Are you ready to redefine the journey of parenting? Nathaniel A. Turner (AKA Nate), a globally recognized Human Propulsion Engineer, College and Career Readiness Strategist, and TED speaker, is here to challenge conventional parenting wisdom. We embark on a thought-provoking dialogue, dissecting the concept of individual transformation as a tool to bring about systemic changes.
👉Learn more about Nate's Work and get his books here
❤️🔥Become a Founding Member of the Raising Wild Hearts Membership here ❤️🔥
If you feel inspired please consider sharing this episode with a friend, writing a 5⭐️ review or becoming a Raising Wild Hearts Member here!
Are you ready to redefine the journey of parenting? Nathaniel A. Turner (AKA Nate), a globally recognized Human Propulsion Engineer, College and Career Readiness Strategist, and TED speaker, is here to challenge conventional parenting wisdom. We embark on a thought-provoking dialogue, dissecting the concept of individual transformation as a tool to bring about systemic changes.
👉Learn more about Nate's Work and get his books here
❤️🔥Become a Founding Member of the Raising Wild Hearts Membership here ❤️🔥
If you feel inspired please consider sharing this episode with a friend, writing a 5⭐️ review or becoming a Raising Wild Hearts Member here!
The people that we remember, the people who changed the world, the people who we read about in history. We don't follow them as much because of what school they went to. We don't follow them as much about what. We follow them because they were a master in something. They were enlightening and they helped to enlighten us.
Speaker 2:Welcome, revolutionary Mama, to the Raising Wild Hearts podcast. I'm Ryan Watkin, educator, mom of three, rebel at Heart and Passionate Soul on a Mission to empower and inspire you.
Speaker 2:Here we'll explore psychology, spirituality, parenthood and the intersection where they all come together. We'll discover how challenges can be fertile soil for growth and that even in the messy middle of motherhood, we can find magic in the mundane. Join me on my own personal journey as I talk to experts and share resources on education, creativity, self-care, family, culture and more. I believe we can change the world by starting at home, in our own minds and hearts, and that when we do, we'll be passing down the most important legacy there is Healing, and so it is. Welcome back to the Raising Wild Hearts podcast. So today I'm joined by someone named Nate, which is also my husband's name, but I'm not joined by my husband it's another Nate. So, yeah, that was really exciting to be joined by another Nate. His name is also Nathaniel, but he goes by Nate. I will put his website in the show notes so you guys can learn more about his work.
Speaker 2:We had an epic conversation when his wife was pregnant with their son. He sent off to Harvard to get a college application and to figure out what Harvard wanted, and they him and his wife raised their son around these metrics and I was like what? I was super mind blown by it and he mentions it in the podcast. It wasn't something that he had told his son, it wasn't something that was like, hey, we're raising you to go to Harvard. They just kind of kept these guideposts, these like this compass that they used when raising him and when making decisions about his education and his life and the different things that he would be exposed to. So it was really, really cool to hear that perspective and I even say in the interview that I you know I tend to go against academic rigor, I tend to not put value on academics, and this conversation really opened my eyes to. You know, we don't have to completely shut out academics at all. You know I've dabbled in this kind of unschooling realm and obviously, as you know, we home educate, so we have quite a bit of flexibility here in the state of Florida and I don't necessarily believe in putting my children in boxes, and you all know that. You've heard me say like there aren't two boxes, there aren't three boxes, and this systematic change is something I talk about a lot, and Nate argues eloquently that it's not systematic change that needs to happen, that it's change on the individual level, because the individuals are the ones creating the systems, and I loved that point of view. So I'm really, really excited for you guys to hear this conversation.
Speaker 2:As always, I've got some more amazing conversations in the works and, yeah, reach out, let me know what your biggest take-aways are. I'm at raising wild hearts on Instagram. You can tag me, share an episode with a friend If you feel inspired. It would be awesome just to shoot a link to a friend. Our audience, my audience, is growing. New people are showing up every week, which is super exciting and really cool.
Speaker 2:I'm very much taking this podcast as, as you know, a passion project, and I'm chopping wood, carrying water. I am putting the best interviews out there. I'm interviewing the best people with the most inspirational messages and reaching a big handful of you guys, which is amazing, and there's more people coming every week. So, yeah, share this episode with a friend. It means a lot. If you're super, super inspired to take like five seconds or maybe 10 seconds, you can leave us a review on Apple Podcast, which would be epic. You can go to the podcast page. Make sure you're subscribed while you're doing this. It's the check mark in the top right hand corner and you can click like I think it's follow, and then scroll down and you can click on. Well, you could click on, write a review or you could just leave five stars if you want, but if you wrote a review with a couple words of why you're inspired, that would be amazing and I would super appreciate it. That is what's going to get the podcast in front of more hearts and minds. So, yeah, I'm really excited to jump in with Nathaniel A Turner.
Speaker 2:He is a breath of fresh air. He's one of the most entertaining and captivating Renaissance people of our day. He's sought after by organizations and individuals worldwide to share the tools, techniques and strategies to live life in the present with joy and on purpose. He calls himself a humanitarian propulsion engineer. He's a college and career readiness strategist, a TED speaker, and his author's work includes the books raising Superman, stop the bus, it's a jungle out there, journey Forward and the Amazing World of STEM. Nate also shares an audio version of his unique style of envisioning and manifesting the best version of himself across numerous social media platforms. So he's also a lawyer. His son, as I mentioned, has a PhD in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon, carnegie Mellon University and is also a first year MBA student at NYU. So while he did not spoiler alert he did not end up going to Harvard. He is a very successful and fulfilled individual, and Nate credits that to the method that he calls the life template, which I thought was really cool.
