The time Channing Tatum spent dropping his trousers as a real-life teen-age stripper inspired “Magic Mike” in 2012, provided more material for "Magic Mike XXL" that opened last week, and taught the actor, 35, the kinds of lessons those who make their livings fully clothed could never appreciate:

1. Make dollars that make sense

“I was young and dumb and stupid and wanted to make a little money. You can work 10 hours a day for minimum wage – that’s the opportunities for kids without a college education. Get some s**t job that you’re really going to have to bust your hump for. Or you can try something else a little crazy.” (GQ Style)

2. Stripping's not as lucrative as you think -- even if you're Channing Tatum

“On a good night, 150 bucks ... Not as much as you think. On a bad night, 70 bucks — even 50 at times.” (THR)

3. You do sort of feel like a piece of meat

“You get in at 18, and halfway through 19 you look around and you’re like, ‘Man, I don’t want to do this.’ I never really enjoyed taking my clothes off. That was a weird thing. I really enjoyed the dancing, the performance of it all, the craziness of the life. But I would always take my pants off and run off stage.” (E! Online)

4. Bare your body onstage and bare your soul offstage

“I was having a beer with [director Steven] Soderbergh, we were making a movie together. I did this for like eight months of my life when I was like 18 or 19 years of age. He was like ‘We gotta make a movie of this.’” (MTV News)

5. Lap dances can be awkward

"[One time, while giving a woman a lap dance] the lady goes, 'Oh my God! Look at you! You remind me of my nephew!' — and then grabs me," he recalls. "It hit me like a hand grenade. It was like tick, tick, tick, boom: She's grabbing my butt and saying, 'You remind me of my nephew.'" (THR)

6. Drugs don't really help the show

"I wouldn't say I was losing myself in drugs because I wasn't doing anything habitually," he says. "Just experimenting. Experimenting, I would say. Never the big ones — crack or heroin. I never OD'd or anything. Never." (THR)

7. Be honest with those who are closest to you

“We were walking together, and my dad said: 'Why? You didn't need the money. We always provided,'" he shares. "[It] broke my heart. I told him it had nothing to do with him. 'That was my road. That was the road I had to take.’” (THR)

8. Your wife can be OK with you stripping

"She actually loves 'Magic Mike,' believe it or not," he said of his wife Jenna Dewan-Tatum. "If I was just doing some movie about strippers, then she'd probably be like, 'Why do you want to do that?'"

He continued: "But it started off as a story that I really love, and it's grown into something that I love even more because it's a weird world that I experienced in my real life. It's just a part of me telling some part of my life. And she understands that." (THR)