Can You Be Successful In America Without A College Degree?
Setting The Context
If you read my previous post then you know I started telling the story of where I came from before I became known as the #realestatementor. To recap, what started this story was a drive with a local entrepreneur from the city I grew up in. He was attempting to discover how I had so quickly accumulated my wealth and was hoping that I would tell him I started out with some sort of "hand-up" in life.
As I continue through the tale you will soon see that even though I had a bad start in life, there was one thing that separated me from everyone else. Since you are here in LeoFinance.io there is a chance that you had a similar experience as well. Let's get back to the questions he asked me.
“So, where did you go to school?”
Well, that’s another funny story. I really didn’t have the typical school experience. I grew up in Fall River and started out attending Belisle Elementary School (now torn down and developed into single family homes), but I stopped after the second grade. There was some sort of situation – I barely remember it – and my parents decided to pull my brother and I out of school.
It was over some school assignment that my mother felt was an invasion of privacy. The assignment was, “I love my parents, but sometimes they do weird things, like _________.”, and then you filled in the blank. Mine was innocent—my mother had promised to take me to cash a check, but then she forgot—written in true 7-year-old fashion with half the letters backwards and every eight or ninth letter sitting on the line. My childlike schoolwork wasn’t like anything half the class had written though. Someone from the class had written about a domestic dispute and another had written about her mommy’s friend that visited when daddy was out. You know, invasion of privacy kind of things.
That assignment was the catalyst that changed me from being like everybody else. My mom decided that she was pulling her kids out of school and she was going to homeschool us. My mother – the high-school dropout. Because, you know, dropping out in the tenth grade clearly means you’re qualified to handle your children’s intellectual futures.
Being Homeschooled - The Good And The Bad
Now, the benefit of homeschooling is obviously not in the social aspect of things since it was just my brother and I. We were fortunate enough to have some very close friends from back in school who we’re still friends with to this day – in fact, two of them got married within the past five years and the best of them all just got married in 2017.
They lived next door and their parents were best friends with our parents. So, I didn’t grow up having great social skills either – that was something I had to really work on as a young adult. Initially, I was an introvert, and till date, I still have some introverted tendencies, but largely, I’ve become a social creature and I love spending time with others, sharing the knowledge I’ve gained and creating new experiences with all the fascinating people I meet on a daily basis.
Getting Over The Anxiety Of Socializing With People
Nowadays, you can find me speaking in front of fifty to a hundred people without breaking a sweat. I genuinely enjoy getting in front of people and having these conversations. But I had to build that. Being homeschooled put me at a disadvantage in the social sphere, but it also instilled some respectable qualities in me and my brother.
We found that we could learn absolutely anything if we wanted the knowledge badly enough. We even learned that the social detriments of homeschooling could be learned away. You don’t always have to be told or taught something by somebody else. You just have to make the decision to do something, then you have to go out and dig for the information on your own.
My Mother Didn't Have All Of The Answers
Being a high-school dropout meant that mom didn’t know certain levels of Math. Same for certain levels of History, or English, or Science. Throughout most of our homeschooling, my brother and I had to go back through the book and try to figure it out on our own. The answer was in there. It must have been. They wouldn’t have given us the question if they hadn’t told us how to get the answer. So, that digging for knowledge and finding the appropriate resources was something we learned to do at a very young age.
We can’t always rely on others to give us the information we need – sometimes we have to go out and get it ourselves. That was by far one of the greatest lessons I learned being homeschooled, and it’s the one I still use to this day that has gotten me to my current level of success and will continue to get me to every advanced stage of success. When I don’t know something, I just need to dig for the answer. All the answers are out there somewhere – they just need to be found, and I’m going to find them—all the answers, all the knowledge.
Turning A Disadvantage Into A Strength
Now, obviously not everybody comes out of homeschooling with that value and that lesson. I’m not saying to go homeschool your children and they’ll be successful. What I’m saying is that I turned a weakness into a positive skill. My mother couldn’t teach me, so I had to learn on my own. I wasn’t socially excellent at that time in my life, but I made myself a social person by putting myself into social situations that forced me out of my comfort zone.
Finding the information wasn’t always easy either. We’re talking about a time when the internet was in its early stages, but my family couldn’t afford it, so we didn’t have it. Instead, my brother and I were forced to find the answers we needed in good old fashioned hardcover encyclopedias and dictionaries.