Speaker 2:I'm like Nate tell us a secret to life and he does, and basically the whole conversation we have is like his own, his version of this life template, so super interesting. It made me think a different way, and I always love the conversations that kind of challenge me to think outside of my own box, to challenge me to step outside of this like echo chamber that we can all sometimes live in. So I think that's important for everyone to do, and my goal here is not to bring you guys, people with the same opinions on everything. It's not to be an echo chamber. It's to bring varied perspectives on how we can change the world by starting at home, how we can be better parents, how we can be better versions of ourselves, how we can be more connected to something greater than us, and not everybody believes or feels the same thing about that, and so I think it's great to have all these different voices from all these walks of life and yeah, that's my goal, and so I hope that's inspiring to you. I know it is to me. I'm like wildly, massively inspired after every conversation, even though it's in a different way.
Speaker 2:So enjoy today's conversation. I cannot wait to see you guys in the membership. It's open raisingwildheartsbuzzsproutcom. Hit subscribe. I'm so excited to see you in there for our Women's Circle Monthly and our Lunch and Learn. If you join in the next I would say month or so, the next few weeks, you will be a founding member, so you'll be locked in at $10 a month. It's an amazing value. So, yeah, get in there. I'll see you in there and enjoy today's conversation. Hi, nate, welcome to the Raising Wildhearts podcast. Thank you for having me. I'm happy to be here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I want to just dive right in with the headline on your website.
Speaker 2:It says Be the Founder. The headline on your website. It says Be Whom you have Always Imagined. What does that mean to you?
Speaker 1:A number of things. One for me Be who I Always Imagine is being the best version of myself, and so it's a reminder on a daily basis, on a continuous basis, to be that person, that the only time to be that person is now, because when you're gone you can't fix who you were, so you might as well be the best version of yourself possible. So that's it. And then that is also sort of a reminder to other people that we're all here on this planet to hopefully to do just that Be who we always imagine being. There's this quote and I don't want to spend a whole lot of time sort of sounding like I'm trying to convince someone to believe in a certain way, but there's a quote that I believe that as a person think it in their heart. So are they, and I believe that in our heart is who we really want to be, and we should find ways each day, using tools, techniques and strategies sometimes, that we're able to offer, to help people do that very thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love that. So I think your home message fits in really well with the whole premise of this podcast, which has changed the world. By starting at home, I was, you know, reading some of your questions before we jumped on in. One of the questions that you had posed was instead, or one of the sentences you had posed was, instead of seeing socio-political and geo-economic issues as challenges of systems and structures, we need to scrutinize the flaws, the faults and failings of humans more closely. That seems like an unpopular opinion right now. And even on this you know podcast, we talk about how the education system could be better. How you know, we need to change our system. Systematic change starts from the top. You're suggesting that it starts from the bottom, right here, just with like with number one. So let's talk about that a little.
Speaker 1:Sure, I think it's easy to blame systems, because you can't see systems, you can't identify systems.
Speaker 1:But the question is who establishes those systems? I mean, there's only one system that I know of that humans have it manufactured, and that's the ecosystem, and we've mostly messed that up. So, when we start to my political systems, or economic systems, or school systems, et cetera, those are all things that are created and maintained by humans, and so I just feel like if we don't like the systems, well then we can change those systems. So, in line with your initial question about being who you always imagine being, the question is when we create new systems, will they be created by people who are the best versions of ourselves or we're some other version? If it is true that a good tree can't produce bad fruit, and if it's true that a bad tree cannot produce good fruit, then I also think it is also true that bad people, or mediocre people, or people who are self interested or self absorbed, or maybe who are self loathing, et cetera, cannot create the kinds of systems we need to have the best possible society.
Speaker 2:Yeah, why do you think there are so many self interested people walking around out there right now? What's your, what's your thought on that? What's your theory?
Speaker 1:I just think that's a common theme and a message. I feel like humans sort of forget that we should all exist together. So I think about the lion king, the great deal. So I'm going to borrow from Mufasa, and if you remember the scene, if you've seen it, I'm sure you have the scene. And Simba says dad will always be pals. And he said right. And he goes on to say well, let me explain about how the circle works. He said well, dad, don't we eat the antelopes? And he says, yes, let me explain. Well, I think humans forget that we all exist in this great circle together.
Speaker 1:Some of us think we own the circle. Some of us think we live outside the circle. Some people are told they don't have anything to do with the circle. Some people are very much minimized inside the circle. But we all exist together. Unfortunately, not enough of us fully understand that. Some of us think we have more importance than we do. Some of us think we have less importance than we. Then we should. So I think that that's a big part of yeah, I love that example.
Speaker 2:We're all about. You know the movies, the kids movies right now here, so that's relatable for me.
Speaker 1:They're actually the best ones generally.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and the older ones are, you know, the best ones, although some of them I don't know. I look back and I'm like what?
Speaker 1:is this Like we're watching?
Speaker 2:Dumbo and there's like a group of you know, these circus guys like essentially getting drunk in this tent, you know, and this was like I forget. I think Dumbo was like in the 70s, but I'm like who let us watch this when we were kids?
Speaker 2:This is a little iffy, so I think talking to you is going to be a really good opportunity to educate my beautiful listeners out there on aces. So some people may have heard of aces, some people may have not. I'll say that it's adverse childhood experiences. And would you break down your how you found your aces score and what your aces score is and how that affected you in life and how you chose to not let it affect you as well?
Speaker 1:Sure, in 1994, my wife decided we were going to be parents and I it is a true story I didn't want to be a father, she was wanting to be a mother. We had gotten married in 93. So, you know, we made through the first year. And then she says, hey, my biological clock is ticking, I'll be 30 this year. And I was like, yeah, but your clock is digital, you can't hear it, don't worry about it. So long story, short right.
