“A Conversation with Steve Schecter on Creating a Life of Purpose in Drug Prevention”

Ladies and gentlemen, happy Monday. And welcome back to another episode of Party talk, where we empower leaders in youth drug prevention. And today we’re going to talk about developing youth and their minds, because today I’m talking with Steve Schecter, he is the founder of Much Smarter. And this is a company that helps young people use their minds to create the life that they want. And why I’m so excited about this is because in drug prevention, we talk a lot about substances. But what we don’t talk about is that foundation of a weekend help students create a life that they want, they won’t have the desire to use destructive substances, because they will be so in love with their reality, they won’t need to escape it. So Steve, thank you so much for being on the party talk podcast. And how’s your day going so far?

It’s going great. And I’ve got to tell you, Jake, that you have such incredible positive energy, that it’s absolutely contagious. I could, I could tell you with a great certainty, if I were feeling down before I got on the call with you, I’d be feeling I’d be flying. So thank you for that your outro is truly infectious.

“Crafting a Life of Purpose: Steve Schecter, Founder of Much Smarter, Explores the Power of Learning and Self-Creation in Youth Development”

Absolutely. Thanks for saying that. I love it. And why don’t we learn more because when I was on your profile, I resonate with all your language, like everything you’re putting together? And can you tell us more about. Like, what is much smarter? And why did you see a need for this? I guess, however, you want to start the story. I’m just really, really intrigued it sounds awesome.

Well, that’s a great starting point, Jake, why did I see the need for it. So it really started with my own background. And I found myself as a young person having certain pain points, like all young people do. And this is really what’s so important about what you your work, I found certain pain points and just normal stuff. Feeling shy, comparing myself often needlessly, with other kids, and finding the need for skills. You know, I had a, I had a conversation with my dad once I must have been about 11. And I was talking with a friend of mine, Richard and Richard summarized his problem has said, “I don’t have confidence.” And I talked to my dad, and I said, Richard, and I don’t have confidence. And he said, Well, I can’t speak for Richard, but I know you, Steve. And I know that you’re going to learn how to have confidence. And so learning for me was a big thing. Because whatever I found lacking in my life, I found that there was generally someone who could guide me and I could learn some skills. So it really is all about skills. Fast forward. I found from experience that I was able to level up in almost every area of life, and just having the experience of leveling up academically, socially, never got never got good at golf. But as a matter of fact, I discovered that my error in golf was I just defined the rules the wrong way. If I had made the game about getting the highest score, I would have been a champion. Yeah, but, but it was really all about learning, learning was very powerful. You’ll see that guitar behind me, much of what I learned was, through the discipline of getting good at music, I was a natural musician. But when I discovered what the practice musician could be, I developed a real passion for building skills and for learning and and then became a parent thought about what is it I wanted my children to learn most, you know, we were educating them in New York City, a very competitive place. And I was thinking about, but what is it I really hope they get, and then I even began to muse about what would I do if I had the opportunity to influence the world of education? What would I want, What would I want it to be about? And I came up with a provisional answer, but it was all about skills. And when I thought about skills, what are the really defining skills, the really defining skills are really being able to exist within our frame, being able to being able to to create your life. I think it’s I think it’s so meaningful today. I call it the created life. You know, one of the biggest difficulties as a young person is out outside influences seems so strong. And we feel helpless in, in, in, in light of all the pressures that weigh on us, when we understand that we are the creator of our own life. It makes everything different. So I’m going to stop here to sort of check in with you about what, I still wonder.

No, that is, that is so cool. I’m writing down some things because I definitely want to ask you about them. And, yeah, just to relate to what you’re saying, I, wow, I 100% can see myself in your shoes. One of the reasons why I became so passionate about my work is I saw a lot of my friends escaping their life, you know, for the living for the Weekend. And I forget who it was that told me this, but they said, “if you’re living for the weekend, and wouldn’t you want to just change your week?” Wouldn’t you want to create a life that you’re excited about every day of the week. And I think that’s what you’re talking about is these skills. And I remember, I remember going through school having this struggle of, hey, my friends want to escape to have fun, they want to do these dangerous things. They were learning how to socialize by depending on a substance, or they would learning how to relieve stress depending on a substance. And I thought to myself, well, I’ve seen where that road leads, I’ve seen addiction. I’ve seen all these trials and relationship issues that happen. When we go down that road. I don’t want that like, quote unquote skill, or I don’t want my body to learn how to do that. I want a real skill, where I learned how to deal with my stress. And I learned how to socialize without depending on a substance. And music drumming is for me, man. I’m a drummer. So we gotta we got to play sometime. Is so many lives is awesome. So yeah, all that to say I absolutely relate to you, 100%. And definitely want to dive into some of those skills that you’re talking about, like, what are these? You mentioned, there’s a number of skills that you focus on or that you’ve identified, we’d love to learn about what skills are important for young people to learn.

