I'm not a sports guy. I don’t think that’s much of a secret.
So until a few weeks ago the name Toto Wolff meant nothing to me.
Turns out he runs the Mercedes Formula 1 team (one of the most dominant operations in the history of motorsport) and he’s worth somewhere north of two and a half billion dollars.
But that’s not what caught my attention.
Wolff's father died of brain cancer when Toto was fifteen, and the family fell into real financial trouble. His first business venture was selling candles and torches at large nighttime gatherings in Vienna. Before that, he wore a golden cape and handed out flyers for a local electronics shop. He studied economics briefly at university, but quickly dropped out.
That’s it.
That’s the “official” education of Toto Wolff—the origin of a two-and-a-half-billion-dollar fortune. It’s the story of a kid with no degree, no money, and no connections deciding to go find a need and fill it.
Nothing that made Toto Wolff—the reading of an opportunity, the tolerance for risk, the refusal to come apart when the first attempt flopped, the discipline to run that same play at larger and larger scale for thirty years—is marked by anything you’d find on a report card. It isn't tested, graded, or taught. It’s built out in the world, through real experiences, real risk, and real grit.
This is something I’ve been trying to help parents realize for the last decade. The thing that determines whether your child thrives is almost never taught in any classroom.
Most kids today simply don’t have it. I actually think a strong case can be made that many who are naturally like Wolff have had it “schooled” out of them by the time they’re teenagers.
For too many young people, a bad grade, a lost game, a plan that collapses, turns into a total shutdown. They just quit when things get hard. Or worse, they look around for someone in some position of authority to tell them what they’re supposed to do next. It’s easy for us to see this happening at scale and conclude that something is wrong with the kids today. But I think there’s still a lot of hope to be had. Because what looks like a character flaw is often just a missing skill.
In this case, the skill has a name: mindset.
The ability to lose and stand back up, to keep moving when the motivation has drained out, to look at a mess and produce a next move instead of a path of retreat. We spend twelve years transmitting facts a phone can retrieve in half a second, and close to zero hours teaching the one thing that actually matters more than anything else.
So we built something that fills that gap, and honestly, it's one of my favorite resources we've ever created.
It's a new Mindset category inside the Tuttle Twins Academy. It’s four courses (thirty-five lessons) taught by experts in their field—mentors who have the skill to present this stuff to teenagers in a way that they’ll actually respond to. It teaches deliberately what Toto Wolff learned through hardship.
How to grow through failure rather than drown in it. How to build habits that keep you moving in the right direction even on the days you want to quit, because motivation is a fair-weather friend but habit is what carries the work when all else fails. It teaches how to keep your head in a world engineered, quite profitably, to keep you rattled and distracted, and how to make a decision and own the consequences instead of waiting on rescue that might never come.
There's an old line I come back to often—that before you can govern a nation you have to govern yourself. That lesson scales to a fifteen-year-old perfectly. The one person your child can never resign from, never escape, never outsource, is himself. A kid who learns to manage themselves can handle very nearly anything the world sends their way. A kid who never learns it will struggle behind every credential he manages to collect, because the diploma doesn’t build the supporting character.
And lest you think Wolff is a fluke, he’s not.
Sara Blakely got doors shut in her face selling fax machines, was too short to play Goofy at Disney World (she was cast as a chipmunk instead), and failed as a stand-up comic before she turned an idea and a great deal of nerve into a billion-dollar company.
Richard Branson walked out of school at sixteen, dyslexic and miserable in a classroom, and built the four-hundred-odd companies of the Virgin empire. David Karp never finished high school, taught himself to code, and sold Tumblr for more than a billion dollars before he was thirty. Steve Jobs left Reed after a single semester and sat in on a calligraphy class for no reason but interest, which is the entire reason the Macintosh later shipped with its unique typography.
Different fields, vastly different personalities and interests, but the identical thread runs through them all: not a degree, not privilege or opportunity, but the way each of them metabolized fear, failure, and the grim middle stretch where almost everyone else simply quits.
That thread is a skill, and that’s actually great news. Because a skill is not luck.
A skill can be taught.
We dropped the Academy's price this week—$499 for lifetime access or $269 for the year, either one covering all forty courses across ten subjects, plus everything we add down the road.
You can check out a sample here.
It’s so empowering to gain this kind of knowledge—addictive even.
And once they “get it” they become unstoppable. Because people who gain this skill can’t quit. They are fundamentally changed at their core into something powerful and unstoppable.
Those are the kinds of people I want the rising generation to be.
Powerful and unstoppable.
— Connor