Speaker 1:We decided to have a child, but in making that decision, there were some things we noted about our own childhoods that we did not want to replicate in our own child. Around the same time, kaiser Permanente were doing a study in San Francisco on some of the issues children were facing in school, and they were trying to figure out if, if this issues were based on something internal, so could there be something going on at home as opposed to always looking outside? And they came up and realized that there were these things, called it ACEs adverse childhood experiences. There were 10 things at the time that they noted that could cause a child to do poorly in school as well as do poorly in life, and so, upon seeing that study, we decided that we needed to first of all take the test and see how many ACEs we had ourselves. I found I had eight and my wife had seven and up to 10, we had nine of those 10.
Speaker 1:And so that became really key because if you don't know how you have perhaps I don't want to use the word damage because I believe now what we've tried to do is learn how to repurpose anything that happened was bad. We can talk more about that in a minute. But recognizing those things, realizing that if we were not intentional about addressing the things that were were adverse circumstances in our lives, that we were very likely to repeat those things in another child's life. So we hear parents, for example, say all the time well, if, for example, I was spanked as a child, it wouldn't be called spanking today, would be child abuse. But I know people when they had children who were my peer group would say, well, it happened to me, I turned out okay, and like well, no, actually, actually you didn't. And now this next generation is not going to turn out okay. So that's what the ACEs study allowed us to do to see how our childhood was hindered and how not to hinder someone else's childhood by doing some of the same things.
Speaker 2:Right. One of the big three lines here is healing intergenerational trauma, and I think this is a really helpful tool for doing that, and it takes the emotional aspect out of it. You don't have to. It's not like talk therapy. You don't have to, which I'm not bashing. I think talk therapy is great, but you don't have to, like get into the story of it.
Speaker 2:It's like a checkbox, like go down the list and check it, because I think some people are like, yeah, I had a great childhood, you know, and it's like, well, but did you, you know, like go back? I'm also a seven, like your wife, and you know, that's something after we chose to have kids that I started to address and I went, oh, maybe this work should have happened a little bit before. And that brings me to what do you think people should know before choosing to be parents? And even that you know, even that question, choosing to be parents it feels as though.
Speaker 2:It seems as though people aren't making a conscious choice. People are just reproducing, thinking that it's either like the next best thing to do because they got married, thinking that it's going to be all like Rosie, that was me. I was like, oh, I'm going to have a baby and then I like, oh my God, my baby turns into this person who's arguing with me all the time. No, but you know, like you know my mirror and it's helpful for that. But yeah, it seems as though a lot of people aren't actually choosing. So for someone out there who may be thinking about having a child many of the people here are parents already. What do you want them to know before choosing that? And even for current parents, like, how could we go back and reflect on our experiencing becoming parents?
Speaker 1:Sure, I think the easiest way to think about what it is that you're going to do or be, or the importance of parenting, is just to recognize that you are a tree and so you're going to produce some fruit. And the question is well, what kind of fruit are you going to produce? Which means that the tree has to examine themselves, and that's the very first thing I would say to any parent. But you have to do some self analysis, and then you should also do some self, have the person to whom you're going to have this child with, do some self analysis, and both of you all should know who you are, so that you know what it is that you're potentially going to pour into this piece of fruit.
Speaker 1:If you find, to your point, my point that there are these aces that you have in your life, then it is incumbent on you to fix those things. Otherwise you're going to give them what, consciously or unconsciously, to the child You're not going to want to give them to a. One day you're going to look back and you're going to say, oh my God, or you may actually pick the person to be the other parent who has not dealt with their own stuff, and then one day you look up and you're like, well, what in the world is going on? And they don't know what's going on. So I would say the very first thing is to right to that don't self be true like examine your own life before you decide to create a new life 1000%.
Speaker 2:Every, though the running joke is like oh, they don't give you a manual for this stuff. Like you know, parenting. It's like, well, why the hell not? I mean there should be some like policies and procedures upon you know deciding to conceive or happening to conceive. You know there should be some sort of a standard of care there, and there's just not. So it can be challenging when you find yourself being a parent and being like oh my God, this is so much harder than anybody. Culture your parents. Anybody says. Nobody says like, hey, shit's about to get real.
Speaker 2:I always joke like at the baby shower people need to be like like anti, and grandma need to be like listen, shit's about to get real right now. And they don't because you know, no one would do it. Maybe I don't know.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean to have to decide to be a parent takes to the enormous amount of hubris because you're going to be responsible for something else for 1821, 25 years, it could be what you're always going to be a parent.
Speaker 1:And the question is, are you just going to do this without any preparation at all? And so when I hear parents say there's no manual, then I often think well, I don't know how true that is, but I imagine if you were going to take a trip somewhere that you had never gone, you would create your own man. If you were going to leave here and go to Greece, or if you're going to go to South Africa or anywhere, before you left you'd have an itinerary. You at least have an itinerary of the things you want to see and things you'd want to accomplish on your trip. When it comes to parenting, it seems to me that those things should be very obvious to us, that we should be saying well, what might I want for my child after I? But once upon a time, people didn't go anywhere without a map in their car, and so to think you take this journey called parenthood without a GPS, without a map, just seems like it's just irresponsible.
Speaker 2:At the very least irresponsible, for sure, I mean, I always look at our next generation as the next leaders parents, caregivers, teachers, government officials.
Speaker 1:System makers yes.
Speaker 2:System makers.
Speaker 1:Look, we're coming full circle already.
Speaker 2:I like it, it's so true. You know, that's a really nice perspective for me to have to, just reflecting on the whole, you know, system maker thing. So let's talk about, let's talk about your son and his journey. Would you break that down a little bit for us?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So again, you know, having realized that my childhood was not as as it could have been, and also recognizing that academically I'd achieved a lot more than anybody probably ever thought that I would, but even given that my father would say to me routinely that I should have always been further along than I was. So when I graduated from law school and graduate school, the president of the university introduced me last, because at the time no one had ever done a dual degree. Then they're both their masters in the JD simultaneously. So that's cool, I'm an average student.
