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What I would tell your teenage child, grandchild or other young person that you want to have a good life
What I would tell your teenage child, grandchild or other young person that you want to have a good life
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About this episode
Lenny Lawson shares valuable life lessons aimed at young people, emphasizing the importance of personal responsibility, financial literacy, and effective communication. He reflects on his upbringing and the lessons learned from his parents, urging today's youth to develop skills that will serve them in the real world. The discussion touches on the impact of technology on attention spans and the need for mentorship in navigating life's challenges. Lenny also highlights the significance of budgeting and making informed career choices, advocating for a shift towards technical education over traditional paths.
Topics:
financial literacy
personal responsibility
communication skills
mentorship
budgeting
career choices
technology impact
youth development
Cars:
Ford Bronco
Email Lennie at [email protected]
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"...ching to bring a trailer auction to see what Fort Bronco was gonna bring. So I don't apologize for taking ..."
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Hey folks, Lenny Lawson here, the Car Guru.
My daughter was just in my office.
I had to ask her to remind me of a phrase that I've used many times.
That happens a lot these days in my old age.
But yeah, you remember the saying, a jack of all trades, but a master of none?
My question for America's youth today is that are you a jack of all trades?
When I'm talking about trades, there's certain fundamental things I think that every young
person needs to be at least acquainted with, familiar with, and they need to respect certain
attributes that we all need to have.
My parents imbued into me certain things.
I didn't even realize they were doing it.
I mean it was the example of how they lived and how they conducted themselves, you know,
just in society, how they interacted with people that they knew and loved, and how they
interacted with people that were total strangers.
You didn't see a lot of difference with them.
And I learned my respect for other human beings and interaction with other human beings from
my parents without even realizing it.
So in today's show, we're going to talk about stuff like that.
I know that this is a show about cars, but what I want to do is I want to prepare
young people and to equip old people who still have young people in the household
to focus on certain key attributes that are important when they go out into the
real world.
And you understand how concerned I am because you're probably concerned about our youth and
about their influences, about where they get information, you know, the different sources
of information that are available now weren't available to us.
We had three channels in my house when I was growing up.
Well, there was public broadcasting.
Yeah.
I mean, and you probably, if you're over, what, 50?
Yeah, probably.
You understand the three, well, no, it's been longer than that.
Probably if you're over 60, you know what the three channel thing is like, ABCNBC and
CBS.
That was it.
And we didn't live there, did we?
We watched it at 6.30.
Maybe watched the local news, read the paper.
The inputs for our generation weren't as obvious and in our faces all the time or in our back
pockets or something that we kind of lived in.
We didn't talk about screen time.
Screen time wasn't an issue.
So much of the information that they get is playful.
It's cultural.
It's not helpful.
It doesn't do anything to improve their lives.
And so they think that that's all they need to hear.
And so they come to their jobs.
They work.
I've got, I've got them working for me, you know, people who have that phone on their
hip and some of them put the earbuds in their ears and I don't know why I allow it.
But at this point, I still do the mechanics, you know, they, they're, I don't know what
they're listening to as long as they turn the hours and do good quality work.
I'm not going to complain, but it is a distraction.
And we've had an issue with some of our young salespeople that come to work.
They end up not lasting long.
We've got a good crew right now.
And for the most part, these guys, they're young.
I mean, I'd say age 22 to early 30s.
And whether it's one that's a geezer like me.
But for the most part, these guys work pretty hard and they're always, they're
doing videos.
They're connecting with their owner base and they're connecting with prospects and
they're doing videos to try to get people into the sales funnel, you know,
people that are out there floating around maybe thinking they're in the market for
the car, they're trying to capture them.
And that's why these guys are successful and they use social media in a positive way.
Now, at night, you know, are they still continuing to play around on those,
in those areas like TikTok and so forth or Instagram or Facebook or whatever
where it's really not adding any value to them and they're not really learning
anything.
I mean, they're talking about late night TV going away.
What about network news?
Is it going to go away when this generation moves on?
Who knows.
But there are certain things that I wanted to talk about today that I think
are critically important.
The first one I'm going to touch on is financial.
And I'll get back to that here in just a minute.
Okay, so your youngster is getting ready to leave the house.
Now you've probably never messed around with the budget that much.
Maybe you kept it in your head.
Maybe you did.
Maybe you had spreadsheets and really watched expenses and, you know, you've been
diligent in contributing to a 401k.
You have have a savings account.
You have investments.
You know, you're looking at that.
That is a priority in your life.
Is that really you?
Do you think that's the people, maybe your kids, your adult children?
Are they living that way?