“Choosing Skill Sets Over Shortcuts: Steve’s Journey to Mastering Physical Exercise and the Joy of Sustainable Growth”

I love that question. And so that kind of brings me to that brings me to current chapter. As it happens. I got a master’s in business, I went to work developing products for companies, I was very engaged in it, I did it well. The heart was missing, where I engaged my heart was in music and actually took a year and a half off to write and produce a musical I produced it for one night on Broadway and I my heart was engaged. The one night musical was a success. I was so happy that I was living in New York City at the time, I picked myself out of park bench overlooking the East River. And I sat there for a week and bliss I was so happy from the experience. And then the as a as a as a coincidence of the universe, I think, through me an interesting curve, and that a guy who was college advisor at a school here on Long Island, said to me, you know, he had observed that I was volunteering with young people and he said I I really admire your commitment to young people. I wish you’d help the some of our students. And I didn’t think he was serious. So I said, Sure, no problem. So he started. So this was the birth of my accidental tutoring company. He started sending me students a few months later, and he was sending them in numbers. And they were starting to tell other students and what happened was that I no longer had time. It was It no longer fit within the volunteering hours. So I had to make more time. And then so that’s how my current life began. And early on, and it because of my own experiences, I wanted to make it about more than just the academics. Don’t get me wrong. I think the academics are important, especially if you use them the way I do. The what I what I what I came to was a kind of a model, that our success, and I use success in the broadest sense of the word. In other words, success is self defined. “But our success is a product of how we think, how we feel, and how we learn.” So those are the three sets of skills. How we think, relates to the way we view our potential and the way we view difficulty. And I have in the years since outlined 10 thinking habits that I think are the most powerful to master. But let’s boil it down to essentially two things, we want to learn how to expand our view of our potential, and shrink our view of difficulty. The more we understand the difficulty is temporary, that difficulty can be broken down. And that in that way difficulty can be mastered, the more powerful we are. And so that’s those are habits of thinking, habits feeling. Around the time I was starting to work with students, I learned what for me was a superpower, “I learned how to let go of what I call limiting emotions, and limiting emotions.” We all know what they are. fear, anger, self judgment, worry. So I identified 10 Feeling habits that are in our model. But let’s boil it down again, for the purpose of being brief, or thinking how our feeling habits come down to being able to choose the emotion we bring to our game. Think of think of when we’re in a helpless place, we think we are our anger, we think we are or anxiety when we come to understand it as something we’ve learned to this point in our life. And then we can learn something different. That’s a whole new place of power. So for again, it’s all about learning. And then finally, the habits of learning. Again, there are 10 of them, but they boil down to being able to look at the challenges we face in the matter of a game of skill. And this is where this is where I think we we’d like to rejuvenate academics. Now most people think about academics is stuff that they have to do. And and who could blame them, you know, we’re in, we’re in a box from K through 12. And we we you know, we think of it as an obligation. But if we think of these mental challenges as a way to get mentally fit as a way to learn how to use our mind, we can reframe them and make something out of them. And it’s this is really not for the system to do for us. This is for us to do for us. So it’s habits of thinking, habits of feeling and habits of learning. And those are the three sets of skills. I want to just because of I know your particular interest, I want to talk a little bit about the habits of feeling the one in the middle, because I personally learned how to let go of limiting emotions. I can date about 20 years ago when I really started accelerating my learning. And I want to say it’s been a really important thing. I noticed that when I learned how to let go of these limiting emotions, and I share this with students I noticed that often, often, often, often, things would get better if I would only refrain from making them worse. And I the reason. The reason I say this to you is because I know the special concern that you have with young people and avoiding going down the road of dependency or even harming themselves. And so having come from the perspective of things often will get better of their own accord if we can only learn how to refrain from making them worse, I think is it’s a great learning. It’s not even that difficult. Jake. You know, it’s great learning.