Speaker 1:But afterwards, at the little gathering week my wife gave for us, I stood over in the corner and could not celebrate what I'd accomplished, in part because my father said to me earlier it took you long enough. You should have been a congressman or a senator by now. To which I thought well, okay, if you say so, I don't know how I was supposed to get there, but cool. But now I'm about to have this child. And here's what I don't want to do. I don't want to have a conversation with my child at any point, telling my child they should have done more, and I don't want to have my child to say, well, I wish I could have done more, but you didn't prepare me for more earlier. And so, given that as the backdrop, we wrote Harvard for an application for an unborn child and use the application from Harvard to figure out a way to bring it back, to build a template for his life that we didn't know we were having a boy or girl at the time, I should say but to build a template for the child's life that we could at least follow, so that the child, when that child got a chance to go to college, potentially attend a school like Harvard. So we wrote Harvard, got an application from Harvard.
Speaker 1:Harvard said they were looking for three things as a further students. One is, of course, they want students to do real well academically to. So this is 1994. I'm not sure everyone agrees that Harvard still feels this way. They're looking for students who are world citizens. And thirdly, they would care, look for students who care for something greater than themselves. We thought that was a very interesting approach and like, of course, who wouldn't want a child to do well academically? Who wouldn't want a child who was a global citizen and who wouldn't want a child who was humanitarian? So we took those three elements and make those the template for everything he would ever do in his life. At 16, you met all the qualifications to attend Harvard started his own foundation at 14.
Speaker 1:So I'm going to cover the part so that I'm clear about it. So the academic piece met the requirements at 16, had already earned 36 college credits, spoke four languages, started his own foundation, et cetera. And the little part which about being a global citizen he's, as I mentioned, he was proficient in a number of languages. We traveled a fair amount so he could have a perspective of other people in different walks of life. We would do this thing in our own home, and I would encourage families to do this. We would call it a domestic exchange, where Americans love to go away to another country, but we could live right here in the same city and never go to a particular neighborhood, because that neighborhood is comprised of people who don't look like us, and so we wanted to make sure that wasn't how he lived his life. And then the last part was a humanitarian piece.
Speaker 1:As I mentioned, as a 14 year old he started his own foundation to care for homeless teens and to encourage young children to learn to read at the youngest possible age. So we had done that, and so he was getting ready to enter his senior year. Well, second semester is junior year, and he said I don't want to go to college now, I want to chase my dream of playing professional soccer. And so he packed his bags and he moved to Brazil. And he played soccer in Brazil and traveled to Germany for trials for a little over a year.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 1:Then he came back home, having lived in Brazil, he said there's no way I'm going to school anywhere where I have to wear pants.
Speaker 2:So so where's the school?
Speaker 1:that a little small school in California called Santa Clara University and finished his bachelor's degree in computer science and electrical engineering and then went on to Carnegie Mellon where he finished his PhD in electrical computer engineering in May, and now he's working on his MBA at NYU.
Speaker 2:Wow, no big deal. So you, I know part of your message for parents is college admissions and kind of like the life template and how to set up a kid for success. I kind of see the other side of that. You know, I grew up in a family where it was like it was not a question if you were going to college. It was where you were going to college and I had multiple alumni from the University of Notre Dame and my family and so it was like your Notre Dame bound, you know, and I, to be quite honest, didn't have what it took to get into Notre Dame and now that I'm saying it out loud I wonder if it's just because I wasn't prepared.
Speaker 2:You know, like we, you know we got up to the application. I had a great, you know, gpa not great, it was better than decent, right above average. And you know I wrote a great essay. I was a good writer. I studied English. You know where I ended up at Florida State, and you know we had my priest write a letter. You know Catholic University, whatever. And I still didn't get admitted and I remember, you know, thinking like, oh man, that's stunk, but there were. You know it was like community service hours. It was all probably a number of the things that Harvard wanted on that application. Probably those three were in line and I didn't have those other. So I had the academic piece, mostly you know. But if I would have been really strong in these other two I would have done it.
Speaker 2:So here's, like now reflection, years later, I am at the point with my kids where I don't want to push them academically. We home educate and, like you know, we are a member of like a co-op, so they go somewhere for classes, we do some stuff at home, and when my kids are like I don't feel like doing my homework, I'm like yeah, that's okay, you don't need to do it. Like, and that's just me right now they're still very young. Like so I guess I don't value academics as highly. So I'm curious, like to somebody like me or to somebody who doesn't value academics, like what's your, what's your take on that? Is it really important? Like obviously you have a very talented academic family. You guys have gone all the way, I mean you've gone like the whole way. So what do you say to somebody who's not into academics?
Speaker 1:So I'm going to separate the student because I, because I, while I hear you, I want to make sure that you understand what, what I'm thinking. I'm not, I don't think so much about education or academics, I don't really think about that. I think about enlightenment. So if you're focusing on the outcome, which is meeting a standard and sometimes I think you can feel like you feel, but I am interested in enlightenment, I'm interested in timeless wisdom. I'm interested in and knowing enough to know that I know and I don't have to rely on somebody else's story about what is that. I know how to find it. That I understand is a method that I know how to ask, ask and answer questions, those great. I know how to search for what I'm looking for. So in that, in that regard, I'm interested in making sure children have what I call the buffet table of knowledge, which is that some children thought about cheese and crackers as opposed to filet mignon and caviar at the other end of the table. So, if you can imagine a buffet table with the very far left hand side is cheese and crackers and the far right hand side are the you know, don Perignon, filet mignon, etc. Today, what we prepare children, as we say well, some children will get everything to the right and then some children will get only the stuff to the left. I want to give children opportunity to have whatever it is they want to choose, but they can't choose if they haven't been exposed to enough stuff. So that's why I said I don't focus so much on what, what, what, the academic, the academic story of the day, I would say, because it changes in terms of what, what we think is important.