Are they living paycheck to paycheck?
And the reason they're living paycheck to paycheck is because they can't control
their spending.
It could be because they just don't have a job that pays that much.
But you know, most of the jobs that I'm seeing are $18 to $25 an hour now.
Should be able to do pretty good at that.
Should be able to put some money away.
But from what I see, it's just more of an opportunity to spend.
So if you never lived under a budget, then you probably never included your
kids in any of that planning process and helped them develop a budget.
Helped them to understand what a bank balance is and why it's important to have savings and
what percent of your income should, or your gross, sorry, your net income, should you save?
Should you put back for a rainy day?
What is a rainy day?
You know, is that when something real tragic happens, like the lady that I'm talking
to right now that has an old OLC, what year is that called, 2015?
Nissan, it's got 187,000 miles on it.
Not good maintenance history, lots of time between oil change, like anywhere from 12 to 15,000
miles between oil changes.
The engine's out of the vehicle.
Her payoff on that vehicle is probably, well, as it sits right now, probably five times
what the vehicle is worth.
It's salvage right now.
I mean, you could put an engine in it, but the cost of the engine with the mileage that
she has on it, if she puts a new engine in it, it's more than the value of the car.
But because her payoff is so high, what choice does she have?
Plus, she has no money.
She cannot afford to put a new engine in.
So what does she do?
She calls me.
What do I do?
So I can fix certain things and I can help her minimize the cost.
I don't know whether she's wanting me to help her pay for it just as a donation or something.
We have plenty of charities and civic responsibilities, things that we do, things that we sponsor.
And occasionally I have paid for something for somebody that was desperate.
But you know, I don't know about you, but I just don't like to reward irresponsibility.
If something fails like an engine because you didn't maintain it, I'm not sure I want
to help with that.
How do you feel about that?
Does that mean?
Well, that's how my parents raised me and that's how I'm raising my kids or raised
my kids to bear responsibility for your actions.
Now in this particular scenario, I don't know that she's been irresponsible with her life.
That's not for me to judge.
But I see a lot of this.
I see people, they get into situations and it's not of their own making, but they've
got nothing to fall back on.
So that's where the rainy day fund comes in.
And I don't think kids understand it.
It's get the money, spend it.
Get the money, spend it.
Pay your bills and play Sony PlayStation all evening.
It's not anything about development.
Now I'm not saying all young people are that way because they're not.
There's a lot of responsible young people and thank goodness I've got a lot of them
working for me.
But when their life goes off the tracks a little bit, they'll come and have a sit-down
conference with me and we'll work through it and we'll talk about mistakes that they've
made and then things that they can do to get back on the right track.
I was talking to one of my daughters this weekend about, you know, she's having some
issues with behavior with her kids.
And we talked about the difference between a rut and a grave.
You know, you can get out of a rut.
And so some of these behaviors have cut pretty deep grooves.
I always think of an album, you know, like the old record albums, LPs that we
used to play.
You know, if you played it for a long time, then over time, if you didn't keep a
clean needle and keep the dirt out of the grooves, then it would start sounding
all scratchy and you would lose your sound quality.
But life's kind of like that too.
You know, we can get stuck in a rut and pretty soon, things just aren't
working anymore.
But with kids, it takes a while to get out of that groove.
You know, you get halfway up the slope and you're almost there and then you
tumble right back in.
So I like to talk to these young people and say, what kind of groove are you in?
What kind of rut are you in as far as your lifestyle is concerned?
I mean, it's everything from marriage falling apart to, you know, being
overweight, being unhealthy, having financial troubles.
I mean, I've heard it all.
I've been through, I don't know how many divorces I've never had one myself.
But the one thing that's consistent about most of the issues, and I think you'll
agree with this, is most of the wounds are self-inflicted.
And it's behavior over a long period of time.
I think kids are getting exposed to a lot of stuff in school, which is good.
I've done a lot of interaction and do a lot of talks at high schools.
I don't really, it's harder for me to relate to middle school people.
They wanted me to do a career day for eighth graders.
Come on.
You know, when I was in the eighth grade, I remember I had a civics class, and
they wanted us to pick our three careers that we were pretty sure that we were
gonna do.
Well, mine was a mechanical engineer, an architect, or a forest ranger.
None of those worked out for me.
You know, I didn't know I was gonna be a car dealer.
I mean, we lived in West Virginia.
My dad worked for Chevrolet and Motor Division.
He wanted to be a car dealer.
So he turned in his resignation.
They helped him find multiple car dealerships.
We settled on one in Greenville, Tennessee, moved here.
And I started high school at 14, 10th grade at 14.