Wow, that’s fascinating. I love that I love the way that you’ve broken it down into these three areas. And it sounds like you have an incredible model, even being on your website as well. Was, was super intrigued about, you know, gamifying and having this challenge like viewing learning as a challenge. And I think that goes with like you said how we think we feel and we learn is we can apply this view of the these challenges are a like a challenge can be overcome. Like you had said it’s a way that we view them that can make all the difference. If we think that we are the problem, or we are our emotions that we have no control over it. Versus if we recognize we’re feeling an emotion, then we do have control over it. And that is such an important lesson to learn. And looking back on life, right we probably can both attest to I wish I had learned that earlier. Like would have been so much sweeter.

Yeah, it’s uh, I feel, I feel deeply grateful for having learned it, period. I feel it’s, you know, I think about, I think about being a teenager in particular, and how I’m comparing myself with everyone else on every possible dimension, and seeing how meaning, meaningless that is, and all the all the pressure, it puts and all of the unnecessary unhappiness it creates. And then coming to a point where I can honestly say, “I’m the creator of my own life.” I mean, that’s really it. And I can feel it, even saying that I can feel an exhilaration. And it’s something, it’s something learned. But I think it’s really to your point, you know, a lot of the addiction that you’re talking about, I would imagine a lot of it’s fairly dramatic and fairly. There are dramatic forms that the addiction takes. But I think there is, I think, the tendency or the vulnerability to indec, an addiction is kind of pervasive in society. If we encourage dependency, in other words, if we teach people how to be helpless, if we teach them that the power is elsewhere, then we may be encouraging mild forms of dependency. But it’s just a continuum. Right? So So for example, rather than being so quick, to diagnose a young person, and give them some sort of a medication, not saying that’s a wrong thing to do, but don’t hurry, I had a so I had a conversation with a psychologist, they, the parents asked me to speak to the psychologist on behalf of their, their child. And the psychologist had identified the child as ADHD and was some recommending medication. And I said, simple question. I said, Tell me what the medication will accomplish. And the psychologist very kindly explained it in layman’s terms, said, Well, you know, on these old fashioned cars that had spark plugs, just imagining, just imagine the spark is not quite firing. In other words, it doesn’t it kind of there are gaps. And then, you know, if you’ll understand nerve cells, there’s a, there’s an electrical signal, and then there’s a chemical leap. And so these nerve cells are not firing adequately. So they’re almost these little. And, and the, the, what the medicine does is provides a hormone, which ensures the steady firing of these nerve cells. And so I listened to it and I, I said, well, doesn’t a young person get that same hormone from active physical exercise. And they psychologist said, Yeah, I said, Well, wouldn’t we at least try that? What would be wrong with yoga or, or jogging first. And then if that doesn’t work. And it was not even considered, it was like, Oh, I’m not in that business. I’m in the business of making a diagnosis. And, and the reason why I think that’s so profound, Jake, is that I mean, so many students, when they get that diagnosis, whatever diagnosis, they feel it defines them. And so, again, I’m not saying that the diagnosis is not real, or that these things don’t come up. But I’ve also seen that at the most profound levels, ultimately, we’re responsible for our happiness. We’re responsible for our effectiveness. And whatever program we’re on, we ultimately want to have the skill of understanding where we are, what the performance is calling for, and how we’ve learned to get our best performance going. Yes. Oh, I got chills because it’s, it’s a lot like the, like, the passion behind what we’re teaching, and even the language you use. It’s, this is so awesome. Even though this is our first time meeting. I’ve been. I feel like we’re sharing a path because I talked about this, this theme in our presentations. Yes, it’s a drug, alcohol and vaping prevention program, but It’s talking about learning. And the theme that I use is choosing skill sets over shortcuts, saying, Hey, don’t take that quick, easy way out that pill right away, that drug that quick escape, because there’s probably a more sustainable option. And that’s what you had said with that example, is, you know, can we start prescribing physical activity, if a doctor says, Hey, I prescribed you every day, 30 minutes of physical activity, and that’s something you can do for the rest of your life and makes you better in a lot of different ways, versus the dependency of that drug. And what we know about drugs is the effects of it tend to lessen, we have to up our dose to get the same effects. So it’s not necessarily a sustainable solution. We should be looking at these other other alternatives. And so I just love your language. It resonates with me so much, and the things that we teach young people. Yeah, it’s really really cool.

