One of the biggest lies you can tell yourself is that you aren’t as successful as you want to be because you don’t have the right education. That you need the right degree from the right college to get the right results.
Getting the results that you want for yourself is about hustle and heart and effort. You have to learn and evolve and grow.
And while you can do all of that behind a desk in a classroom, you’re going to have to do a whole lot more — if you want to be successful.
The biggest mistake you can make is to believe that you can’t get started being awesome until you get a degree.
In fact, that might be the one thing holding you back.
Every part of life is full of winners who traded “a degree” for hustle.
- Business — Richard Branson dropped out of high school at 15 and never returned. Over the next 50 years, he would build the Virgin Group and lead over 500 companies, creating a personal net worth of $5 billion.
- Manufacturing — Henry Ford had no college education at all and few years of formal education at all. He went on to reinvent the manufacturing process and the entire automobile industry.
- Boxing — George Foreman dropped out of school to run with a local gang. He started boxing years later and built a career that earned him a spot in the World Boxing Hall of Fame and the International Boxing Hall of Fame as World Heavyweight Champion and Olympic gold medalist.
- Humor — Mark Twain only had a 5th-grade education. His Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is considered by most literary enthusiasts to be the greatest American novel of all time.
- Innovation — Steve Jobs stayed in college for only six months. His breakthrough inventions in mobile technology are perhaps the greatest business marvels of the last fifty years.
- Literature — William Shakespeare dropped out of middle school. He would later create almost 2,000 English words and write the most famous literary works of all time.
- Fine Dining — Joe Lewis dropped out of school to help his father with his floundering catering business. Today he owns 200 companies including a Premiership soccer team and 135 restaurants — and is worth over $5 billion.
- Science — Albert Einstein was a high school dropout and failed his university entrance exams. He came up with the Theory of Relativity, published 300 scientific papers, won a Nobel Prize, and is considered the greatest mind of the twentieth century.
- Music — Aretha Franklin got pregnant at 14 and dropped out of school a year later to take care of her baby. She would sing her way to 18 Grammy awards and became the first female artist to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
- Movies — Quentin Tarantino left high school to work as an usher at a film theater so he could afford to take acting classes. He’s been nominated for multiple Academy Awards and is the winner of two.
- Politics — Horace Greeley had no schooling at all. He would later become a Congressman, helped found the Republican Party, and today is considered one the most influential journalists in American history.
- Money — John D. Rockefeller left school as a young teenager to get a job. He would build Standard Oil into a large petroleum monopoly, ultimately becoming the richest man of all time (considering current inflation).
- Aerospace — John Glenn was a dropout from the science program at Muskingum College. He went on to become one of the most important astronauts in American history.
The list goes on and on and on.
Music superstar Lady Gaga, media mogul Oprah Winfrey, philanthropist Bill Gates, platinum artist Jay-Z, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, Uber founder Travis Kalanick — they all dropped out of school and hustled their way to success.
They each hustled. They each worked. They each fought past the same fear and doubts that you have right now.
Success is not about a degree. It’s not about what grade other people give you. It’s about how hard you’re willing to work to get to where you want to be.
Maybe you need to forget about the degree and get some hustle.
The post Forget About The Degree. Get Some Hustle. appeared first on Dan Waldschmidt: Author of EDGY Conversations.
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