Hey guys, in today's podcast, Gary's in Chattanooga, Tennessee giving a keynote in front of the Chattanooga

Preparatory School. In this podcast, Gary talks about what is most important in school.

This is the Gary V. Audio Experience.

What I'm going to do is kind of give you guys a little bit about my background,

spit a couple things that are on my mind that I think might be valuable for your life,

and then hopefully maybe even do a little bit of Q&A with you guys because I think that

matters as well. It's really fun to be here because when I think back to my childhood

and school in general, I have a really interesting relationship with school because I was an

atrociously bad student. My whole life, I got D's and F's. I'm not so sure how well of an

opening line that is for the mentors and everybody else, but I think it's super important for you to

hear where I'm going with this. It doesn't mean that you should go and get these and F's and

things that nature, but what I'm going to speak to you about is where I come from,

what got me to where I am today, and that's not predicated on how successful I am financially

or reputation-wise, I sit in front of you today as a 43-year-old man who's extremely happy,

and happiness to me needs to become the thing that everybody tries to achieve, whether they're

sitting here or they're sitting back there, even though they're much further along. So I was born

in the former Soviet Union. I was born in a small country called Belarus, which was part of the Soviet

Union near Russia and that part of the world, near Poland. I came to America when I was three.

We were unbelievably poor. I lived in a studio apartment in Queens from the ages of three to

six years old. That was literally the size of the stage that I'm on now with five other family

members. So I came from a really kind of early rugged place. We didn't speak the language,

the economy was bad, so it was hard to get jobs. It was tough. The only thing my parents knew was

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