Supporting Military Families and Building Businesses – An Interview with Entrepreneur, Michael Wish

In this exclusive interview, Michael Wish, founder of the Claire Bethany Foundation and a Marine Corps officer, opens up about his diverse career as an educator, entrepreneur, and mentor. From the challenges of building businesses to his deep commitment to supporting military families, Michael shares invaluable insights on the power of teaching, learning, and creating impactful change. His approach to mentoring and service is an inspiration to anyone looking to make a difference.

Michael Wish, Entrepreneur & Educator

Introduce yourself! Please tell us about you and your life, so we can get to know you better.

I'm Michael Wish. Educator, entrepreneur, and the only man in an all-girl house: my wife, two daughters, and our dog Lucy.

Everything I do revolves around teaching, coaching, and mentoring. I started a tutoring business that grew into a full education company. I've published several books. I run communities for entrepreneurs. I host a podcast called Teach, Coach, Mentor, where I sit down with people who shape lives through those three roles. And I'm building the Claire Bethany Foundation, named after my youngest daughter, to help military families with special needs children afford equipment and services that insurance won't cover.

I live by three principles: be aggressively curious, experiment joyfully, and get obsessed. Those aren't motivational posters. They're how I make decisions, build businesses, and teach.

My academic background is in physics, math, and economics. I earned my black belt in karate at 14 and started teaching kids classes the same year. By 15, I was teaching adults. That experience shaped everything I've done since. Karate is entirely physical. It develops proprioception, an awareness of where your body is in space, and it taught me to take abstract ideas and make them tangible. I still teach that way today.

I'm also a Marine Corps officer with over 20 years of service. That career gave me some of the most formative teaching experiences of my life, from the artillery school to the Naval Academy. But the throughline has always been education, not the uniform. The military shaped how I teach. Teaching is what I actually do.

Outside of all that, I play golf. Badly but persistently.

The Claire Bethany Foundation is a meaningful initiative. Can you share more about how it has influenced your approach to supporting military families and your perspective on service?

Our youngest daughter, Claire, was born with a condition called polymicrogyria, which literally means "many small folds" in the brain. The result is cerebral palsy: her brain has difficulty communicating with her muscles. She is non-verbal and non-ambulatory, but never short on joy or smiles.

Claire is seven now, getting tall and heavy, getting too big for my wife to lift safely on her own. As her father, it is my responsibility to care for her. That means getting strong enough in the gym to carry her safely. That means being present, much more present, than I've ever had to be after 20 years of deployments and service.

Make no mistake: this is not a burden. Claire has made my life immeasurably better. I am a better man because of her.

When Claire got too big to lift into her car seat, we needed a wheelchair-accessible van with a ramp. It was hideously expensive, but we had no choice. More importantly, we had the means to afford it. Many military families do not.

I've had the honor of serving alongside some of the most dedicated, selfless Marines you could imagine. Men and women who work long hours, for low pay, in challenging conditions. I cannot imagine how hard it must be to do all that and care for a special needs child on an E-3's salary.

The Claire Bethany Foundation exists to help military families with special needs children afford the equipment and services insurance doesn't cover. I want to buy vans with ramps for E-3s who need them. Because they deserve it.

Simon Sinek once said that the greatest joy and calling in life is to serve those who serve. That idea drives everything about this foundation. My service to the Marine Corps is shifting, but it isn't ending. It's just taking a different form.

In your experience, what are the most common barriers adults face in mastering the art of learning, and how do you help them overcome these obstacles?

The biggest barrier is that most people confuse consuming with learning. They read an article, listen to a podcast, watch a YouTube video, and walk away feeling like they learned something. They didn't. They consumed. The differentiating characteristic between consuming and learning is retention. If you don't retain it, you didn't learn it, and you probably weren't thinking.

Consuming is the process of fooling yourself into thinking you're learning when you're not. And our entire information environment is designed to keep you consuming: infinite feeds, autoplay, algorithmic recommendations. It never asks you to stop and think.

The second barrier is that adults don't have systems for learning. They have goals, maybe. They have motivation, sometimes. But they don't have a repeatable process for acquiring a skill, testing it, getting feedback, and refining it. They just absorb and hope.

The professionals, side hustlers, and entrepreneurs I work with don't need more information. They are drowning in information. What they need are systems for thinking and learning. That's what I build with them: structured approaches to identifying what matters, learning it deliberately, and applying it under pressure. Not consuming. Thinking.

How does your background in physics, mathematics, and economics influence the way you approach teaching and coaching?

Physics teaches you to start from first principles. You don't memorize formulas. You derive them from the ground up, and if you can't, you don't understand the material. That discipline shaped how I teach everything, including business and entrepreneurship. I always start at the most fundamental level and build through complexity.