Speaker 1:But I'm more interested in in enlightenment, the people that we remember, the people who changed the world, the people who, who we read about in history, that we we don't follow them as much because of what school they went to. We don't follow them as much about. We follow them because they were a master and and something. They were enlightened and they helped to enlighten us. That part is what I'm interested in Harvard, as I understood it, in the way that they were taught, or their requirement was that they wanted kids to be to meet the this academic criteria. Sure that I like my child, I wanted my child to do that. But I was also more interested in my son being able to think critically. I was more interested in making sure that we prepared him using a Socratic method. His love of learning comes from the fact that we did not force him to learn, like some people do. It was just about hey. So why don't you always seek enlightenment, seek knowledge, and so that's? That's what we've attempted to do.
Speaker 2:Thank you for clearing that up. That was a brilliant. That was a brilliant answer to my question, or to my thoughts, because I think, you know, when I hear the word Harvard, I don't, I don't, it doesn't sit right with me because of the whole, like rigor, the, the label that you know, and so I think that's a great perspective. We're seeking for our children to be enriched through their life experiences.
Speaker 1:Right. So you mentioned Notre Dame. You're from a Notre Dame family and you told the story, and so what I would say is Notre Dame is a wonderful target, because I don't know where we go if we don't have a destination. So you can have a destination, you can have a target. I would like, even if you play the game darts, you don't do the door to door. There is a circle. The effort is to not do it, but that is to go.
Speaker 1:It feels like sometimes we don't have a goal. A giving example, most school systems, and I don't you mentioned about homeschooling your child. I think all those things are wonderful. I always wonder, though, what's the target?
Speaker 1:When families say to me that they're attending a school and their child is at this preparatory school, and I say, well, it's great, but what college are they preparing them for? And they say, well, I don't know. So then, when you call it college preparatory, a college could be any college. It could be a community college, it could be a woman's college, it could be a historically black college university, it could be an Ivy League school, it could be a state school. What exactly are you aiming at? So for me, Harvard is an aim, because to aim at. Harvard at the time was the best school in the country. It didn't mean he was going to go to Harvard which obviously didn't want to apply to Harvard but it meant that if I could meet the qualifications of that institution, that was truly the very top and everything else on the buffet table was available to me.
Speaker 1:But too often, because we don't have a target, we wake up one day and you say, hey, you're supposed to go to Notre Dame and you're like but nobody made that my target. I know I hear what you all are telling me now, but we didn't aim for that. I couldn't go in there, but nobody aimed for that. And so the results are hey, what are you preparing for is Florida State, and Florida State's a great school. I love Florida State, as you know that. But it was not a target. It was the outcome of not necessarily being prepared to know exactly what the highest level you could potentially go to.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. And if your wife was pregnant today, what would you be aiming for? What would be your target now?
Speaker 1:Wow. So if my wife was pregnant today, I would probably be aiming for Oxford maybe. Yeah, I would probably aim for something outside of the country. I would be dangerous. I would be dangerous my wife was pregnant today I would be dangerous, but I would still aim for the very top. Because in doing that, here's what happens.
Speaker 1:So when you say to your friends that you got this application and you want to prepare your child to go to Harvard, first of all most of your friends, I think you ought to be in your mind, Because that's what elite people do. Are you crazy? What kind of parent are you going to be? Are you going to be overbearing?
Speaker 1:Okay, but for us that meant hey, how quickly can we get this child to learn how to read? Because if I can get the child to read, the sooner my child can read. Learn to read, my child can read to learn, and now everything in life is open to you. So if I can get a two-year-old to read and that two-year-old learns to read before his classmates at six, that's four years that this child, we've been able to share things with this child in a way that other people can't share with their children. If Aristotle's words are true that if you give me a child until seven, I'll show you the man. If that is true, in the first seven years of a child's life, or the most form of years, well, imagine if a child can start reading about the life that they want to have as early as two years old. It's a huge difference. So that I would want to do I would still want to do those kind of things.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and there's a big difference here between forcing said child to be Harvard bound or to go to Notre Dame, or to go to Oxford or to be an entrepreneur, or to any soccer star, any of it, like. There's a difference between us pushing that on them and us observing, teaching them how to critically think, putting them in environments and situations where they have the ability to grow to their highest potential. It's not our highest potential. It might be higher than ours, it might be lower. It's every. You know everybody has different potential. So it's giving them opportunities to be the best that they can be, not being some, like you know, dance mom who's like living vicariously through their kid or you know some Notre.
Speaker 1:Dame Right.
Speaker 2:Or soccer parent, someone who was rejected from Notre Dame and being like you got to go to Notre Dame and what I did is I, you know, and I very self-aware as we talked about you know, lots of self-awareness happened in the last 10 years and continuing to happen, but I've noticed myself swing into the other side of the pendulum. Oh, okay, then we'll be unschoolers. You know, academics don't matter and as much as I thought that I wanted to be that like, I realized, well, you do need to learn how to read, because if you learn how to read, you can learn anything. You also need to learn how to crunch numbers. You want to make money, you want to. You need to balance a checkbook, I mean. So it is important. So I went to the other side of the pendulum and I'm like, okay, here I am in my happy medium. That's like my favorite little place to be in, this like neutral place. This is the best of both.
Speaker 1:The thing I wanted to say about Harvard is, again, just the clarification. He never knew that that's what we were doing, so he never knew. He didn't know that until folks started asking well, what are you all doing? Why you know?
