If School Didn't Fit You, That Doesn't Mean You Were the Problem
A piece for people still carrying old school labels (and why those stories can be rewritten).
There is a particular kind of weight that some people carry out of high school. Not a physical weight. More like a quiet verdict. A label they didn’t choose but somehow absorbed. Not academic. Not a natural learner. Better with their hands. Doesn’t apply themselves.
For many people, these labels were never spoken aloud. They didn’t need to be. They lived in the look from a teacher when an exam came back. In the subjects you weren’t steered toward. In the quiet, well-meaning advice that nudged you away from certain dreams before you even knew you had them.
And here’s the thing about those labels: they have very long shelf lives.
You can be forty-three years old, running something you built yourself, raising a family, contributing genuinely to the people and communities around you, and still feel a small, persistent flicker of that old verdict whenever someone asks where you went to university, or what you studied, or what your score was.
Our most recent conversation on More Than a Score, with Lael Stone, is one of those episodes that puts that weight right on the table and asks: what if the label was always wrong?
The Story the Score Tells — And What It Leaves Out
Lael’s pathway doesn’t fit the conventional template. She left school without putting much stock in her final score. At seventeen, she travelled overseas alone. She started businesses before she had a business plan, built a body of work around connection, healing, and helping families…and eventually created a school.
But what struck us most wasn’t the impressive list of things Lael has done. It was how honest she was about the inner experience along the way.
She spoke, directly and without performance, about feeling not smart enough. About the specific feeling that comes when you don’t have formal qualifications in a world that treats formal qualifications as the only legitimate proof of capability.
“I felt not smart enough because I didn’t have formal qualifications.” — Lael Stone
That line deserves to sit for a moment.
Because Lael was not describing a lack of intelligence, she was describing what happens when a system built around one narrow definition of ability - grades, scores, academic performance - becomes the measuring stick that people internalise long after they’ve left the building.
She was describing what so many of our guests have described, in different words, across dozens of conversations: the gap between what a score said, and what a life turned out to be.
The Two Things That Kept Moving Her Forward
When we asked Lael what had carried her through the uncertainty, the unconventional path, the moments of self-doubt, she offered two words.
Courage. And passion.
Not a five-year plan. Not a clear destination. Not a score that unlocked the right doors.
Courage, as Lael described it, is not the absence of fear or doubt. It is the willingness to keep moving anyway. To try things before you know how they’re supposed to be done. To ask for help. To start something imperfect.
And passion. Not as a fixed, singular calling you’re either born with or not, but as a kind of energy that points you toward certain things and keeps you returning to them even when progress is slow.
These are not flashy ideas. They are deeply practical ones. And they are almost entirely absent from the way most schools talk about preparation for life after Year 12.
“If you didn’t know how it was supposed to be done, how would you do it? That question contains more learning than most exam papers.” - Laura
For the Parents Reading This
If you are raising a young person who doesn’t seem to thrive in the conventional system, who loses energy in certain classrooms, who comes alive outside of formal learning, who collects detentions instead of distinctions, this conversation is worth your time.
Not because it will solve anything immediately. But because it offers a different frame.
Lael’s story is a reminder that some people are not broken by school. They are simply not designed for the particular shape of it. And the task for parents isn’t to force the fit. It’s to help young people understand that the shape of their life doesn’t have to match the shape of the system.
That requires a particular kind of parenting courage, too.
It means resisting the urge to translate every difference into a deficit. It means being curious about what your child is drawn to, rather than anxious about what they’re avoiding. It means holding space for pathways that don’t have a clear name yet.
And it means being willing to say out loud: there is more than one way to build a good life, and I believe you can find yours.
For the Adults Who Carry Old Labels
This section is for the people who are not in their final year of school anymore but who still, occasionally, feel like they are.
If you left school with a story about yourself that wasn’t entirely flattering. If someone, somewhere along the way, gave you the impression that you were not quite the right kind of smart. If you’ve spent years building something real while simultaneously doubting whether it counts.
This is what Lael’s story suggests: lived experience is a form of learning. Years of doing the work, of staying curious, of building and adapting and trying again — these are not a consolation prize for missing formal qualifications. They are, in many cases, a more demanding and more durable education.
The problem is not that your pathway was wrong. The problem is that we built a language of success that could only describe one pathway, and called everything else a deviation.
You were not the deviation. You were just following a map that the system hadn’t printed yet.
Play, Curiosity, and the Things School Forgets to Value
One of the threads that runs through Lael’s episode, and through so many of our best conversations, is the quiet argument for play and curiosity as serious educational values.
Not play as a break from learning. Play as learning. Curiosity as the engine that keeps people moving when external motivation runs out.
These are qualities that flourish in certain environments and get quietly extinguished in others. And the tragedy is that by the time many young people finish school, they’ve learned to feel vaguely embarrassed by both.
The students who remain most curious, who ask questions nobody expected, who want to go deeper on the thing that isn’t on the exam, are often the ones most likely to be described as difficult, distracted, or not living up to their potential.
What if that curiosity is not a problem to be managed?
What if it is, in fact, the most important thing to protect?
Rewriting the Story
Lael eventually came to a place where she could see her pathway clearly — not despite its unconventional shape, but because of it. She recognised that lived experience, deep learning, and years of genuine doing had built something real. Something that didn’t need a formal institution to verify it.
That recognition didn’t happen overnight. It required a kind of internal archaeology: going back through the evidence of your own life and reading it differently. Seeing the initiative where you used to see only the absence of credentials. Seeing the resilience where you used to see only the chaos.
This is not a simple or painless process. But it is a possible one.
And it often begins with something seemingly small: a conversation, a book, an episode of a podcast that reflects a different story back to you.
We hope this is one of those.
Dan & Laura
Listen to the full conversation with Lael Stone: The Courage to Find Your Own Way via our link or wherever you get your podcasts.
We publish real, honest conversations, practical articles, reflections, and resources alongside our episodes — all designed to help you rethink success, have better conversations, and support the young people around you.
More Than a Score
A podcast and book project for parents, students, and educators who believe that no single number defines a person’s worth, future, or potential.