Today on Acta Non Verba Matt Beaudreau discusses the generational communication gap and how mentorship can strengthen our future workforce. Listen in as Matt and I explore the division between generations, how to help youth identify their personal superpowers, and the key things we need to focus on as leaders to set up our younger generation for success.
Matt Beaudreau is the host of the Essential 11 Podcast. Through years of coaching, keynote speaking and educating, Matt knows the struggle of trying to navigate the world in the 21st century, especially for today’s youth. He created this podcast to offer valuable insight and advice, but don’t take it from him- take it from the successful people you already know.
Matt is also the founder of Acton Academy Placer. Utilizing and prioritizing the Socratic method, they encourage freedom of thought in all individuals, with an emphasis on teaching students how to think for themselves rather than what to think.
You can connect with Matt on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-beaudreau-071a5b99/
Episode Transcript:
00:26
Acta Non Verba is a Latin phrase that means actions and not words. If you want to know what somebody truly believes, don’t listen to their words instead, observe their actions.
00:55
My guest today truly embodies that phrase. Matt Boudreau is a keynote and TEDx speaker, founder of multiple Acton Academy campuses, co-founder of Apigee Strong, and the host of The Essential 11. Now I had the honor of being interviewed by this man not long ago, literally hours ago, and we had a powerful conversation talking to some of his younger generations that come through the curriculum, ethos, and academies that he’s created.
01:24
And I cannot wait for you guys to hear that conversation on the essential 11 podcast. I’ll be cross referencing that and cross posting that like crazy. This man is an educator and what I have found for myself as a teacher, as a coach, the best leaders and coaches have the heart of a student with the soul of a teacher. And this man has both of those things. So without further ado, Matt, thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for what you’re doing. You are truly spearheading true education.
01:53
You’re doing what everybody claims to be doing as an entrepreneur and as an educator, which is they see a problem, they want to fix the problem. They see this niche that has this huge gap in it and then they don’t do anything. And that’s exactly, well, that’s what I love so much about what you’re talking about. And again, we got to connect a couple hours ago, man, and you’re talking about actions over words. And you know, as well as I do, as well as listeners do, the majority of people are talk and, you know, taking action on that. And again, you put that into practice to you.
02:21
came in, spent your time pouring into these young people. So I’m grateful for everybody that’s doing so. And it’s an honor to get to do it the way I get to do it. And I just want to give you kudos because every single person on that call, everyone addressed me as sir. Everyone was incredibly respectful. I opened it up to questions, and I wanted to make sure that they understood everything. And every question was respectful. There was never a hint of boredom. Every single person was taking notes, as you mentioned. I have taught martial arts for a long time. I have given keynotes, much as you have, thousands of people.
02:51
And I can tell when people are engaged. I can tell when they’re just pointing it in and every single person there, every one of your students was glued to the zoom screen. So it was an honor to be able to present to people that are just sponges that want to absorb this stuff and start figuring out how do I apply this right now. And that’s it. And that, you know, those people are, are out there, right. And even within the younger generation, which you saw today, and that’s something that, you know, from a human development standpoint, it’s something that.
03:17
I speak a lot on generations and my clients bring me in to speak on generations and leading the younger generation. How do we recruit good ones? How do we retain them? What does all that look like? But it starts with understanding that those good people are there. And there’s so many of our leaders that are like, hey, this younger generation, they’re ruining the world. Well, you know what? In the 50s, they said the same thing. In the 20s, they said the same thing. Every generation looks to the younger generation and goes, oh man, they’re screwing everything up.
03:42
They look to the generation before them and they go, those old people didn’t, you know, they’re living in the past, right? Everybody has a tendency to do that. So I want people to realize, no, there are some amazing young people out there. That’s really who we are looking to serve in both the schools that I build, as well as, as well as this online mentorship program, we want to serve those people who are understanding that I’ve got gifts and I have this hero’s journey to live.
04:08
And I need to find out what my genius is and what my path is so that I can help other people. Like those are the young people I want to serve and they are out there. Yeah. And they’re so selected to be a part of what your curriculum is and everything that you put into it. And we’re going to dive into a lot of stuff, but before we hit record and even when we were talking before, you were kind of like me, we both stumbled onto speaking. We just sort of had this message and then you tell somebody and you can see them. They’re just like…
04:32
Dumbfounded. And then they’re like, you have to get in front of this person. I didn’t even know you could get paid to speak when I got my first engagement. They just said, can you come tell your story? I spoke for half an hour. I did half an hour of Q and a, and then they give me a check. I was like, I can’t take that. They were like, you’re the keynote idiot. Take the money. That’s what you’re here for. And I was like, oh, okay. You’ve had a Ted X. It was incredible. You have another one that’s coming up, but could you also mention some of the places that you spoke at before? Because, and I’m not trying to say this disparagingly, if you put something in your bio automatically, it makes you a CEO or a speaker.
