seven hours. Well, break down what you did in the seven hours.

[00:30:42] Well, I read it from my nose 17 times. Well, you only really need to do it once if you understood them, you know, or the or my entrepreneur people who you know, I've spent four hours in the office today. Awesome. What'd you do? Tell me about your time diary. Well, I check my email every 15 minutes because, you know, I might get an important email coming in. Where they read the same memo, they're going to send 11 times before they send it. So and then the general success tips is really is is basically a list of 10. And I borrowed from other people, you know, like Stephen Covey's of the world, you know, thank you. You know, things that are just universally good advice. I don't take credit for most of them, but the key is really an awareness of what your strengths are and awareness what your weaknesses are. Play to your own strengths. Find ways to shield your weaknesses, whether it's delegation, whether it's just, you know, workarounds, and that's really what it kind of boils down to.

[00:31:38] Ok, so what's your daily action plan, so what's what's a typical day look like for you?

[00:31:44] Well, I like to exercise, so I wake up. I usually do some kind of exercising, I get up or I'm up like five, so I'm usually I kind of check my carry over from the day before. I'm usually exercising like five 30 to about seven plus or minus. I spend between seven and lunch working on my entrepreneur side. And I either I'm working directly with people or developing coursework, and that can mean writing a book when I say coursework. I use that generically to include creating videos, creating social posts, creating any sort of marketable product, things like that. And then after lunch, basically, I'm on the academic side, which is managing whatever my schedule is that day. Yesterday, I had eight kids and three different classes I taught, so that's going to vary a little bit more. But in my world, my afternoons are much more structured. My mornings are the ones where I can flounder if I don't keep on track.

[00:32:41] So do you do any kind of meditation or anything?

[00:32:45] Yeah, but I'm not that consistent, I probably should be more so. I'm not real high.

[00:32:49] I'm doing all the time. I just I don't really get it myself. I'm a self-starter no matter what.

[00:32:54] You know what I find like, like I get I got like an exercise bike and these bikes I find to me, that's kind of meditative. I don't know. I don't I don't listen to music. I kind of just getting a little zone because I'm trying to like, you know, ride 35, 40, 50 minutes. And sometimes it's like, I feel like getting off after five. But you know, so that's sort of I know it's not meditation, like sitting there with your legs folded and you know all that, but to me, it kind of has the same effect. And I like to swim to swimming. I find, is you because there's nothing you can do. All I can do is stare at the bottom of the pool anyway. So I find things like that walking. I like actively kind of meditate if that is an oxymoron, but kind of how I'm able to do it.

[00:33:36] Let's see. I've got that bicycle thing you just mentioned down more efficiently. So if I'm supposed to get on for fifty five minutes and I want to get off after two, I just don't get on

[00:33:48] Stage for two minutes. There you go. Yeah, you're right and you save two minutes here, life.

[00:33:52] And maybe when we have you on again, we'll tell you you were competitive bicyclist.

[00:33:57] I was for about, well, I still ride, but about eight, 10 years I was pretty hardcore.

[00:34:03] Wow. Wow, wow.

[00:34:05] So you know the funny thing the whole time I was racing. I never fell. Skated a few times, got bumps, you know, handlebars, bumped wheels, bump never fell once, and that's your biggest fear when you're riding that fast. Twenty twenty six miles an hour. I stopped doing that. I go out like this casual ride with like my wife and some of her friends along this little trail through Valley Forge Park, which is beautiful. Hit a stone and roll down a hill.

[00:34:33] Well, at least somebody didn't jump up in front of you and cause a no crash. Do you see that on TV?

[00:34:39] Yeah, it's nasty what happens anymore, but

[00:34:43] So tell everybody how they get a hold of you and make the grade that they could glean.

[00:34:50] Yeah, there's there's a ton of stuff on my website. I am trying to kind of catalog it, so everything is in one place, but it's makethegrade.net. There's all kinds of ways to get a hold of me there. Get on to list, get freebies. Sign up! Do you want to be on my podcast if you're podcast worthy like Tom was, and that's that. I'm a kind of direct guy. I don't. I mean, I got an email list. I've got all that stuff. But if you have a question for me, I make it pretty accessible. You know, I say, look, set up a time. I got links on there to set up meetings with me. Let's set up a meeting or a Zoom. And, you know, let's talk business. You know, why go back and forth for three weeks on email? We can accomplish the same thing in ten minutes in a conversation.

[00:35:40] That's time management and info management. There you can put together daily action. Yeah, well, but it's true, though, because especially if you if you work the social networks like LinkedIn, right? It's it's just whole like dating thing. It's like, you know, hi, how are you doing? Loved your profile. Oh, thanks. You know, I like yours, too. Hey, you know, I saw that you used to work for somebody. So, oh yeah, I did. And all you really want to do is see if there's some collaborative effort the two of you can have. But you spend four weeks trying to, you know, and it's like the big ass like, you know, hey, can we set up a meeting like, Oh my God.

[00:36:14] Right?

[00:36:15] It's like, it's like my fear of rejection. And it was in high school. I wanted to have a meeting. Somebody said no, and I've been traumatized ever since. Well, but

[00:36:26] The two types of people that would come to you, though, is maybe a parent or a child. You know, an older

[00:36:32] Man with a kid in middle school or high school. I have stuff for younger kids, but that's really my sweet spot for an entrepreneur, right? We're a very small business, maybe like a two three partner business. I'm not, you know, I'm not set up for like a corporation.

[00:36:45] I don't big business people don't like me. Yes. So but this is great. Great, Steven. So thank you. You got to run. So yeah. Thanks so much for coming on. I love giving you a hard time about the higher education non-system.

[00:37:02] Well, you're not wrong. You're not wrong.

[00:37:05] Yeah, it's just I go, Yeah, you got to. I know.

[00:37:07] You know what?

[00:37:08] The argue with you or something. You got to go through the motions.

[00:37:11] This could be our next thing. Here's the here's the counterargument from some people. Show me a better system, right? Like, like like I mean, probably I probably shouldn't end our discussion with that kind of comment. But that's the comment you get from people is OK. It's not so great. It's like the sat, right? Is there anybody in the right mind in the universe is going to tell you? The SAT has any direct bearing on how well somebody is going to do in college or act. Nobody, right? But yet the thing's been around since the GI Bill and it's not going anywhere, even with all the COVID stuff going on and test optional all blah blah. So it's like, and that's always the counterargument. Yeah, it's not perfect, but where we have better.

[00:37:50] IMTCVA.org.

[00:37:54] Yeah, it makethegrade.net.

[00:37:58] All right. Very good, dawg.

[00:37:59] This was great. Tom, thank you very much for having me and people. I'd love to get a hold of you or get a hold of me. Let's talk shop. Let's see how we can help each other.

[00:38:07] There we go. All right, everybody, we'll catch in the next episode. See you later.

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