Speaker 1:By that time he's getting ready to leave and go to Brazil. People are asking how does it? How do you feel comfortable letting a 16 year old go to Brazil? Well, because his entire life has been geared around this buffet table. He's prepared. He's met all the academic standards that he needs to meet. He's learned how to speak other languages. He's now fluent in Portuguese. He understands to respect other people's culture when he gets there. He understands to respect other people's humanity. He understands his responsibility to be an outward manifestation of hope and love for other people. He's got that so he can go. But that's the buffet table.
Speaker 1:He didn't know that that's what we were doing and he didn't know that it came from Harvard. It was only when his life started to evolve in such a way that other people were taking notice, that then they then finally said, hey, what were you all doing? And say, hey, well, we bought these books. I actually were gifted these books from a gentleman by the name of Glenn Domen. He's no longer alive.
Speaker 1:You may be familiar with him, but he wrote books like how to give a child encyclopedia of knowledge, how to teach, bring out the genius and babies, how to teach a baby to read, et cetera. But he was working with children with brain injuries and was teaching children with brain injuries how to read and do sophisticated math problems by 18 months and so upon reading that well, hold on a second. That's how you get a child to Harvard. But we never shared with our son certainly not an infant why his parents were increasing their own vocabulary, why they would buy these big books and reading to this infant and telling his infant colors. The baby had no idea. Why the baby had a computer at one. He had no idea. We knew, but we never discussed it.
Speaker 2:Okay, that's a good clarification to have. That was a little behind the scenes working of you and your wife. Yeah, it's brilliant.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we didn't discuss it, partly again because most people think you're crazy and secondly, you don't know if it's going to work.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Case in point yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean, and I'm assuming you would say that he's probably thriving in his life. I mean, he seems like a very driven, ambitious guy. Obviously you tell me otherwise, but would you say that he's thriving, happy, successful, all those measures, humanitarian you've mentioned that word numerous times. Would you say that he's pretty to his core, like a happy kind of a dude? I would.
Speaker 1:So academically, of course that we've kind of covered that. That part is taken care. But the other two points are equally important. He speaks multiple languages and he's lived in another country, and he's done so by himself. That's different.
Speaker 1:So when he arrived in college, while his classmates, his freshman class, were people who probably you know, maybe they had traveled abroad, his life was very different. He had already lived abroad. He had lived where and played soccer in a nation where 900 people become professional soccer players every year, and the whole mentality in the academy he was in was simply had nothing to do with academics. So you come from a place where people keep touting. You got to get prepared for college and then you go somewhere where no one people mostly don't care about if you're learning how to do, how to read proficiently or do math. They're interested in knowing. Can we get you prepared? So some club in Europe will buy you and we can make a few dollars. So he's here.
Speaker 1:His parents, father, more, lived in some levels of poverty, but nothing like the level of poverty he saw in Brazil.
Speaker 1:So now can you have compassion for other people who live in these Brazilian favelas, who at the top of the mountain or top of the hill could be their house. In the morning there could be a rainstorm and when that person comes home that shanty home is no longer at the top of the house. Or folks who don't have electricity but don't have clean running water. These are the kinds of young men who are living in the academy with him and every Wednesday if you don't perform to a certain level out, you could go and have to go back to that, to the lifestyle.
Speaker 1:So he's had an opportunity to see that and I think that that certainly deepened his understanding and compassion for other people. Then the humanitarian piece when he went off to college, real quickly when he graduated, went to Jesuit University and when he graduated his engineering program awarded him the award. That's essentially the humanitarian of the class, that for those four years the person who most represented men and women for others was him. But again, I believe, and I think my wife would concur, that all of that was about what we laid as the expectations long before it was born.
Speaker 2:Right. So the targets were obviously hit, I mean, and it manifested in his own life journey in many of his choices. Most of his choices is what it sounds like and what a you know we've been exploring a little bit on this show that our whole job as parents is to help our children individually, so not to become little versions of us, not to become, you know, what we think they're going to become, but to become who they're going to become. And I love these really high standards that you've set, because human potential is infinite and I think we forget that. And what a beautiful perspective for him to have as a teenager living in another country. I mean, it's something that a lot of people don't get, I mean.
Speaker 2:I never got it, you know like. So I think that's amazing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, me either, which I never got it either. So that's like you want to do what? Of course, that's not really come as a surprise, because that's part of what the buffet table said. Hey, listen, you're going to do well academically, you're going to understand critical thinking, you're going to understand this credit method, but you're also going to be a world citizen. Why? Because you know, the further we would get along, and we started looking by day. I work in the financial services industry, so I would look at economic trends and you say, well, well, world is trending. You're much more globalized or much more technological.
Speaker 1:Math and science are at a premium in ways that maybe we hadn't considered before. I don't know if you want to do anything in math and science, but I should probably make sure that you can do math and science Well, because in order for you to have access to everything the buffet table I can't have you saying I can only, I'm only mediocre in math. If you say one day, you know, I would have really loved to have been an engineer. And so, to that end, right when he was 16 and decided he wanted to leave, when people said, what do you think he's going to end up doing when he's done playing soccer. I thought it might have been something in writing. I thought he might do something, some soft science.
Speaker 1:When he returns and having lived in Brazil and realizing that there are so many people who don't have don't have access to to energy, don't have access to Wi-Fi, he says I want to use my life moving forward to take technology to help people who have been historically and geographically underserved and underrepresented. I said what does that mean? I'm going to be an engineer and I'm going to start my own tech company to provide energy to people? Okay, but without him being prepared when he takes the SAT to score high enough. There's no engineering school in the country that is considering him and certainly he's not Carnegie Mellon without that math proficiency and he's not at NYU without that math proficiency. So hopefully he had an aim for the highest to begin with. I don't think he would be where he is currently.