05:02
or an international keynote speaker, even though they’ve never spoken anywhere before. But yet if they say that, they hope that they’re going to get people to do it. Could you mention some of the places that you spoke and some of the impact that that made on those? Sure. It’s a very good point. One of the things that has been interesting to find out, I remember finding this out early on is that, you know, the National Speakers Association, honestly, is a large, large organization and I have a group of speakers that
05:22
We’ll attend the annual events to meet with each other outside of the main event. We don’t even actually go into the NSA. What I end up finding out is that it was 90 plus percent of people who put that kind of thing in their bios and I’m a public speaker or speaking is even the ones that say, look, speaking is how I get paid. That’s my career. They make over 90 percent make $30,000 a year or less speaking. Whereas at this point, that’s an hour keynote.
05:48
for me, right? And so there’s a different, and I’m not saying that’s because I’m amazing. Please don’t get me wrong. That is not it. But there is a difference between saying I’m a speaker and then you have got the thousands of hours on a stage speaking. You can say you’re speaker, but you have the testimonials from organizations that are saying this actually impacted our people. And again, that’s what we’re there for.
06:14
It’s to impact those people. It’s to impact the organizations. If you don’t do that well, you don’t get the repeat business. So my clients at this point have been very grateful. Amazon was a big one. Netflix, Google, Microsoft, Honda, US Air Force, Lockheed Martin, Stanford University, Wells Fargo, Purina, Caterpillar, so many Brooklyn nets, so many organizations. And what’s been cool is it’s been in so many different fields too. So I have gotten the opportunity to dive in to so many different…
06:44
industries working with these guys and some of them like American Eagle, right, it’s clothing and retail, but I’ve gotten to work with like nine or 10 of their different departments at different times. So I get to see all aspects of these businesses. And the reason we’re able to do that is because what I’m talking about is people. That’s the common denominator, right? That’s the common denominator. The people, yep. That’s the thread, right? So when you’re talking about leadership and you’re talking about communication and talking about
07:09
recruiting good people, retaining good people, you’re talking about relationships and you’re talking about people. And so that’s what I’ve been able to increase is the bond between people working together or between the organizations and their consumers. And then I also get the benefit of taking that information and bringing it back to the young people that I serve. That’s a unique… It’s what Navol calls a unique proposition selling point kind of thing. Nobody else that I know of has that relationship and then can bring it back to…
07:38
directly to young people in an educational environment like this. It’s fun to get to do what I get to do, man. Well, and it gives you one, it gives your students a huge advantage in the marketplace because they have the advantage of knowing in real time, because you and I both know there’s a lot of things that people will say, Oh, we’re all about this, we’re all about this, we’re all about this, we’re all about the people, we’re all about the communication, we’re all about respect. But then when something happens that really demands that subject to be broached, right. HR doesn’t want to talk about it or.
08:07
people want to point fingers. We talked about leadership when I was on your show. It’s the same thing where it’s very easy to preach and pontificate these very murky ideas and they’re very ambiguous. But it’s like, okay, but if I’m leading somebody, you have to get in there. And there’s going to be some people that like a certain style of leadership. There’s going to be some people that don’t respond to that. And that’s the leader’s fault. Again, it’s not about this idea of, well, I told them what to do and they didn’t do it. It’s like, that’s it. You told them. Yeah.
08:33
You’re not leading them. It’s a much more nuanced conversation, right? And I’m married and I’ve got kids at home and I can go in and boss everybody around all day. That’s not going to get everything done, right? There’s got to be a relationship there. There’s got to be an understanding. I’ve got to be able to look at things as the leader of the household from their perspectives. And that’s what I’m encouraging organizations to do as well. You know, we’ve got five different generations in the workplace, in the marketplace. That’s actually never happened before. Five distinct generations.