Yeah, and you know, it’s sort of, here’s the, here’s another cool aspect of coming back to what I was sharing with you about learning how to let go of limiting emotions. I can’t even say it was difficult. It requires a little more patience. It requires a gentle persistence but most skills if you break them down and you’re willing to master the skill a little bit at a time they’re not actually difficult. And that’s your your your choosing apparently easy often. Apparently easy now for really difficult later now in exchange for a little tiny bit challenge now for easier and greater and more joyful later. Yes, I have to share with you with some joy that I finally I finally mastered the physical exercise component I’ve been I’ve been on ups and downs for physical exercise all my life I have never found a mode that I’ve loved enough to stick with and because my schedule is so busy I mean, you could you can you could relate it was always a challenge about three years ago with the pandemic and I’ll something about the universe every negative also has its positive side because of the pandemic. Didn’t get to go out as much, it was sort of confronted with it. I took up calisthenics. Now, calisthenics, the beauty of it is, it’s easy to do, it’s something very scalable, you can start astonishingly small, and I’ve built it up, I’m in better shape than I’ve ever been, get a little stronger all the time. Don’t get injured. And a wider approach is so great. It’s almost like redefining. And so here, here where we’re talking about something that easy, a little challenging to start and then soul rewarding down the line.

Yeah, that’s good. Gonna ask you more about your program? And I know what it looks like.

“Transformative Learning: Approach to Gamifying Education and Mastering Challenges with Students”

Yep, absolutely. So. So we, we actually, for our, for the first few years of practice, I was helping students with whatever they and their parents brought to me as what was stressing them out what was stressing them out often was either a standardized test, or a difficult subject. And initially, I was just addressing the academic component. And then I found that Jacob was just getting a lot of love. And I said to something else going on here, there can’t be this much love attached to it as he just can’t be. But I realized that that we’re the love was coming from is that I think parents and parent and child, were feeling something exhilarating, on becoming successful with something they thought they couldn’t. And I think this was the this was the big thing. So I remember I had a and this, this comes back to the game of skill metaphor. I had a student named Jonah who came to me with he wanted to take SAT he wanted to do well. He wasn’t showing particular strength in any subjects. And when I gave them a sample set of SAT, math questions, he got one out of 20 Correct. So it wasn’t like a wasn’t like an astonishingly strong start. Not only that, there were, there were issues there were attention issues that his parents were talking about. So but ideal in a world of strength. So I wanted to find out what Jonah’s strengths were. And I found out that he had an extraordinary work ethic when it came to sports, that he loved tennis, he would practice tennis from 7am to 7pm. He loved basketball, he would practice basketball from 8am to 8pm. And so I said to him, at the start of our work together, I said, Jonah, what would happen if you practice math, and he and he really despised math, I said, What would happen if you practice math the same way that you practiced tennis or basketball, and he said to me, without hesitation, Steve, I would be a math monster. And so we, we set it up so that he approached it as a game. His mom actually called me to ask if I could encourage him to ease up a little bit because he was going at the same ferocity that he went at his basketball and his tennis. But the net out was No, he didn’t become a math monster, but he tamed a demon. In other words, he got good at it. And he felt so rewarded for that it he understood how to approach difficulty.

What did that,  What did that look like? How can you make that that math similar to practice to like practicing? How Yeah, how can that mind shift even happen? Or what does that look like to gamify? Something like that.