Speaker 2:Sure, it's amazing. So let's touch a little bit, if you wouldn't mind, on the life template. Could you tell us what that is, what it means and how to follow it? Just give us a secret to life real quick, if you wouldn't mind, nate.
Speaker 1:Sure. So I would say, this Starts with you, starts with parents asking what are your hopes and dreams for your own child? They're not mine. So this is. And once you know what your hopes and dreams are for your child, then we can go about building the template. It's much like if you were building a house. You'd have to talk to an architect. If you could build a house just as you wanted, which we would all love to do, an architect would say to you Ryan, what do you want in this house? And you might say I want four bedrooms. I don't need people in your family, I want a room for my husband to get away from me. You can call it whatever you want, to call it man cave or whatever. I want my own room. Well, I can do stuff just for me. And then architect would say OK, great, now I'm going to go and design it and you have to find people to help you to construct it, because I'm not the constructor, you are, and that's the life template.
Speaker 1:So begin with, hey, ryan, what do you want for your children? Now, most people will start with something that's kind of ambiguous to me. They said I just want my child to be happy and I'm like, well, that's not really what you want, right? Can you please define what that means? Right, because your child could be happy as a criminal, right? Right, what do you want? And so we're asking you to figure out what you want. And once you have decided what you want, then the first thing, if you imagine like three circles and the most outside circle is familiar, so we say, hey, to be what you want your child to be, let's make sure your child is essentially a jack of all trades. I know you've heard that that's a terrible thing to do, but it's really not. Imagine how useful it is when you know a lot about a lot of different things. You may not be an expert in all those things, but you know enough that you can have a conversation with someone and think about the children that we meet along the way, that can have conversations about stuff, and we're like, oh my God, that was such a really engaging child. So we're always very excited about that.
Speaker 1:Inside that big circle is a circle that is called mastery. What things, given where we are in our walk, our journey as humans, must we master? Well, today it would be good if we could master science, technology, engineering, math, reading, writing, language skills. Those are always going to be things we should master as human. But I didn't notice. I didn't say master of school, I said here are the things you should master. We should probably also master compassion and humanity and human dignity and expressions of those things Absolutely.
Speaker 1:And then inside, that is the core, and which is to say, if today were your child's last day, how do you want people to remember your child? Your child is not going to write down the bitch where none of us are. We're not going to write on the bitch where we're not going to give our own you the G, and we're not going to write the final words on our tomb or our earn or whatever. But if we could, what would we want it to say? And in given that we won't be able to do it at the end, then everything we do every day should be about making sure that those who know us that that's the way they remember us, and so that's so. Then we go about that Once. Once we know what it is that you want to do, then we say, ok, well, here's the things that we should do, depending on the age of the child.
Speaker 1:Ok, now you want the best for your child. Do you want your child to go to college? Yes, all right, cool, where would you like your child to go to college? What would you like your child to do? They may or may not do it, right, they may or may not be that. But if we were saying, where could they go? Ok, I want my child to be an engineer Easy for me to have that kind of say. I want my child to be an engineer, great, where do you want your child to go?
Speaker 1:I live in Indiana, so Purdue University, what my child is going to produce, ok, cool, but it's Purdue, the best we could do. Because if you want the absolute best for your child, it's Purdue, the best you could do. Well, no, purdue's. You know the top 10 school? Ok, what's the number one school? Ok, what number one school is MIT, all right. So let's aim for MIT. And if we get Purdue, hey, we're happy, we get MIT, we're quite happy as well.
Speaker 1:But if we only aim at Purdue, the odds are that we will. If we miss Purdue, then we get something less than Purdue. So let's aim above Purdue. And if we get above Purdue and we choose to go to Purdue, then we choose Purdue. Then we look at stuff like you know, the endowments of the school. So you want to go to Purdue, that's great, but Purdue doesn't offer as much money as an endowment as MIT or I may find out. If I don't, if I'm a poor, fat, from a family with not lots of resources, I'm not wealthy and privileged Then I may find that some schools elite, some elite schools now don't require you to pay tuition, that because my income is at a certain level or so I don't have any student debt. So yeah, while I love Purdue, I might want to go to Stanford If Stanford is going to give me a free ride, as opposed to Purdue, asking me to pay five or six thousand dollars because it's a state school. I would prefer not to own anyone. So those are the kinds of ways we move about.
Speaker 2:Right. So what's coming up for me is that it just feels like it's kind of this like manifestation process, like this energetics, like you're putting the energetics out there of what you know we're judging to be like a very successful life, and though the life may not pan out to be this exact version of it, it will be some version of success, manifested because all of these pieces have been put into it along the way for years and years and years.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean it's like the expression shoot for the moon If you miss your land upon the stars. I less brown famously says that and I would say but less we don't want to miss you don't want to miss the stars and grave of who. We're trying to go to the moon, let's go to the moon.
Speaker 2:Right, but yes, that's, that's exactly what we're doing.
Speaker 1:We say hey well, where do we want to go?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And if the world were perfect and there were no limitations where, what would we want? And it requires us. In my Senate I say have this conversation all the time. It requires us to really dream and sadly, not enough of us dream. We often think the dreaming is an irresponsible time. It's an irresponsible pursuit. We often say get your head out the cloud. We say this to young people. It's an interesting thing, because children dream all the time. Children imagine all kinds of things and then they get connected with adults and adults. You know, take all the dreams away from children or encourage children to stop dreaming Like I would imagine. The little Ryan had all kinds of dreams. She probably sat down and imagine things happening and told things to her family and they just kind of looked at. That's Ryan being Ryan Totally. One day Ryan is older and Ryan is can't remember all of the dreams that she had, and so that's really what we're trying to do is not to not just to never stop dreaming.
Speaker 2:I love that. What age we?
Speaker 1:are.