08:58
And when you’ve got five distinct generations operating side by side, you have five very different ways of defining leadership. You have five very different ways of defining communication. What does good communication look like? And it all comes down to that perspective of that person. So good leaders are going to have to be willing to engage all of those perspectives. Yeah. I talk about leadership when I do keynotes on it, I talk about it almost like the five love languages where
09:26
Again, like you said, if I have a group of killers and I’m like trying to get them going, that’s fine. But there’s going to be at least 25% of your employees that are not going to be on that page. Like you said, that may be because of the generations. And then all of a sudden they’re like, I don’t really, that doesn’t resonate with me. I don’t feel like I want to run through a brick wall right now. As a matter of fact, I’m more confused by your message now. And now you have the other three quarter of the company that’s all revved up. And now you’ve actually unintentionally created artificial division unnecessarily. Bingo.
09:56
Right. And we should be going this direction. And now, instead of doing that, you’re confusing everybody. You’ve money the water and now you’re like, well, why are we tanking this quarter? Why are we down 30%? It’s like, well, because you just got everybody riled up and then say go, and they have no clue what’s going on. They don’t trust each other. They can’t communicate. You have sales over here that’s doing this. You had delivery that’s doing this. I mean, there’s so many dynamics. And again, until people in those places that they see it, it just seems like, oh, we all just seen Combaya and all of a sudden, you know, we have an incredible quarter. It’s like,
10:25
That’s almost more dangerous than anything else out there. It is dangerous and it does, it creates that division. It creates that division in perpetuity. That’s really what I get paid to do at this point is to go in and go, okay, what is the division that’s already here? What are the issues? What are the pain points? It’s all of that stuff. But then it’s giving them that understanding of cool. You’ve got 10,000 employees and you’ve got.
10:45
50 of them that are kind of in this traditionalist sense. And you’ve got about a thousand of them that are boomers. You’ve got three or four thousand that are Gen X, but they’re all in these leadership positions. You also have millennials who are the biggest group within there and they’re taking on more and more leadership as Gen X is retiring. And then you’ve got Gen Z who grew up and they’ve never known a time without the internet and they’ve never known.
11:07
a time where they actually had to leave their room to even survive, right? You need food, you order it, it’s delivered. You need clothes, it’s ordered, delivered. You need a boyfriend, you swipe right. You need to work like it’s all been there. So you’ve got all of these perspectives working together in that same office or that same division or that same unit, all with those different perspectives. And you go in as a leader and say one thing that literally just got taken five different ways.
11:35
You’re perpetuating division unless you get that part out in the open and go, look, you’re viewing it, you’re viewing it, you’re viewing it, and you’re viewing it. Here’s how you guys are viewing it. Let’s talk about that with each other so that there is not this artificial division now between you guys. You guys now understand each other and can move forward and figure out a solution where everybody’s gifts get to come to the table. Everybody has that superpower. That’s right. And it reminds me of the military. Every generation of the military, the generation before was soft or these guys are never going
12:05
But like you said, each of these generations has a weakness by comparison to what their standards were. But again, as things evolve, it’s not really a weakness. I look at what my father knows or what my grandfather knew. My dad or grandfather, if you were broke down the side of the road, they could find a rock and piece of string and somehow they could change the alternator. I’m like, does this vehicle have an alternator? They’re like, yeah, we just created it. And I think of myself, I’m like, I can’t do that. But in today’s day and age, that isn’t necessary.
12:34
understanding the people in the workplace, there are so many things that are going on there. And again, just from that idea of, because I spoke at places where they’re like, well, you know, and so on. So they say you should do this, this and this and communication and team building. It’s like, okay, but and build trust. It’s like, that’s fine in a perfect world. But what happens when you’ve lost trust? What happens when you don’t have communication or you think that you do, but it’s not being received? That’s right. How many people are actually listening to what?
13:01
is really intended behind what’s being said. So there’s so much complexity there. And just to give this general idea, like I say, that to me is aggravating because leading people is difficult because people are difficult. What worked an hour ago may not work now. That’s right. Very few universal truths, but otherwise we can relate to it if I go, okay, hey, I’m gonna have to give you some context of culture because we’re gonna go over, we’re gonna expand into Dubai.
13:26
And so we’re going to be talking to all these people in Dubai, their culture says this, this and this. So we have to be very careful. We want to go in and you don’t want to shake hands here. You want to bow here. You want to… We understand that there’s differences of culture in other countries. What we need to understand is there’s differences of culture just within our own country and with our own ranks, within our own employee base. Understand that. Even though they grew up in America and they grew up in America, they still grew up in a different America, different skill sets and different perception. So it’s understanding all that stuff, which makes it a never ending…
13:55
never going to run out of work. That’s it. It’s, it’s an occupational hazard, but it’s job security. That’s exactly right. And same thing on the education side, right? And like that’s part of the way I love the way we run our schools is that we’re, I always tell my parents like no two years are going to be the same because we’re just going to continue. It’s not school. This is it. This is an educational center. It’s not school. School’s going to look the same every year. It doesn’t matter what the world around it is doing. School’s going to look pretty much the same.
14:24
We’re going to look different every year because something is going to be more relevant now and we’re going to need to focus on it. Something is going to be irrelevant now and our students are going to have to adapt to that. They’re going to have to be able to unlearn just as much as they’re going to have to be able to learn. Right. And so we’re going to incorporate that into everything we do. We’re a continuously growing, changing organism based on what is needed in the world we actually live in versus the world we theorize that we live in. Yeah.
14:52
perception, the academia, the bubble that everybody’s in. And that’s something else as well. It seems like so many of these, this idea with academia, this is where we see a lot of, I’ll just say straight up liberal kind of ideals, which I don’t think are bad necessarily, as long as they are tempered with logic. Why is that so prominent in those areas? And I’ve seen a lot of people like you were saying that get out and they’ve been sold this bill of goods.
15:20
and they have 50 to $100,000 in debt and they’ve been told this is what’s going on. And then they finally get out and they’re like, this is not at all like they said it would be not at all like I expected it to be. And frankly, these skillsets, not only the skillsets, but the philosophical notions or this, the ethos that they live by is completely preposterous and there’s no way they can apply it in the real world. When they get punched in the face, the first time they’re just like, wait a minute, this wasn’t what I was told the real world would be like. Yeah. It’s a scary scenario. And I always preface when I start talking about.
15:50
how those agendas are playing out in schooling and traditional academia. When I say traditional academia, you know, it’s we’re talking our public system K through 12, as well as the universities, but also a lot of times talking to private schools that model themselves after public schools. That entire system of academia is really built on this old fashioned Prussian model, right? And it’s designed not to create innovators and thinkers and people that are leading. It’s designed to create obedience at the ultimate level.
16:18
It’s you’re smart enough to follow the directions, but not so smart that you challenge and innovate and come up with a better idea. And at some point, you’re also mentally or financially trapped to where it’s even riskier to take a chance outside of that, right? So it’s designed that way on purpose. There’s a reason and always preface any of these talks about school and education with I am very pro teacher and administrator, like the people themselves.
16:48
very pro them because the majority of them are phenomenal people who are doing the stuff for the right reasons. The majority, right? I agree. The system they are in, I am very anti that system. So I want to make sure that that’s very, very clear. That system is designed to do exactly what we were talking about. So you know, there were some people early on that understood that from
17:10
a systemic standpoint, if you can get an entire nation of young people and you can make their brand of schooling compulsory, that over a period of time, you can make a populist think a certain way, behave a certain way, be obedient to a certain degree. And we need to start that now, start it early and just sprinkle things in early on. So all of this stuff we’re seeing play out, we’re in 2021 right now, all of this we’re seeing play out in terms of it’s now kind of labeled as a…
17:38
quote, unquote, liberal agenda, wherever you want to go with it. Socialism is a, you know, is a good thing to all white people are inherently racist to you can identify as a tyrannosaurus Rex if you want to. All of these different things have literally been on the docket as an agenda for 60, 70 years. It was just, when do we put this in play? And it’s been, you know, school has actually been something that has been weaponized against our populace. Unfortunate.
18:08
And that’s something that I realized early on. I was a public school teacher, and I was what I called creatively insubordinate. As a public school teacher, I was always getting the hands slapped. I remember being brought in by the superintendent of the first district that I was in. And I was in the gang lands of California. I was in a tough area, and kids stabbing each other at school, and parents that are in prison. Some of my best parents would come to their conferences with their parole officer, and that their area code tattooed around the neck. And I mean, they were some hard dudes.
18:36
So I was there and being told like, Hey, algebra is what’s going to save these guys. I had the superintendent literally sit me down and go, okay, I’ve got a problem. You are not listening to your site administrator. You’re implementing all these other programs from a personal level. I see what you’re doing. And it makes all the sense in the world from a professional level, you need to be pushing algebra on these kids. And I’m going, that’s not going to save them. They need, they’re brought home and they’re told to get out of the porch and sell drugs. Like I’m trying to shift their mindset so that I can actually save their life.