Well yeah, you know, which, and it’s really a, it’s really a way of thinking about it, you know, I am, I learned most of what I needed to know about learning from studying classical piano. So classical piano was something that I actually got. I actually was inspired to get a great piano teacher when I had been relying on natural skills, natural gifts, and I got up in front of an auditorium full of people in my first year of college and crashed and burned, I hadn’t practiced well enough and crashed and burned literally had to get up. Smile as you do it with a with a with an engaging smile. I smiled to the audience said, ladies and gentlemen, I must apologize. But I cannot continue the piece bowed and left the stage. But I got a I got a great piano teacher who taught me how to learn. So what she taught me was fundamentally what doesn’t matter whether you’re playing scales, or whether you’re playing one hand at a time, play it, like you’re making music, you’re always making music, and she would show me physically what that meant, like. So you’re, you’re, you’re in a place of joy you’re in, you’re getting into a flow state. And she taught me how to take something complex, break it down into small working parts, so that what you’re working on on a given day is not is not difficult. And then to patiently and lovingly build it back together again, I bet any great college football coach will tell you that, that he or she does the same thing with the team, you know, break it down, do the small drills, build the enthusiasm around those small drills and then pull it back together again. And so that’s what I learned to do with classical piano. I then applied it to academics. When I before I went to graduate school for business, I applied that same mentality to a big bad standardized test, and broke it down, like I would break down a piano piece. And then I learned how to apply that to most things. And so what what what the neuroscientists will tell you is that if you have a strong neural network for something else was a neural network is the is the you know, the brain assigns nerve cells to a task. And when a task becomes very well practiced, the nerve cells not only aggregate into bigger bundles, but they fire more quickly. If you have a strong neural network for something at any level, weak neural network for something else, if you can kind of get them close together in your your thinking, then the weak neural network will start to benefit from the strong neural network. I did that with math and music. I didn’t like math at all in high school, but when I learned to associate it, with music in my brain, that I was able to actually love math. And so I think that’s what happened with Jonah. I think he became when he started to see math in the same place that he saw tennis and basketball and understood the process then it neutralized it you would least neutralize it and maybe You turn into something you love now, and being a person in the world and in a, in a business or in a professional capacity, you recognize that you have a mix of things that you love, and you have a mix of things that you don’t love. At a minimum, we want to get out of our comfort zone. And so that involves being able to approach something we fear. So I think that’s where, even for a student being able to one time master, something you fear is, is liberating and expansive. So yeah, and so but it is, it is a why it is a matter of the way you see it. Nobody else can do that for you. It’s really about how you frame it. So when I talk about gamification, the the the avatars and the bells and whistles and the end, and the teachings are the less important thing than in to internalize it as a game. I am, I recently had a student that I was honored, the parents decided to assign me the student in the students gap year, the student took a gap year between high school and college. And instead of sending the student away to a school, they decided to have the student study with me for a year. And we actually, as part of our training, we did math that she would have feared that we did calculus. And here was some of the cool things that happened as a result of our work together. She understood that she could learn something at her own pace, in other words, that that that it didn’t matter if some things took her longer. It didn’t matter if she made mistakes, it didn’t matter if she failed. In the end, two things she got out of the work, she could work for a half hour on a problem that she didn’t know how to do, get the wrong answer and be not at discouraged. But in a in a kind of a blissful place. Go back to the beginning. Work the steps through get it right. And and, you know, do the high five. And, and that what a great send off for college. Yeah, maybe she uses the math, maybe she doesn’t. But she will benefit from knowing how to master difficulty. Yeah, knowing how to solve a problem knowing how to stay calm, stay in place, stay focused, right. So the these are ways in which you reframe some of the things you have to do or you think you have to do and look at them as something that you get to do. You can you can gain a lot of power.

“Much Smarter: Empowering Minds, Transforming Lives, and Building Lifelong Learners”

That’s incredible. Wow, Steve, this is so cool. I, I’m seeing that you can take, you can take something that seemed like a chore. Or maybe you didn’t think was possible, or it’s not my thing. And then you can learn to love the process by connecting something that you do love. And that that’s very, what sounds cool is that you, you and your company are able to tailor it to this specific person to get to know them, and to figure out what this looks like. Because you’re not just helping them for a class or a test or a lesson. You’re helping them become a lifelong learner. And just like your mission statement says it’s to use your mind to create the life that you want. And so I’ve just, I’m loving this concept. Can you tell us how we can learn more about it? And if we want to work with you, like what that where he can go to kind of ask questions and stuff.

Yeah, so our website is www.muchsmarter.com. And you can learn about our philosophy and our approach and what some students have gotten from working with us. If you have an academic challenge of any sort, if you want to expand academically in any way, talk to us, we’ll see if there’s a fit as a better better still, we’ll help you see if there’s a fit we typically like to invest in in a conversation to help you try out if there’s a fit. And then if you see there’s a fit. You can see about engaging us one on one. Also be on the lookout for our games we have. We have one standardized test game in the US. We will have another available in the new year. We’ve got two games in the UK. My intent, Jake, is to have a K to 12 curriculum of based on our games and the purpose of the games ultimately is yes to academic to to help you address academic challenges, but we’d like to let a every student than the and those that love them have an opportunity to use K to 12 as a way to develop the mind you want to develop and get through it at a pace that makes sense for you, and to use it to power your life. And that’s what we’re all about. So today’s question about how you could engage with us.

Yes. That’s wonderful. Steve, thank you so much for doing this with me. I, I’ve loved our conversation. I definitely want to keep in touch. I appreciate you covering out some time to talk with me.

It’s just been great, Jake. And as I said, anybody who gets on a call with you is privileged, just the energy alone. Incredible, but the questions were great, and thank you.

Absolutely. And for everyone listening. This has been one more episode of partying talk, where we empower leaders in youth job prevention. I hope you have a wonderful week and in case you haven’t been told recently, you are a world changer. Keep doing life saving work. We’ll see you next Monday for another episode.