And my brother, I knew he wanted to be a doctor.
He wanted to follow in the footsteps of our grandfather.
But I didn't know what I was gonna do.
But I felt like the car business was good.
It looked fun, you know, get to drive all these new cars.
And, you know, little did I know what all was gonna be involved.
But I found out after I graduated from college, I went to a school up in
Detroit, Michigan, called the Chevrolet School of Merchandising and Management.
It was run by Chevrolet.
Well, it was run by General Motors, and each division had their own branch of it.
But what they did is you stayed up there.
You lived in Detroit for six weeks.
And I learned more in six weeks than I learned in four years in college.
But it was specific knowledge about becoming a car dealer.
And I love it when young people are able to take advantage of those
kind of educational opportunities where they learn something that is specific
and directed to what they're gonna be doing.
And this generalized stuff is what gets people in trouble.
We're seeing a lot more young people that are high school graduates that are not
going to college, but they're graduating high school and they were in a college path.
They should have gone a technical path.
But too often the technical path is frowned upon, you know?
And I mean, we looked down on that when I was in high school,
I was going to college, you know?
I wasn't gonna go learn how to work on cars or wire a house.
But those are the jobs of the future.
You know, all of those technical skills that these kids don't want to do, or
so many of them, they go to college and they end up getting a 40-year degree and
end up waiting tables at Applebee's.
And they're off to a terrible start, you know, financially.
They don't know how to manage their money.
They don't know anything about credit and, you know, I talk about credit.
I'm not talking about credit to eighth graders.
But I talk about it to 11th graders and 12th graders.
And you know, the funny thing is that they have watched their parents.
They know that their parents have bad credit.
Not all of them, but a lot of them do, because they've watched, you know,
they've answered the calls from the collection agencies.
You know, they've seen or heard, overheard their parents fussing about not
being able to make the car payment or whatever, the mortgage payment.
And so what we don't want to do is repeat those mistakes.
So I'm a big, big advocate of businessmen and businesswomen going
into schools and talking some sense into these people.
And there are 11th graders and 12th graders before they get out of school
so that they understand what their financial responsibilities are and
what creating a strong financial path looks like so that they don't get
into some kind of a rut that they languish in until they're in their mid-30s.
And by that point, you know, they're disgusted and frustrated and
they've had four or five different jobs.
And they're looking for another new start.
And you may be saying, well, Lenny, what makes you an expert?
Well, I'm not an expert, but I see it.
I experience it.
I have for, well, I've been doing this for 47 years now.
I've interviewed a lot of people and not hired very many because
of just the lack of qualifications.
You know, how somebody interacts with you.
Another thing I wanted to talk about is just the lack of communication
skills that kids have, a lot of them.
As far as communicating, they aren't able to connect with me.
You know what I'm saying?
They don't look me in the eye, their eyes are darting back and forth.
You ask them what their goals are in the future.
They hadn't even thought about it.
You know, never really thought about that.
You know, where do you want to be in five years?
What do you want to be doing?
What would be the perfect job for you?
I don't know, something I can make a lot of money doing.
You know, it's just, there's no real focus on a career,
something that they enjoy doing.
I've heard many times that if you take on a job
that you love and you enjoy it,
you'll never work a day in your life.
I mean, I'm 68 years old.
I could retire right now.
I could go to the house, sell the dealership
and be fine for the rest of my life.
But I enjoy having a place to go to,
young people to be able to nurture and grow
and be a mentor for them.
And just having a challenge.
I mean, I just can't imagine waking up
and you know, what yard cell am I going to today?
Let's see, I'm ODR to clean out the garage.
Oh yeah, I gotta go clean out the attic now.
No thank you.
That's not a daily plan for me.
You gotta see my calendar today.
I showed it to my daughter.
She said, dad, you shouldn't have that much to do.
I said, I know if all of you would do your jobs,
I wouldn't have this much to do.
I was just kidding though.
But I say all that to say this.
I had a tour that I had worked out
with the technical school here
and they were gonna bring a bunch of,
let's see, what were they?
I think they were sophomores in high school.
And there were about 15 of them, the bus shows up
and I'm just, I'm sitting here in the showroom and I said,
okay, Lord, please let me say the right things
to inspire these young people to be better,
to work harder, you know, to understand
what's laying out in front of them.
And so, you know, I gathered them together
in the waiting room over on the Nissan showroom
and we talked for a little while
and I talked about personal responsibility
and I did it in a way, well, I like telling stories.
And so I use examples of stories and people that I've known
and also some occasional, some fictitious characters.
And you can see, you can just see a light switch turn on.