19:05
And he’s going, I know, but we need them to test well. And I’m like, okay, so there’s a giant disconnect and he’s going, there is a disconnect. And my problem as a superintendent is, I should fire you for your insubordination, but you’re also the most well-loved and well-respected teacher, you know, possibly here in this district. So what do I do? I’m like, well, that’s on you, man. I’m gonna do what I do. You make your call, however that needs to look for you. Right? But having that conversation, I’m like, okay, well, then maybe I need to become an administrator. And so…
19:34
I go become a public school administrator and that’s where you really see how the sausage is made and you go, wait a second, this is really all politics. This is really all money. This has nothing to do with kids. This is really anti-development. This has nothing to do with them. So I’m going to come in that I don’t have the ability to change that either. Yeah. Bye. Got to go. And we’re talking about actions over words, right? Administrators see this.
19:59
And again, and I’m not knocking them because I’m very pro administrator, but they see this, but then they go, ah, but my pension’s tied up in this. So I’m just going to stick it out. That’s it. I’m going to kick the can down there. This is a broken system. I’m concerned about a KPI, about a key performance indicator score, testing on this. So I’m going to stay here and just write it out, even though I don’t fully believe in what it is that I’m doing. And as my pensions here, I just have X amount and more, you know, more years and they’re at least get to do some good.
20:28
I personally can’t live like I can’t live like that. I can’t go, okay, well part of my day, I’m getting to do what I think is right. The rest of the day, I don’t get to do what I think is right, but I guess I have to. Like I just, there’s no part of me that feels like that’s an okay way to live. So I left my six figure job as a public school administrator to go to, I’m like, well, at that point, naively I’m like, well, all private schools then, they don’t have to play the role, so I’m gonna go there.
20:53
And I naively went there thinking it would be different, but I went there for $30,000 a year after just having our first kid and my wife’s at home. Right. So massive pay cut to do what I thought needed to be done. You learned that private schools are much the same as, as the public, you know, you’re not necessarily against turning to government, but there are still boards. There’s still agendas. There’s still politics. Yep. There’s still all of that. And so again, you know, it was a few years into that where I went, okay, now my children are getting to age where they’re going to have to go to school.
21:21
They’re not going to be a part of this. And so now what do I do as the leader who has that relationship with integrity? Now what? I mean, it really turned into, we’re either homeschooling or I’m going to build what needs to be built the way I see it. And so that’s the route that I chose to go. We talk about the hero’s journey. Steven Presswell talks about this in one of his books, the hero’s journey never ends. That’s right. We go through it. We go through adversity, we go through all this trying place, and then we end up at a crossroads, just like we were describing this like,
21:51
Okay, I know that this is the right thing. I also know that I’m being complicit in supporting this system. That is not the right thing. Right. And somebody needs to do something. Somebody needs to step up, but we don’t want it to be us because it’s too hard. We don’t want to write that book. We don’t want to do that. Tedx talk. We don’t want to do all this because we know how much work it’s going to be. And I don’t have time for that. I, you know, I’m just trying to make a living. And then when we start listening to that internal dialogue, we sound exactly like all those people.
22:21
that are making excuses, that are bullshitting themselves, that are justifying it. I call them rational, they’re rationalizing, I call it rational lies. That’s right. Because they create this thing that allows them to sleep at night. But if you look at every serial killer, they have a rationalization for, well, you know, the dog told me to do it, or that’s what my voice, or that’s what God told me to do. There’s a justification for anything if we allow it to have oxygen and see the light of day. And so you were very much within that place.
22:47
How were you able to find the courage and what did it even take to get to that place to start doing that? I mean, what did the first steps even look like to do what you’re doing now? Yeah, that’s a really good question, man. I haven’t been able to figure out, is it something that was, you know, it’s that old like nature versus nurture sort of thing. I tend to think there’s a lot of both, right? I remember being 14 and watching Braveheart for the first time, you know, him saying, everybody dies, not every man really lives. And me being like at 14 going, yeah, man, like I get, I feel that.
23:14
I have to live. Right. And so, you know, even at that young age, I was like, I need to collect experiences and I need to just try to do, I need to do as much as I possibly can. So I have just this unique set of experiences from graduating at 17 and leaving the house and making sure that I didn’t take a dime from my parents at that point to working to put myself through college to going through and being homeless during that process at some point, because I would not take anything from my parents to getting into having been a lifelong.