Eventually, we did have computers, but most of our schooling was based on encyclopedias and the text books my parents were able to afford. My education came from going through these books that she would buy each year and then taking some tests at the end of the year to evaluate and make sure that we knew what we were doing, because the state does like to know that homeschooled kids are getting at least some kind of education.
“Do you have a college degree?”
The answer used to embarrass me every time the question came up. “Did you go to college?” Yes. Sort of. I went to college for two semesters. During that time, I had a 4.0 GPA because I didn’t go to college right away. I know that sounds counterintuitive, but hear me out.
I finished homeschooling and jumped right into work. You have to remember, I was always told to work hard, work hard, work hard, and save, then invest. So, I’d actually been working since I was twelve years old.
My first job was at a Christian bookstore, putting prices on things and cleaning and other minor tasks. My second job was similar at first – I worked at a flooring company as a salesfloor assistant until I was moved over to work in the warehouse. My brother worked here with me, but he was moved into the estimating office. People sometimes ask if that bothered me; it didn’t.
Office work never seemed like real work to me. Remember, work hard, work hard, work hard, and save, then invest. My grandparents worked in factories. My father worked as an industrial painter and welder before managing a warehouse space at Walmart. So for me, working in the warehouse was following in my father’s footsteps. Work hard, work hard, work hard, and save, then invest.
My First "Real" Job
At eighteen, I started working at Walmart too and thought I was “the man”. Within six months, I’d become a department manager. Six months after that, I’d become a department manager in a different department, and I was doing remarkable, working hard, working hard, working hard, for $10 an hour. Which was fine, because I did save, and I was able to buy a truck that I still have to this day, and I was happy. Once I bought that truck, though, my bank account stopped going up, and I hated that.
When I finally saw my bank account after a year, again at $38, I decided that I needed to do something. Ten dollars an hour wasn’t enough, especially if I wanted to start dating. By that time, my parents had already gotten divorced and that meant that the $30,000 savings before dating rule no longer held any power, so I had a girlfriend, but I still wanted to be able to have that money, because that’s what I was told success was. So I made a commitment and I made a change.
The True Meaning Of "Hard Work"
At twenty-one, I got a new job making eighteen bucks an hour. Who cared that it was an incredibly hard labor job, working third shift in what felt like a sweat shop? I worked in shipping and receiving at a bakery, where the temperature could get up to a hundred and twenty degrees, and it did, almost every night in the summer.
By the time I got home, I was heat-exhausted and sleep deprived every day. It put a damper on my social life. I hung out with friends less because I had to sleep to prepare for the hard night’s work ahead of me. It put a strain on my romantic relationship because my girlfriend hated that I always wanted to sleep when she wanted for us to go out and do things.
But I learned hard work. I learned dedication. I learned how to put up with all the crazy overtime. And I learned that I hated it. I love hard work, but I hated physical labor because it didn’t allow for much creativity, and because I couldn’t be my authentic self nor follow my genuine passion.
My “new” girlfriend at the time saw that I hated it and finally suggested, “Hey, you know what, if you don’t like that, why don’t you go to college? Why don’t you get a degree?”
There Has To Be A Better Way
I thought it through and realized she was right. I didn’t want hard labor. I wanted to supervise, like I was doing at Walmart. So, I started at my local community college, going for business management and marketing. After two semesters, I ended up getting an accounting job up near Boston, an hour away. And I drove there, 2-3 hours a day, 5 days a week for four years.
My new girlfriend’s (and future wife’s) father had helped me secure a great accounting job, so I never completed that degree program, but I got enough education to get me into a job. Between college and my accounting job, I learned management, accounting, and marketing, all of which I still use today.
Like I said, I used to be embarrassed when I told people I didn’t have a degree, but now I realize that it was never about getting a college degree for me. It was always about getting what I needed to build a business, because I always knew I was going to be a business owner. I didn’t know what kind of business it would be, but I knew that owning a business was my goal.
Now I tell people who ask, "you know what, if you don’t have a degree, good. You’re in the same spot as me. You can succeed because you don’t have a degree and you haven’t gotten all that bad programming of just study, study, study, and do nothing with it". And if you do have a degree, you can still break that programming and reprogram yourself to be successful beyond what a college degree could ever prepare you for.
More To come...
Over the next few posts I will continue to reveal some of the critical experiences in my early life that formed my view of the world and why I continue to building my real estate empire and likely what has lead to my new found love of Silver, Crypto, business and the Stock Market as ways to diversify my wealth and income streams.
These posts are being pulled directly from my first book, Broke To A Quarter-Million which can be found at Amazon and Audible! Get your copy and let me know what you think!
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta