Five Successful Friends
For whatever reason, I was recently thinking about five dear friends of mine and about what they had in common (other than being my friend).
All of them are at the top of their game, all of them are self-employed, all of them are high earners, all of them enjoy highly satisfying family lives, all of them contribute richly to their larger communities. And not one of them went to university.
Some are short, some are tall. Some have red hair, some have no hair. Some come from old pioneer stock, some are immigrants. Two speak only English, two are English/French bilingual, one speaks three languages. As different as they can be, perhaps, but all of them share these things in common, not in ranked order:
1. Extraordinary people skills.
2. High levels of self-understanding.
3. High levels of self-control.
4. By happenstance, and early in life, found themselves in mundane work where they found ways to do it better, smarter, and/or faster, and learned how to build systems.
5. Discovered that what they had learned was of universal application, and of high value.
6. Monetized this knowledge, either by applying it on a mass scale, teaching it to others, or both, or in yet some other way.
Now of course this is not to say you should not go to an institution of higher learning, but it is definitely to say that success in life is certainly not correlated with a university degree. And above all else, it definitely tells us that the Alignment Doctrine works, that is, when you get yourself into that place you were meant to be, and bring together your innate aptitudes, your experiences, and your training (formal and/or informal), magic can happen.