23:43
you know, martial artists, seeing this whole mixed martial arts thing taken off and doing some sketchy fights and having nine fights, you know, having nine fights in the cage and some sketchy airplane hangar, you know, like I had a couple of sketchy fights in Kansas. So you know, there was so much learning that comes out of all that through almost joining, you know, it was interesting hearing you talk about your journey and going into law enforcement. So I thought at graduation, I was going to be going into the secret service and ended up going a different route from there. But collecting all of these experiences.
24:11
is a huge part of that. And somewhere along the way, whether it was the nurturing of those experiences to the mentors that I had a chance to come across, I just realized that integrity was something that I wasn’t willing to negotiate with. It was just something that I was going to be that guy who said what I meant and meant what I said and give it my best effort, even if it killed me, no matter what it was.
24:38
I’m seeing all these issues in education and understanding that truly for me to be in line with my integrity, I was going to need to create what I thought needed to be created. I had my own kids. There was no, I’m the example, we talked about this on the thing, right? They’re going to do what I do before they ever do what I say. How can I tell them to live a life of integrity if I’m not willing to be integrists on this and move forward for the most important people in my life? The most important education.
25:06
For sure. I don’t like what is there for them. Well, then who else’s job is it to make something for my children? It’s my job. So I don’t like the schools that are available, then I need to make one. The hardest thing I’ve ever done by far. It’s a difficult thing to start any business, to start that kind of business where other people are putting their children in your care and they’re
25:36
That’s some high tension stuff, but man, by far, by far, one of the best decisions I ever made. And at this point you have three campuses and you’re getting ready to open a fourth and you have with Tim Kennedy, correct? And we got three here. I’m helping Tim open his out there in Cedar park, Texas. We as a network have a couple. And when I say network, I mean network. It’s not a franchise. There’s a group of people around the world that are of the same mind that are going, Hey, we’ve got to build something better. And so we’re just helping each other. So I.
26:06
had a call yesterday with my friend in China, right? He was trying to build one of these in China and we’re trying to help them get this up and running. And so we’ve got this network and I’m a part of pushing this whole network forward to really try to create global change by creating a better model. You have an incredible ethos and it’s aimed mostly towards young men with that leadership intention. Can you give us a short snapshot of what that looks like and how that’s already starting to make an impact on the generations to come?
26:33
Yeah, the campuses that the physical campuses we build out are K through 12, male and female. We want people to understand how to think, not what to think, not an agenda, right? We want to understand how to bring logic into things, how to actually look at both sides of a scenario and then weigh evidence and use that to inform decisions, right? Which is a crazy concept. And then understand that I’m going to come across human beings that do not agree with my assessment of that evidence.
27:01
And that’s okay too. That doesn’t have to impact me. It doesn’t have to impact me emotionally and drag me down. I can just be what it is, right? So from that perspective, you know, we’re very Socratic in our methods. We do not lecture ever on campuses and we don’t answer questions on campuses ever. And that doesn’t mean we ignore the kids. It means we don’t answer their questions. We get them to understand that there are answers there and they have multiple ways to figure out those answers. But the…
27:29
quote unquote authority figure isn’t going to be the one to just hand it to want to get them out of that habit. Right? So the Socratic method is huge for what we do on these campuses. The goal setting and the systems that we implement are huge too. So we want these young people to understand how to set their own individual goals. Just because I’m 12 and you’re 12, we’re not born to do the same thing. We’re not really good at the same thing. You’ve got a superpower, I’ve got a superpower. So set your goals.
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accordingly, so that you’re getting to be a better version than you. Not everybody who’s 12 is the same thing doing the same thing, same time. No, it’s you need to be better than you and trying to figure out what your superpower is. So we’re giving them tools to be able to do that. And then we’re having them take on real-world responsibility. So they have real projects, real businesses they are building from 5 years old to 18. Every single one of them will either build a new business every year or they will take their business into perpetuity. So we have…
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17 year olds in our network that this is no joke, they’re making six figures right now while they’re in high school. Based on the businesses they are building as their quote unquote schoolwork, right? We’ve got young people who are taking on the responsibility of cooking here on campus. We’ve got an executive chef that taught them how to cook. Part of their job and responsibility on campus is to come in and cook real food, not frozen stuff we’re heating up, cook real food for the young people here.
