Why the best students are NOT the most successful

thank you fabulous for sponsoring today's video hey guys how's it going welcome back to another video so a couple days ago i reunited with one of my high school classmates who i had not seen for nine years and we kind of reminisced about the bygone days when i was in high school i was pretty much just like angsty as [ __ ] and i would just like only wear black only wear leather listen to like metal music things like that i mean i still only wear black now but i don't listen to metal music anymore because my heart can't take it anyways it just kind of got me thinking about what the other people from my high school class are doing these days so i went on the facebooks the linkedins and like the instagrams to try to find out and it was pretty much what i expected people who got the best grades the people who did the best in school you're saying it wrong it's leviosa not livio ended up getting the best jobs as investment bankers people who work in tech uh and people work in hedge funds don't talk to me about the sec what was surprising though is that the people who were the most successful uh were not actually the people who got the best grades the ones that started their own successful companies the one crypto dude that made a thing and made a lot of money as well as the kid who ended up traveling around the world and opening up her own ngo these people were definitely not the best students and this kind of got me questioning you know what we're always told like you should get good grades you do well in school and then you should you will be successful to understand why it is that these students with the best grades are not the ones that are deemed most successful it's important for us to go back in time and understand the history of modern education well education is the process of receiving or giving systematic instruction especially at a school or university the key word here is systemic instruction so you see in

the beginning when we were all hunter-gatherers it was not systemic education although obviously learning things has been very characteristic of our species since the dawn of time you gotta differentiate what food together was considered poisonous how to hunt but it wasn't systemic it was self-directed in fact learning and playing were synonymous and especially children have this natural tendency to play by learning things and exploring things so for the hunter-gatherers this self-directed play in combination with the knowledge and the skills that are passed on through generations in the tribe children naturally grew into adults that contributed towards their village or their tribe by getting food shelter and devising ways to in general survive and make their lives better but then sometime around the agricultural revolution this natural tendency of learning and playing and then applying the things that you learn become basically not cool as dr peter gray says with the rise of agriculture and later of industry children became forced laborers play and exploration were suppressed wilfness which had been a virtue became a vice that had to be beaten out of children so you see to be a hunter-gatherer person you had to acquire vast knowledge of plants and animals and develop skills in crafting and using tools in order to hunt and to gather but with the agricultural revolution people began to live in permanent dwellings and they started to accumulate stuff what makes a good farmer is someone who is able to work these long hours of unskilled repetitive labor and unfortunately the people who had to do this the most was children and as time went on through the middle ages children are forced to be even more obedient and learn only the things that they're supposed to learn in order to fulfill their duties as a farmer a baker or a blacksmith and of course to instill a fear of god so basically this natural tendency of learning through play literally got beaten out of the children and learning itself was now seen as systemic instruction aka education and

then came the final nail in the coffin the industrial revolution now that we can mass produce things and the assembly line became like the best thing ever laborers also became mass-produced children were obedient the ones who learned the correct things and the ones who were able to suppress that urge to play and to explore things were rewarded by basically not starving to death and not being beaten to that now these days there are child labor laws in place and it's not socially appropriate or legal to beat your children to death but the purpose of education still remains the same school is still a place for you to learn to correct things and become better laborers so it's like the same thing but with extra steps that just sounds like slavery with extra steps so yeah ever since the industrial revolution what defines a good student pretty much stayed the same as well a good student is someone who is self-disciplined conscientious and can comply with the rules to get the best grades and to do like the correct extracurriculars these students were the ones that schools encouraged and were best rewarded but i would say since the industrial revolution things have actually changed a lot so i was curious to know what happened to these straight a students after they graduate from school luckily there was the study that was done by karen arnold from boston college that studied what happens to high school valedictorians and salutarians salutatorian okay like the people who were second best and what she found was that 94 of these students went on to college and they ended up leading the academic pack with a average gpa of 3. 