Speaker 2:I love that. Yeah, I think, as little kids, we have a very innate sense of why we're here. We are very close to God, we're very in tune with our purpose, and over the years, it kind of gets kicked out of us, bumped out of us, beat out of us, whatever, and then we forget for a number of years, I forgot for decades, and so I'm finally coming into that again, which is a beautiful and brilliant time for me. And so you know, though, my life trajectory wasn't, on paper, how it was supposed to be. I didn't go to Notre Dame, I didn't follow the family legacy and all that. I found my own way through, like you know, trudging through the mud and kind of pulling my bootstraps up, and you know that's okay too.
Speaker 2:Like, I guess, to say that there's still an opportunity. If you didn't have the parents who got the Harvard application when you were in the womb like I didn't, you know, like, and so many of us didn't Like I think there's still an opportunity for us to do that for ourselves, and maybe first, arguably, you know, and have our kids watch us like, find those passions, chase those dreams, you know, do the thing that lights us up, change the world, be the humanitarian Like, and you know that's a piece of it too. So this conversation has been so inspiring. As we start to wrap up, I want to ask you what's something you wish people would ask you more about?
Speaker 1:Now we say that the thing, the word that means the most to me is the word who. Some years ago, simon Sinek became famous with the expression great leaders, beginning in with with why. And I started hearing everyone say do you know your? Why Do you know your? Why Do you know your why? And immediately it just did not. It didn't sit right with me. It felt like that was the wrong inquiry to be asking about why. Feel like why's are the wise change. So why, why? Why does why did Ryan want to go to school? Well, because that's what our family wanted her to do. Well, why did Ryan stay in school? Because that's what our family wanted to do.
Speaker 1:But you're, or in my case, why do you get a job? Well, you get a job because you have a small child and a wife. Why do you still work? Do what you're doing? Because they're now grown and they don't eat your money. Well, you found some purpose in, maybe, what you're doing. I feel like your why's change. But the larger question of who you want to be when your time on this planet is up, for me that doesn't change, certainly if we're, if we're imagining the best possible version of ourselves. So that's the question I wish people would ask me what is the why is why? Why is who the most important word in the human language, and how do we get about the process of finding out who we are meant to be?
Speaker 2:I love that because it keeps our finger on the pulse of our mortality, on not intended, you know. I think it's important for us to realize that this is temporary, you know, this is, you know we're not going to be here forever. So to remember that on a daily basis, I think is an important thing.
Speaker 1:So your point you said about your faith. I'm sorry, I just if I could please. We are created by something larger than us. Whatever name you give that thing, if it's that entity is God, or the universal, the spirit of the divine and or the infinite or whatever, there's something big, and if it is true that we are created in the image of that thing that is more powerful than us, then to anything other than to be the best possible version can be seems to me to be letting down or not using properly the gift, to be like the thing that created us.
Speaker 2:Yeah, beautifully said. If you could walk into an elementary school tomorrow and teach a class, what would you teach these elementary school kids, a group of like seven, eight, nine year olds?
Speaker 1:The kids are the parents.
Speaker 2:Well, the kids, they're getting, you know, direct, direct to the source here. We talk a lot about what to teach their parents, but let's talk about now what we're going to teach the kids.
Speaker 1:I would teach the kids how to do two things. One, I would teach the kids how to consistently create a vision board of whatever they want so that they can keep it in front of them, because too often they're not going to have enough people who believe in what they would like to do with their life. And two, I'd like them to write down all of the times they're successful.
Speaker 2:Yeah, love that.
Speaker 1:So often we forget as we go through our journey that we've had success at some different levels. I'd want them to write down every time they succeed. And for our son, we used to call it the academic and extracurricular abstract and we would just keep a record of all the things that he did that were successful, because we already knew he was already keeping a mental record of all the times in his mind he had failed. So we wanted to have something that we could say oh no, no, no, no, no, hold on a second, open that, open that follow up, and you open the follow up and you did this and you did this and you did this. So I don't want to hear that you can't do something. You can see it for yourself. And that's the two things I would ask.
Speaker 2:Love that. What, if anything, are you reading right now? Do you have any books open?
Speaker 1:We just finished and published and released our most recent book about a month ago called the Amazing World of STEM Almost for All, and I got a few things in the, in the, in the words, I don't really know what direction that I'm going. Next I started a book called Another Way, which is the description of how you actually create a life template for your own child, more of a how to do menu. I started working on something called the who Mindset, so I could explain that in more detail and how do we get to that? So I don't know. There's always something, and I mentioned earlier about the audio cast that we're going to have. So every day I write my life is that I could be. I have a friend who then takes the journal that I write, and now there's an audio and she writes and will also add some action and reflection statements, and so then we'll publish that. Share those that. That'd be interesting like. I'm not quite sure how I feel about it, but it'll be interesting.
Speaker 2:Okay, so before I ask you the last two questions, will you tell us where we can find your books and find more about the amazing work you're doing in the world?
Speaker 1:I have a website that is under construction. It's Nathanielaternercom. My books are found everywhere. Books are so the Barnes and Noble, Amazon, etc. Awesome.
Speaker 2:Apple Books Awesome, and let's see what's bringing you joy today.
Speaker 1:Having this conversation with you. That's easy. That's joy and gratitude. I'm grateful that you've seen me worthy to have a conversation in your listeners today.
Speaker 2:Me too, thank you. And the last question is who or what have you learned the most from?
Speaker 1:Wow, one person, two people my father, who is no longer with me, and my son. This conversation I'm having with you today would not be possible without the two of them, my tree and my fruit.
Speaker 2:That's right. Beautiful, what a beautiful way to end it. Thank you so much for being here and who you are and the work you're doing in the world. The ripple effect is real and you're spreading it out, so thank you.
Speaker 1:Thank you for having me. I appreciate you. See you soon.