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on campus and he’ll just not show up. Sometimes they’ll go, Hey, you guys got 72 orders that got to be out by 1145. Go get it. And we’ve got two or three high school age students. We’ll go in and cook the meals for everybody there. They’re taking on real responsibility early. And so that’s the kind of thing that is separating. That’s why our guys are getting recruited. Our guys and girls are getting recruited straight from here to go into career level jobs that used to require a college degree. When I say used to, I’m saying these companies have said, Hey, we only…
29:23
allow college graduates here and they’ve come to our campuses and gone, we’re going to switch our entire company policy because we need you now at 18. Right? Like that’s the kind of stuff we’re seeing is these young people going straight into these roles and they’re being recruited straight here to bypass college. If they want to get into college, that’s been easy for them as well. Right. They’ve got all the skillset to be able to do that. But we’re seeing them build out, saw one young lady build out a seven figure nonprofit before she even left campus.
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And she’s going, I’m going to go ahead and bypass college for a little bit and just work on running this. Okay. Yeah. Cool. That’s a real world MBA. That’s exactly it. These are the stories that we’re getting within our network over and over again. Right. Are these kinds of things we’ve got these people that come out and can think and can actually take action on their ideas because they have some self-awareness. They’ve had the opportunity over the years with us to develop.
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that awareness around who I am, some confidence because they’ve actually done hard things. They failed in front of a whole bunch of people and it wasn’t bad for them to do so. It wasn’t well now you got an F and you got to remediate. It was like, no, you had some high stakes stuff. You had to give a presentation in front of all these people. You had to give a pitch to all these businesses. You didn’t get the investment. Somebody else did. Let’s go back and reflect on that. Let’s learn those experiences at 13 and fail there before you have a wife and kids. Right? It’s that.
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So we’re just developing completely different types of human beings, you know? And then, so we take those same kind of concepts into the male mentorship. And with Apogee knowing what else these guys are facing at this young age and having obviously been a young male. And we want to give them the tools to go out and attack the world as it is, man. And this is what we need. This is what everybody preaches. This is what everybody says we need more of.
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But again, they get to that crossroads and they say somebody needs to do something about this and then they get distracted by their phone or get in their vehicle or they watch whatever’s on Netflix or they eat food or they have some other high tech pacification that keeps them distracted because they feel like they’ve done their job. To point out the thing that everybody sees, but nobody’s willing to work on. Yeah. I am outraged. That’s right, man. Really? If you’re outraged. They did nothing about it. They did nothing to change anything. That’s exactly. I mean, that is the story of the world.
31:40
And we see that even within the network, right? So you’ll have people that are brave enough to go through the filtering process to wanna join the network of entrepreneurs that are trying to change education. And I will get 10 to 15 people around the world that reach out every week going, hey, I’m about to open a school. Can I pick your brain? And I say, no. I ask them to come back to me once they’ve opened it and once they’ve gotten going because the amount of people that say they’re going to versus the ones that actually do anything, the chasm is huge.
32:07
You were asking me on your show, you were like, you know, how are things different from 2017 till now? And I wanted to say, just like you’re saying, when you have all that inbound and people want to pick your brain, I learned now that that’s called consulting, right? Because people don’t respect what they don’t pay for. And just like you were saying, they want to hear you either corroborate their excuse because there’s no skin in the game or they want to hear how to do it. But like you said, they’re not putting it in. So that’s a good idea of, you know, go out there, do it a little bit, fall down a little bit. Yeah.
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and now come back and tell me what’s going on. I love that idea because it very much reflects what he was mentioning about the education that we have now is even with the bell system to create that idea for a refinery or a company that allows that. It’s like, okay, we want to condition them from an early age. Now they go over here. Now it’s lunchtime. Now they punch the clock. And it just destroys your soul to see all this potential to just be snuffed out or somebody to ask a question. And then once they are just beat down.
33:04
It literally discourages the behavior and they just learn, I can think what I want, but I’m going to shut my mouth. But then when they’re not even realizing that there’s the potential to do that now, all of a sudden, they just go along to get along, which you went through that. I even went through that trying to figure my way out before I joined the military and had kind of my epiphany for diversity. And think about the craziness of that too. So we put people through that system for 12 years.
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likely 16 years, right? If they’re going to go to Fortier because everybody has to go to college. So you put people through that 16 years of sit down, shut up, we’re going to tell you what to do, even if you can see, hey, why do I need to do this? Right? Every kid asks that. And the real answer usually when they’re asking that, the real answer is usually, you really shouldn’t be doing this. That’s usually the real answer. But the answer they get is because we said so, and this is just what everybody else does. Right? So we put people through that system for 16 years, be quiet, look to the authority.
