11 behaviours punished in school -- but rewarded in adulthood.

I left the education system. But the education system did not leave me.

You may have left the education system. But did the education system leave you?

One strange realisation as you get older: A lot of the behaviours you were punished for in school are rewarded in adulthood, and a lot of the behaviours you were rewarded for in school are punished in adulthood.

A large part of adulthood isn't learning anything new; it's just unlearning lessons from school, debugging the code the education system has written in your head—line by line, habit by habit, assumption by assumption.

Here’s a list of behaviours punished in school — but rewarded in adulthood:

1. Questioning the highest status person in the room - At school, it’s easy to see your teachers as gods that can’t be questioned. That’s the default assumption the school whispers to you: teachers are the highest-status people in the room. One of the biggest red pill moments comes in your early 20s. A person you know who is lost and confused says to you: “I’m unsure what to do with my life, so I’m going to become a teacher. It’s got great holidays!” You then do the mental maths: “What % of the teachers I put on pedestals at school were just lost people figuring things out?!”. And the same is true now: “What % of people I’m putting on pedestals now are just grown-up children figuring things out?”

2. Copying people - When I was 12, I handed in my dad’s university dissertation as my computer science homework. I was put in detention for copying. In adulthood, if you copy a successful playbook, you’re labelled a “successful franchisee owner”. The global franchise market is worth over $1 trillion annually. Reality rewards finding the smartest kid in the class and stealing every bit of knowledge they have.

3. Hardcore nerdiness - If you had a hardcore nerdy obsession, you’re a bully’s dream. And a teacher’s nightmare if your interests are outside the curriculum. In adulthood, it’s impossible to find someone at the top 1% of their field who doesn’t have a hardcore nerdy obsession with it. Society no longer laughs at you or throws you out of class; they pay you buckets of cash to be a hardcore nerd.

4. Touching reality - The rewards in school are for your theoretical knowledge. The teacher will have a smile on their face if you write a 2,000-word essay of a SWOT analysis of Coca-Cola’s business, but if the same teacher caught you turning $50 of Coca-Cola cans into $200 of profit at lunchtime, they will have a frown on their face. “In theory, there’s no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is!” - Yogi Berra

5. Losing popularity contests - School reinforces the mimetic desire to win popularity contests. In adulthood, you gradually realise the whole game was a facade. If you win, people resent you and want to tear you down. And if you lose, nobody is thinking about you -- most people are too busy worrying about what you were thinking of them to have an opinion of you.

And then you die.

And then they all die.

6. Staring out of windows doing nothing - You’ve finished your work? We don’t want you staring out the window, daydreaming. Don’t worry, we’ve got more work for you. It never ends. And there’s work for when you get home. If you carry this addiction to busyness into adulthood, you end up in the Tversky trap: “Some people waste years because they can’t waste hours”. The most prolific people I know and have read about spend a lot of time doing what appears like nothing: taking walks, meditating, laying on the sofa, staring at the ceiling.

7. Rejecting normality - If you have a weird accent, fashion sense or worldviews, you’ll be isolated from the group. As you grow old, this flips: nobody remembers any of your normal behaviours. If you study the biographies of the greats or attend the funerals of people you care about, the normal rational behaviour is never mentioned. It’s the times they broke out of the median distribution of human behaviour that they tell stories about. In adulthood, you painfully realise that if you want weird outputs, you’ll need weird inputs.

8. Creating your own time zone - School doesn’t care if you get your best work done from 5am to 9am, or 10pm to 3am. You must comply with the agreed schedule. Some people go their entire lives never aligning with their unique biological clock because of the school bell that still exists in their head. The most productive adults ignore society’s clock and create their own time zones.

9. Never ask for permission to visit the bathroom - If you want to go to the toilet, you must ask. You must not release your bladder without permission. Or else.

In adulthood, you can now go to the bathroom as you please, but this concept of waiting for permission from a status figure still exists.

The bathroom is less physical and more metaphorical: Waiting for permission to ask her out, waiting for permission to quit the job, waiting for permission to leave your hometown, waiting for permission to take Roy off the grid.

Meanwhile, 70 years later, when the same children have grey hair and wrinkles, they lament wasting their lives waiting for permission.

If you look closely, all the top 5 regrets of the dying are caused by waiting for permission. They were waiting for someone to give them permission to visit the bathroom:

I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

10. Exiting your age lane - School and college create age lanes. Most of your friends are the same age as you, and you rarely leave these lanes. Some of these relationships become intense mimetic rivalries and zero-sum games. Through contrasting their life to yours, your victories feel like defeats to them, and your defeats feel like victories to them. This is an unfortunate feature in the human operating system.

In the real world outside of school, if you get friends who are significantly older than you, there's less mimetic competition. Just decades of wisdom they love to share. They’ve completed their mimetic games and now want to help people who remind them of their younger selves. This was normal for most of your ancestors.

11. Hunting like an eagle - "One should not read like a dog obeying its master, but like an eagle hunting its prey" - Dee Hock. Whenever I would start a book, article or podcast -- the school teacher still lived in my head.

Decades after leaving school, whenever I opened a book or started a podcast, there he was—demanding I consume at the set pace, forbidding me to skip ahead to what matters. I was taught to learn like a dog. Obedient. Patient. Grateful for scraps. I built up a resentment for learning.

If you want to re-find your love for learning, learn like an eagle hunting its prey. Build your own curriculum. Get what is useful. Move on when it's boring. You're not there to serve the teacher. The teacher is there to serve you.

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This was my first post on Substack. I’ll be using the platform to test ideas for V2 of highagency.com. Please subscribe and share if you enjoyed it.

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Special thank you to two of my favourite people on the planet: Harry Dry and Billy Oppenheimer for giving feedback.