6 and 60 of them actually went on to receive graduate education 90 of them are in professional careers and 40 the highest tier jobs as eric barker says in his book barking up the wrong tree which by the way i think it's like a hilarious name so this guy has a great sense of humor what he said and i paraphrase a little bit is that these students are reliable consistent and well adjusted and by all measures the majority have good lives but how many of these number one high school performers go on to change the world to run the world war impress the world the answer seems to be clear zero valedictorians don't shake up the world they tend to settle into the system what makes people the best in the classroom are the same traits that make them least likely to hit that home run and to really change the world and this is for two primary reasons the first reason is that schools reward students who consistently do as they are told research shows that grades are only loosely correlated with intelligence but grades are great predictors of self-discipline conscientiousness and the ability to comply by rules many of these high achieving students actually admit that they're not the smartest people in the class they just happen to be the hardest working and they see education and learning more about doing what it is that teachers want them to do as opposed to doing things because they're genuinely interested in them so regardless if you're good at school or not building good habits is going to be the foundation of your success i'd like to tell you a little bit about fabulous who's the sponsor of today's video fabulous is the number one self-care app to help you build better habits and achieve your goals fabulous is like a digital coach that uses behavioral science to develop great habits that will enable you to live the life you want fabulous has two general approaches habit tracking where you can pick more than 100 recommended habits or create your own and the second approach is dedicated programs called a journey these behavior change programs are specifically designed to help you achieve your overarching well-being goals like mindfulness or health it's all about small steps that lead to big and long-lasting changes i really enjoyed using families because of the science back techniques and the art and storytelling is just 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goes you are a jack of all trades but master of none i'm kind of a jack of all trades but in actual real life in society the people who are most successful the people who shake up the world the people who become the best at something are actually ones that don't do what it is that they are told and they're generally amazing at one thing and not just relatively good at everything an example of someone like this is winston churchill he got into parliament when he was 26 but was deemed unfit and was labeled as a maverick which was a gre word which i had to look up because i forgot and that means an unorthodox or independent-minded person so basically someone who doesn't fit he loved his country and was pretty much as paranoid about anything that could potentially impact his country like he was even super paranoid about gandhi because of this paranoia he was one of the only people who really saw what hitler was like the guy who was in charge at that time was like oh like let's appease hitler and give him stuff so that he will calm down and churchill was like oh my god no like that is a terrible idea and it turns out he was correct and you have your famous college dropouts like bill gates mark zuckerberg steve jobs and i'm sure many of you guys have heard or personally know people who are like artists or musicians who are amazing at what they do but are like generally pretty bad at everything else there was a survey of 700 millionaires in the us and the researchers found that their average college gpa was 2. 9 college grades as barker writes aren't any more predictive of subsequent life success than rolling dice so that is the evidence and the reasoning as to why valedictorians do not end up the most successful and generally don't become millionaires but i do have my qualms with this because i think it's pretty reductive and just like much too simplistic to just say like oh like students the valedictorians that do the best end up like not being world changers and people who are out of the box they become like super successful millionaires but before i get into my issues with this like general argument and this general train of thought so first let's talk about my issue with this original study of high school valedictorians first of all this study is really old like 20 years old and it is not a represented sample of high school students even like american high school students because there were like 83 students taking across 33 different schools all in the state of illinois and there was no control of like how good these schools actually were and they didn't really consider any other variables so i did try to find other studies but unfortunately this one is pretty much the only one that we got also from this study i feel like it kind of gives off that impression that like oh okay like i shouldn't try to do well in school which is also not the case like just because you do bad in school doesn't mean that you're gonna become a millionaire and become super successful this is like the classic case of correlation and not causation i also want to address my biggest issues with this study the first really big one is

culture and social status the argument up to now doesn't consider the factors of environment or culture of social status of financial status you're kind of just saying like oh if everything were the same then this is what happens but in reality like things are not all the same like not everybody has the same privilege and the same environments and i argue that this is extremely important like for example those of you that are from second generation immigrant families working-class families people who don't have that privilege you mostly grow up with your parents and your families just really emphasizing that you need to do really well in school like they are trying their best in order to send you to school so that you can have a better future so with your future your family's futures your like siblings futures resting on you and then no pressure right doing really well in school and getting that secure job may be more important than being the most successful were like the ones that shape the world simply because you can't risk it the type of culture that you're from is also really important our discussion has been very american very like western focused and i'm not going to pretend that i know about all the different cultures but what i do know is chinese culture because that's where i grew up so in chinese culture there is this concept of alcohol which is the single test that you take after high school that pretty much determines where you're going to go to college the people you're going to meet and a large portion of your life it's basically like this really stressful exam because it doesn't matter what your previous grades were like anything that you've done before it all rests on the single exam east asian culture at least is very community driven as opposed to like a more individualistic culture from western countries so this exam determines where you're going to go to college like the people that you meet around you and the connections that you have around you and that is very much going to determine how successful you're going to be in life so i couldn't find any studies that were done in china or like asian cultures for example but if i were to hazard a guest i would think that the grades that people got it would be a much larger determinator of how successful they're going to be in life obviously not saying that there's no exceptions even like someone like jack ma who apparently failed school like five times and got rejected from harvard ten times um he became very successful but i do think in general asian culture east asian culture at least is much more restrictive and i think your grades matter a lot more for many years researchers were very interested in determining what are the traits and the characteristics of successful people of successful leaders and they were pretty confused for a long time because they found that characteristics of different leaders were actually very different until this guy called mukanda came around and what he found out was that there are actually two fundamental types of great leaders that make it to the top he calls these two types of people filtered and unfiltered filtered leaders are the ones that got really good grades in school like really excelled in their careers and slowly climbed up that ladder an example of this was neville chamberlain who was the guy that was in charge of the uk at that time when hitler came into power he was a career politician now an unfiltered leader was someone who was either too impatient to climb up that ladder properly uh or someone who is just like very unfit and could not manage to fit in enough in order to do this but for one reason or other they somehow come into power and that was the crazy paranoid guy churchill uh while never trampoline was like okay let me go do like diplomatic stuff churchill was like paranoia oh my god and you know that was a very good thing so what i find is really interesting is that it's not necessarily that one leader is better than another leader like filtered leaders are amazing when things are stable while unfiltered leaders really shine when there are things that go wrong when the traditional way of things doesn't work anymore there's a saying that if you measure a fish's ability to climb a tree then it's gonna think it's stupid forever this researcher called boris boysberg i'm like butchering everyone's name but yeah this guy he looked at top wall street analysts that ended up jumping ship to a competitor and what he noticed is that these top analysts actually stopped becoming top analysts when they go into a different environment and that's because they didn't really factor in that the environment itself the context in which they are the top analyst matters a lot so in contrast top analysts that go and jump ship but they also bring their team with them so kind of like having the same contacts in the same environment to support them they do end up still being top analysts so what does this mean in the context of school and your career later well if you're naturally inclined to be a really good student and you excel at that then when you graduate school choose the right environment where things are clearly laid out for you so you know what it is that you need to do in order to progress really well and you excel at that so probably consider more traditional careers more traditional industries and larger companies and for someone who's naturally more out of the box and don't do so well in traditional education for whatever reason don't try to fit your square peg into a round hole ascend trade and take advantage of these traits that make you creative that make you unique it's okay that you're not a well-rounded student you just need to find an environment that fits you where your unique skill sets are valued for example working on moonshot startups being an entrepreneur more creative and independent fields so another node that i do want to make over here is that yes there's some people who are what one extreme and at the other extreme but generally people fall within this spectrum like i always did decently in school but i was never the best student i was also never the worst student and i could get into like a traditional career path but i still didn't really fit into that round pick very well so i think an alternative is that you can go and just choose a job that is more like less risky more stable and then like me maybe you can like do things on the side as well so you're kind of able to incorporate those two things together and at some point you can choose one or the other if you want so yes that is my advice and thus ends this discussion i am super curious to know what you guys think about this and also just like leave in the comments do you think you're someone who is more like traditionally a good student or someone who's more out of the box let me know in the comments okay that is all i have for you today and i will see you guys in the next video where 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