Got a job? Still at school? Or wandering about, not sure what you want or how you’d get there? Either way, I’m here to tell you that you can build real success without formal education — and without a mountain of student debt. If you’re feeling stuck and infected with the illusion of the False Success Path, keep reading.
This is one of my favourite subjects, and it fires me up. I’m completely convinced that people can have success, health and wealth without attending any formal education or special training at all.
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It pisses me off that so many people seem to have lost hope of ever reaching what they — or someone else — define as success, purely because they didn’t complete years of education.
Yes, I’m a rebel. Such a bad one. Most people, including close friends, go quiet at this point or find somewhere to fit a small laugh and an eye-roll. Which only confirms the thing I’m describing. I suspect that’s what too much school does to you.
The protective behaviourism of academics
Sometimes it looks like there’s a spell seeping into students as they walk the hallways of established learning institutions. A quiet programming that becomes part of their behaviour and leaves them easily offended and narrower than they were. As though the walls of those fine, pompous buildings encase the mind for years afterwards.
They get sore and easily wounded by anything that confronts their status, their exams, their years of work — no matter how outdated or limiting the facts they acquired turn out to be. It shows up worst when a highly educated graduate leaves the hall of fame, can’t find a job, and discovers their knowledge doesn’t work in the real world. Or, worst case, is simply wrong.
I’m not writing off all education. But look at what’s changing on this planet, in how people learn and in what’s actually being taught. There’s a reason for it, and more people are waking up to the fact that something isn’t working any more.
I do understand the anger and the fear when you realise the ladder from education to Success Mountain is coming apart underneath you.
When the uneducated earn more than the well educated
I’ve seen plenty of people working from home with no formal education earning far more than a doctor or a lawyer ever will. With recurring income, too. Income while they sleep. Too good to be true? Go and look.
Of course, it depends what your dream actually is.
If you genuinely want to be a lawyer, a doctor or an astronaut, you have to go and get educated, and this post isn’t for you. I wouldn’t see a doctor who’d read a few books and watched some videos on YouTube either.
That said, I’ve met plenty of useless, well-educated doctors. Grades bought them nothing from me. Though very often it isn’t the individual — it’s the system and the settled norms they were put through that limited them.
I often bring up Steve Jobs, because he’s one of many examples of what gets built after dropping out six months in. Do you think he out-earned a doctor or a lawyer?
I think so. And he was working his passion.
Do your dreams REALLY need years of school?
I’m fairly sure that half of you reading this don’t need to give up years of your life and take on a pile of debt to do the thing you’re actually meant for.
I’ve met a lot of people. After enough conversations with clients, students and people in general, I know that a great many of them could build their own future without ever obtaining a specific title or grade. But none of that gets built while limitation is running the show.
They just need to get out of the old illusion about what creates happiness, wealth and “success”.
I did a podcast interview where I ran through everything I’d done, learned and built over the years. I summed it all up and finished with: I have never been to school for any of it.
I taught myself everything I do. I still do.
Does a single client of mine care about my old grades? Before anyone hires me for web design, graphic design, consulting, technical work or coaching — do you think one of them has ever asked what I finished school with?
And on the coaching side I can promise you this: given the state of the planet and the current condition of the collective mind, you will not find a conventional school teaching any of what I work on with people.
My goals don’t need a title or a grade. They need awareness and the right mindset.
Decide to back your own self-education
I have a line I use. Write it down and stick it on your bathroom mirror:
“Humans are Masters of Limitation.”
True words. I see it every day. You may not have that vantage point yet, but get your thinking right and you will.
The point of it is to make you react with this is NOT me. Do that daily and your mindset shifts toward being willing to help and teach yourself. That’s where a different kind of success mindset starts.
Then something changes in you. You may even end up in the category of people with an extraordinary ability to figure things out. Set your mind to do, complete, make-happen — and things start occurring.
As I said, not all education is rubbish, and there’s nothing wrong with getting educated. It’s good and it matters. What’s broken is the framework people are educated inside, some of the content, and the false guarantee of a happy result at the end — which is what leaves people holding a qualification and no idea what it’s worth.
So say you take it into your own hands. You have a quiet wish, a dream. You realise a wish can last forever unless you turn it into goals. And you work out that your idea — a product, an offer, a skill — is something you could genuinely teach yourself. You sit down, do the research, find that plenty of people got there before you, and build motivation out of the proof.
Then you discover how many places will teach you, and that you can pick the parts you’d actually enjoy instead of being marched through a pile of material you have no use or appetite for.
Where to teach yourself, based on what you actually want
What do you want to know more about today? Three that are worth your time:
- Maths, science or economics — Khan Academy. Free.
- A bit of everything, from actual universities — edX, founded by Harvard and MIT. You can audit a lot of it for nothing.
- WordPress, programming, app development — Treehouse.
I’ve studied at MIT through edX myself. Excellent teaching, and it cost me nothing but attention.
The create-yourself state of mind
I remember hearing someone on a podcast talking about mindfulness and meditation, and mentioning that some schools in the US had started running meditation for the children. The result was that the children improved. Which apparently surprised people.
That’s another thing you can simply decide to do for your own brain. There’s a long list of things we could integrate into our lives that would straightforwardly make us better.
Choosing to believe you can teach yourself most things — and can just figure things out — changes your life. One important caveat: make sure you’re connecting to your true self, and not to what friends or family expect of you.
Do you think I’ve met many students struggling because they started down the wrong career path?
Working out who you are, what your core skills are and where your real passion sits is genuinely hard. But there are methods for getting at it.
Nurture a figure-things-out mindset
One of the things that genuinely fires me up is watching someone decide they can. It’s hard to get into that state on your own, and harder still to identify your passion and skills from inside your own head.
Detach from anyone who says “you can’t”, and spend your time with people who back your self-education. That’s what I did to start my web design business — the thing that bought me my freedom years ago.
All the best with it. I hope you find your own version of success — and I hope nobody has to sign off on it.
Ready to stop drifting and start creating on purpose?
The Reality Shift Template is my free 3-step framework — filter the noise, get clear on who you actually are, and consciously create what comes next. Drop your email and I’ll send it over.