And I knew I had them, I had their attention.
And then we started going through the dealership
and they saw, I keep a lot of vintage cars,
antique cars and stuff like that
and they think they're so cool.
And we just, cars in general are a big turn on
for people of that age.
And then we went into the shop
and I talked about how hard it is to be a technician,
what kind of skill sets you have to have,
what kind of money they make.
We broke down what it takes to live comfortably
and what you can make in certain types of jobs.
And, you know, I just got so many good comments
and I had a bunch of them ask me
if they could visit with me later on one-on-one
and I said, sure, here's my cell phone number.
Really?
You'll give a sure note?
Yeah, this is my cell phone number.
And let's get together and talk.
I'll be glad to strategize with you
and give you some ideas
and talk a little bit further on a private basis.
And after it was over, their teacher
or whoever their host was came up to me and said,
you know, I really appreciate you doing that.
That's stuff that they really needed to hear.
And that's what I really needed to hear.
You know, you want feedback
from the people that are closest to the source.
And, you know, they said,
he asked if they could bring another group.
And I said, sure, just let me know anytime I'm available.
You know, what I find though,
when I make those offers to schools,
especially the county schools,
they're just, there's so many demands on them.
They just don't think about it.
It's just out of sight, out of mind.
And I found that the best way to be able to go to schools
and then interact with them is not wait
for the invitation to come.
Is to make the offer, go to the top, go to the principal,
go to the superintendent if you have to say,
you know, I'm willing to do this.
This is the content that I can bring.
I think I can make a difference.
I can help people.
But you know, the way I look at it
is I just help one.
If I just take one kid
and light a fire in his mind, then I've succeeded.
Okay, I'll take my last break.
I'll be back in just one minute.
I was in the waiting room the other day.
It was at my rehab, my physical rehab facility
where I'm getting rehabilitation on my new hip.
And I was just listening to these two ladies talk
and both of them are grandparents
and both of them are raising their grandchildren.
Now I didn't get into the details
but they were talking about all the school things
they had to take them to
and all the extracurricular activities
and how hard it is on an old body
to keep up with these young people.
And some of the situations are due to drugs.
Some of them are other life circumstances.
Maybe somebody dies, you know, child dies
or something like that.
That can happen.
That happened to me.
As far as the majority of cases,
I think the reasons that the grandparents
are raising the grandkids
is because the parents made bad choices.
They did not have people in their lives,
whether it be somebody at school or whatever
to inspire them and to give them hope
and to challenge them to be better.
And in so many other areas of their life
that if they just had some guidance and some mentorship
then they could have been more successful
when they'd be raising their own kids.
The grandparents could be grandparents.
I mean, that's what we're supposed to do, right?
And we're supposed to spoil them rotten
and then hand them back.
You know, we go to ball games, we watch them,
and but we don't have to deal with the fussing afterwards.
I mean, 70 year old grandmother
shouldn't be raising teenagers.
I think banning cell phone use in schools
is a big choice.
I couldn't believe my grandson said
that they're allowed to have cell phones in the classroom
where he goes to school up in Northern Kentucky.
They banned them in the schools here in Greenville
and I think that's a great idea.
We have to break that mind lock
that the devices have on our youth
but also on many other parents.
Maybe you abuse it as well.
I do at times.
And my wife reminds me, look at your screen time.
I think you're spending too much time on your phone.
Of course, I always have an excuse.
I'm working, I'm preparing a new podcast.
But really I was watching to bring a trailer auction
to see what Fort Bronco was gonna bring.
So I don't apologize for taking up this time
and not talk about cars.
But occasionally this is what I do.
So wake up if you need to wake up.
Don't let the cell phone rule your family life.
If you're going out to dinner, all four of you,
two parents and two kids.
And the first thing you do is everybody sits down
and gets their phone out.
There's a problem.
If you text all the time instead of talk,
there's a problem.
Starting early in high school,
if your kids aren't having to manage their own money
and pay their own bills to a certain degree,
there's a problem.
And if your kid can't even look a waiter in the eye
when he's taking his order, there's a problem.
And it's not the kid.
So if you need me, call me 423-552-2020.
Anything automotive or otherwise.
Or you can send me a text to Lenny Lawson
2020 at gmail.com and don't forget,
the CarGuru guidebook is available.
And I can email it to you.
Just send me an email to LennyLawson2020 at gmail.com.
Or you can text me, like I said,
and I will send you a PDF of the CarGuru guidebook,
which will save you thousands upon thousands of dollars
over your life when it comes to buying,
selling, trading, servicing cars.
It's that easy.
Well, I'll see you next time.
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