Impactful Lessons from a High School Student

Read this exclusive conversation with Michael B. Horn. Learn more during the podcast interview on Change Starts Here. WATCH HERE

Dustin: So other than having a paycheck—which I enjoy as well and always have since I started working at 16—what were the things that impacted you the most, or what lessons did you learn that you really think are helping you today and will help you in the future?

Hanan: Learning the 7 Habits helped me more than anything and having my own values, too. Even though I’m still working on one of my 7 Habits, the one that says that you have seek to understand something before being understood. Like when someone has a different opinion than me, I’m not very good at listening to them, so I every time practice the 7 Habits to be more good at them.

When I was teaching the 7 Habits, I kind of had a hard time, too, because I not only had to teach little kids, I also had to teach high schoolers at that time. At my school, we had over, like, you know, five grades and other students just like me doing the same thing. So I asked one of my coaches, “What are some of the things I can do to, like, teach them? What would you do if you were teaching that part of my lessons?” They gave me this book to teach them, too.

While I was at those high school sessions, I kind of learned some things, too, and I’m still—like, in my daily life right now—including those things. Also, having values in my life, I feel like it was a big thing we did the last two days of the institute. I feel like having values makes me feel like an adult, and whenever I asked other kids, “Do you have values of your own?” and they would say, “What are values? What do you mean?” I was really shy. But I was like, Am I the only one who has these values and who’s trying to practice them? It kind of makes me feel pretty awesome. I kind of stopped talking about them sometimes. But my real, close friends, I kind of share with them and tell them, “I have my own values, and you have to respect them.”