And his mother, doing what any mother would do, knowing her kid, says, "Did you cheat?"

Get my dad said, no.

That's not the story and this is what I want you to understand.

So I'll give you a great story.

My dad had gone to a Toastmasters early on and heard one of the most successful magazine entrepreneurs in the world speak.

He comes back and tells me, he said, "Well this guy was failing out of high school, he was struggling, he was raised by a single mom in the Midwest, but he promised his mother, he would take a test called the SAT."

So he takes the SAT in May, his junior year, doesn't expect anything.

Well, he gets a 1480 out of 1600.

So he's stunned, right?

That would be, for the smart people that listen to your podcast - (Tom) That's insane.

Insane, yeah.

Right?

Cognitive dissonance.

But it's a hard test.

And you, you know, it's a variety of different things.

So, he gets to score and his mother, doing what any mother would do, knowing her kid, says, "Did you cheat?"

She knows her son.

and he said, "I swear to God, I tried to cheat but the way the numbers were and the scantrons and the bubbles, you couldn't cheat."

So she says, "You mean to tell me you really got that score?"

He said, "Yeah, I got the score."

So he's stunned, Tom.

So as my dad's telling me this story, I'm like, okay.

So he says, "All right, so what he decides is because he realizes he's smart and he's going into his senior year, he says, 'I'm going to go to class.'"

Now he starts to go to class, he doesn't hang out with who he did when he didn't go to class, all right?

Teachers see him in class and they said, "Hey, maybe, Franklin Pierce, maybe we missed the boat on this kid."

So they start to treat him differently.

Well, as the guy would tell the story, he graduates, goes to a Community College, goes on to Wichita State, goes on to the Ivy League and becomes this massively successful magazine entrepreneur.

So I said, "Okay, well the guy was always smart, he just needed a standardized test to unlock it."

My dad said, "No, that's not the story and this is what I want you to understand."

He said, "12 years after all this guy's success, he gets a letter in the mail from Princeton, New Jersey.

Doesn't think anything about it, the next day his wife says, 'You're going to open it.'"

He opens it, true story, turns out the SAT board will periodically review their test taking procedures in the policies.

The year he took the test, he was one of 13 people sent the wrong SAT score.

His actual score was a 740 out of 1600.

And he said, "People think my whole life changed when I got the 1480."

"But what happened, my whole life changed when I started acting like a 1480."

And what is a 1480 do?

"He goes to class."

I think the lesson my dad was trying to teach me, um ultimately, was in addition to my language, what I do, not how I feel about my past is going to determine who I am in the future.

This is a really interesting part of what you say, that the past isn't predictive.

Correct.

So, talk to me more about that because I I would say most people would say that the past is definitely predictive.

Right, which is great but they'd be wrong.

Right?

So they would be wrong and the simple fact of the matter is the past is real.

Okay?

So the only thing that makes it predictive is if my behavior stays the same.

So I started thinking about a car.

If a car's going backwards, it can't automatically go forward, so it has to shift into neutral and then it stops.

Then at that point, you can either go forward by changing your behavior or you can go backwards by doing the same stupid shit you were just doing.

In fairness to my dad, when he was raised and he was teaching the only thing was positive and negative.

So if you weren't negative, you had to be positive.

But that just never made sense to me.

And if we could just learn how to not be negative, how to not externalize negative, then ultimately that would help them more than ever trying to be told to be positive.