The only people who ask me if I have degree are friends and family. I have never been asked for a degree by my clients who are mostly doctors, attorneys, business owners and entrepreneurs. Don’t get me wrong, if you want to get a degree or certificate for this industry, go right ahead. I actually encourage it if that’s what you really feel you have to. I will never be against anyone wanting to further their education. In my course, I show my students how simple it is to start your own agency with just a few tools and the right mindset. If anyone tries to talk you down because you don’t have a degree, it’s probably time to put that person on pause for a bit. One thing I learned during my career is that there are people, even the people closest to you, who will envy your new ventures and try to make you feel like can’t do it either because they’re jealous or they just don’t have the spirit of an entrepreneur. In the real world, the ones getting ahead are the people who are figuring it out on a daily basis. Anything in life comes with challenges, but you will always learn how to overcome them. That’s one thing a degree won’t teach you. Sure, can give you a little experience, but there’s nothing like real world experiences.
This job comes with a hefty size of problem solving skills that you start to workout like a muscle. When working in tech, social media, branding, there are always advancements, and luckily for us, these advancements always make our job easier so the problem solving skills are actually nurtured by the technology that’s always coming out on a daily basis. In my course I talk about loom.com and how it’s solved so many of my problems communicating to the client and my team. It’s things like this that are always making our job easier as agency owners.
Let’s do the math. This is what I did when I decided to drop out of college. Would you rather go to a university and end up paying upwards of $100,000 for the rest of your life? Or would you rather work smart (not hard) and try to get make $100,000 your first year? That’s a pretty obvious answer. I have friends who are still paying off student loans from 2008 and 95% of them are not even working in the fields they got their degrees in.
When I was in high school, a friends dad was a psychologist and when I would go to their beautiful house in the hills of Fullerton, CA, I was always so impressed and wondered what it would be like to have that type of home and lifestyle. One day I asked, “Jack, can I be a psychologist with a bachelors degree?” His answer was simple, “If you get a bachelors in psychology, you can work at a shoe store” I replied, “So then I need a masters?”. He looked at me while driving us to water polo practice and said, “You don’t wanna be a psychologist… trust me, you’re too talented.”
That statement stuck with me for years. I always wondered why he didn’t want me to go down that route. Later to discover I would have to have years of school, start out at the bottom and work my way up. For most people anyhow. There are people who can start their own practice right away and start making the big bucks, but that’s besides the point. A degree doesn’t do much these days especially in marketing with social media, mobile apps, remote meetings, I mean everything has just changed so much since that day at water polo practice when I was using an old school Nokia phone playing snake.
Bottom line, you don’t need a degree to be the owner of a successful agency. Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg are college dropouts, just to name a few. Guess what they’re in? Tech!
The possibilities are literally endless. Every day I am researching ways to invest in my business to work less and make more money. You can do the same. In fact, I bet there are students taking my course right now who are going to start making more money than when I first started with or without a degree.