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check off the boxes that that authority tells you to check off so you can get your pat on the back and get your attaboy. You’re not actually doing much other than checking off their boxes. And then you take that person who’s been now been trained for 16 years, and you put them into an organization that really wants to innovate. And they’re going, that organization is going, Okay, we need college graduates, because that shows that they’re going to be ready. But every college graduate we have brings nothing to the table. They just play school.
34:26
Like, yep, that’s what’s happening. It’s like Lockheed Martin is one of my big clients, right? And I work with their emerging leaders. Their emerging leaders are 22 year olds who are fresh out of Harvard, Stanford and MIT. And they’re going, hey, Matt, okay. So they got these 22 year olds. They’re all smarter than you, by the way. They’re all way smarter than you are. Of course they are. Right? But they suck. They suck. They’re just playing school and they’re scared to do anything. They’re scared to speak up. They’re scared to take a risk. They’re scared to think. They don’t understand how they’re…
34:54
role plays into the greater mission of what we’re doing here. And we want to fire all of them. What do we do? I’m going, okay, cool. There’s multiple layers to this. One is working with them and you’re going to have to try to untrain this mindset. They’ve now gone down this path for 16 years and you’re going to have to try to shift that. You’re going to have to take your perspective of all this and understand what they’ve gone through. So you’re going to have to lead understanding that they’ve been brainwashed for 16 years. And then hey, maybe as an organization, maybe you stop…
35:24
requiring that all of your people who come in from this role have 16 years of brainwash. Maybe you go a different route so that you can get some people from the get go that aren’t brainwashed like these young people and save yourself the heartache. Like there’s multiple ways to attack it. And so that’s what I helped them do. It’s a crazy cycle that we’ve, we’ve now built. And it’s interesting because like you said, when you zoom away from it, it’s obvious that we see the pattern emerge. Yeah.
35:49
But when you get in close, you know, we don’t have that from the fortune trees. It’s hard to be objective when you’re in the heat of it, but it’s so true. I mean, if you’re afraid of a rotten apple, you don’t go to the cart. You just go to the tree. Right. And that’s where you can bypass that. But again, at the same time, it comes back to that leadership. If they’re using KPIs are important. I understand top of the line, bottom line, all that’s important. If all we measure are those KPIs, then that’s all they’re going to focus on. And if they use the buzzwords of culture and leadership.
36:19
and vision, but they’re not putting it into play. And then they don’t understand why nobody is following this. Well, if they don’t know what it is, or if they’re just checking the boxes, because this is what so and so said that we’re supposed to do, people can see through that people can feel when there is nothing really there. Like you were mentioning that pragmatic empathy where you can understand, listen, I know that this person’s coming from this brainwashing for so long. Right. I empathize with them, but I see that there is some light in this. I see that this young person.
36:47
has these goals and they have this energy that they want to bring in. And we can give anybody skill set, but they have to have that energy, that enthusiasm, that work ethic from doing the hard things, from falling down, from knowing that they’re not made out of porcelain and they can get up and just, huh, that wasn’t so bad. That’s it. They got to have that and that self-awareness of going, okay, I know, by the way, I know what my superpower is. I know what I’m really, really good at. I know.
37:11
what my value proposition is. And here’s what I want to do for you. Here’s how I impact your organization, right? And then like you said, from that organizational standpoint, the thing that keeps them from going back to the tree to get those apples is the fear that’s been built around doing that because the organizational tradition has said, well, you go to the cart, you go to the cart, go to the cart, nope, go to the cart, nope, go to the cart. And so they’re afraid to buck the trend and not go to the cart. They’re afraid to go over and that’s it. That’s what I’ve noticed is that
37:39
the majority of people live in fear. That’s why they don’t take action. That’s why they just talk because it is a safer thing to do. It’s the man in the arena thing. It’s safer to sit on the sidelines and it’s a fear-based mentality. And that’s just another thing that I am hell bent on never living in fear because I don’t want, I just can’t, I can’t look myself in the mirror with that, but I don’t want my kids living in fear either. I refuse. That was part one of my interview with Matt Bodro, host of the Essential Eleven podcast.
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and founder of Acton Academy Placer. You can hear part two of our interview on the next episode of Octo Non Verba, where Matt returns to share how his journey of becoming an educational professional revealed the need to shift how kids are learning in order to foster curiosity and future growth. Matt and I also discuss how Matt’s Academy is teaching kids multiple ways to find an answer, the meaning of real world responsibility.
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and what this kind of education is doing for our leaders of tomorrow. You can find out more about Matt Boudreau on LinkedIn.