Mathematics gave me precision. It trained me to be exact with language and definitions, to distinguish between what I know and what I'm assuming, and to follow a logical chain without skipping steps. When I coach entrepreneurs, I hold them to that same standard. Vague thinking produces vague results.

Economics gave me a framework for understanding incentives, trade-offs, and decision-making under uncertainty. Every business decision is an economic problem at some level.

But the thread that ties all three together is this: I learned to take abstract, difficult ideas and terrestrialize them. Make them physical. Make them tangible. That instinct comes from my martial arts background, where everything is proprioceptive. You feel whether something works. I bring that same approach to coaching. Even when the ideas are abstract, I try to ground them in something concrete that people can test and feel in their own work.

If you could change one thing about your industry, what would it be and why?

I would burn the motivational-industrial complex to the ground.

I'm being only slightly dramatic. The coaching and education space is full of people who sell inspiration without structure. They give you a feeling. They do not give you a system. And when the feeling fades, you're right back where you started, except now you're out $2,000 and a weekend.

I'm skeptical of performative intelligence and impatient with motivational rhetoric that isn't backed by evidence and structure. Clarity over charisma. Leverage over busyness. Truth over comfort. Those aren't slogans. Those are operational standards.

What people actually need is scaffolding. They need systems that work when motivation disappears, because motivation always disappears. They need frameworks for thinking, learning, and building that don't depend on how they feel on a given Tuesday morning.

Knowledge that cannot be clearly taught is knowledge not yet mastered. If a coach can't break their method down until anyone in the room can track it and use it, they haven't done the work. The Marine Corps taught me that. For every four-hour class I taught at the artillery school, I put in 48 hours of preparation. That standard exists because in artillery, a lapse in attention to detail puts a projectile at the wrong location. Lives depend on it.

I'd love to see that same rigor applied to coaching and education. Not the life-or-death stakes, but the seriousness. The preparation. The insistence that your students actually learn, not just feel inspired.

Tell us about a pivotal moment in your life that brought you to where you are today.

The artillery instructor certification process. Without question.

When I went to the artillery school as an instructor, I entered the most exacting and formative professional process of my life. For every four-hour class, I prepared for 48 hours. Sixteen-hour days of homework, studying, reading, and rehearsing. I built depth of knowledge far beyond what students would need, because I had to be ready for questions from both students and fellow instructors who had already taught the material.

I rehearsed until I eliminated every filler word. Every "um" was counted. I refined every analogy. I perfected the flow. My board work was all block capital letters, three inches tall, visible from the back row.

Certification meant pitching the class to a certified instructor, someone who had already taught a full cycle. A four-hour class easily took eight hours in rehearsal. We broke every hour for detailed feedback. They counted filler words, suggested alternate analogies, and interrupted with both student-level and instructor-level questions to test my depth.

This continued for three to four months across every class in the course. The certifying standard was simple: would this instructor allow you in front of their students? If not, you were not teaching.

The stakes were real. In artillery, transposing two coordinates or a lapse in attention to detail puts a projectile at the wrong location. Life or death. The standards reflected that.

That process gave me everything. My ability to speak publicly, my attention to detail, and my understanding of what it actually means to become a subject-matter expert. It set the standard I hold myself to in everything I build today. When I later taught at the Naval Academy, there was no comparable certification process. I was handed a textbook and told good luck. So I put myself through my own version of what the artillery school had taught me.

If you can't teach it, you don't know it. I learned that in a building where the stakes were real. That changes how you prepare forever.

Tell us about your podcast, Teach, Coach, Mentor. What are some key insights you've shared with your listeners that you believe every professional and entrepreneur should hear?

I started Teach, Coach, Mentor because I wanted to sit down with people who shape lives through teaching, coaching, and mentoring, and understand their processes. Not their highlights. Their methods. How do they actually help people grow?

The conversations have changed me. I don't say that lightly. Two of my three core operating principles came directly from guests on the show. "Experiment joyfully" came from a conversation with Joe Apfelbaum, and "get obsessed" came from Karla Murphy. I was already living some version of those ideas, but they crystallized the language. That's what happens when you sit across from someone who has done the work and thought deeply about it.

The insight I keep coming back to, the one that shows up in nearly every great conversation, is that the best teachers, coaches, and mentors are relentless learners themselves. They don't teach from a script they memorized ten years ago. They're still in the arena, still experimenting, still getting things wrong and adjusting.

The other pattern is that the best ones are systems thinkers. They don't rely on charisma or motivation to move people. They build structures, habits, and frameworks that outlast any single conversation or session. That aligns perfectly with how I think about my own work.

If every professional and entrepreneur took one thing from the podcast, I'd want it to be this: you are responsible for your own learning. No one is coming to save you. No course, no coach, no AI tool is going to do the thinking for you. But if you build a real system for learning, and you commit to it with curiosity and discipline, you can teach yourself almost anything. And once you can do that, everything else gets easier.

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