When I was little, my twin brother and I were often encouraged by our mom to play together.

There were the typical sibling wars — he ripped off the legs of my Jordan Knight doll (I put pants on him anyway and the little guy performed Step By Step until my arm got tired of holding him up) and I got my revenge when I snapped the plastic cover of his Ninja Turtles van.

That’s right. I snapped it off like the Hulk rips apart rebar.

We tried to play nicely, though, too — probably in an effort to placate our well-meaning mother. One activity that was always welcome between us both was playing with my brother’s Ninja Turtles, even after my malicious van attack, and only if I pretended that my Barbie was April O’Neil (for obvious reasons, he wouldn’t let me play with a solitary turtle.)

April O’Neil, in case you’re too young to remember boxy TVs with bunny ears, was a reporter extraordinaire — at least, she was in my time (previously she was a computer programmer, which I also think is mega-cool.) The late ’80s brought so many awesome things, one of which was a Ninja Turtles cartoon series in which April O’Neil was a passionate, firey-haired news reporter who was serious about her career — and fighting crime.

Ever since the days of April O’Neil and her inspiring yellow jumpsuit, I dreamed of becoming a journalist.

So I went to university — one of the best in the field of journalism — and began my bachelor of communications in journalism degree.

I immediately excelled in my classes. I looked forward to school every day and wrote for the paper, daydreaming about my assured future as an award-winning journalist. I envisioned my name in glittery lights and the reality was within my reach. The path to all that glory and success was set before me, plowed and primed for me to keep going; I had only to traverse that steady road.

And then I dropped out.

. . .

All Work and No Play

Like so many students, schoolwork wasn’t my only priority.

Besides writing for the university’s paper, I also had a part-time job to help pay for my tiny apartment downtown; I barely had time to eat and sleep, let alone study.

If you’ve ever studied journalism — or any degree, most likely — you’ll know that there is a lot that happens outside of class. More than just studying, research, and homework, there are interviews to conduct, articles to write and pitch, and a competitive GPA to maintain through it all.

I remember a particularly passionate English Lit teacher who was notorious for assigning tons of homework and grading her students with vengeful wrath I’d never seen before. I spent my transit trips to and from school and work with my nose in my Beowulf textbook and a pen furiously taking notes on my lap when I should have been focusing on my core courses — but “electives” were required, naturally.

I also worked most days after school and didn’t get home until nearly midnight. It wasn’t uncommon for me to wake up to my alarm back then with my cheek sticking to the pages of my open textbook at my tiny kitchen table (where I had fallen asleep the night before, mid-cram.)

Weekends were also full of work and studies, and there was very little time to do much else. I tried to maintain a social life, but beyond spending a half hour or so at the nearby pub with classmates with a textbook balanced on my knee, I spent most of my time immersed in my studies and extracurricular work.

There were not enough hours in a day. Not by a long shot.

Burnout started to creep in; rent started to get behind. I had to work more and study less. I stopped seeing my friends; stopped calling my mom back.

I stopped eating. I barely slept.

One day, I literally couldn’t get out of bed without falling over. I would stand up and instantly pass out. I’d hit my wall, so to speak.

As I lay shivering and scared on the cold floor of my basement suite, I knew I was done.

. . .

Detours

There was a multitude of reasons I didn’t complete my degree; the above-mentioned were just the tipping point. I was late to the race in the first place, having taken two years off after high school to run amuck in Europe, where I made terrible choices that only newly appointed adults make without their parents and peers there to stop them.

When I came back, I’d focused on things that didn’t matter, like dating (sorry to any of the men I dated during this time — it’s not your fault.) Then, when I finally did throw myself into my studies, I threw myself too hard and overdid it.

I tried to do too much and it nearly killed me.

Beyond all of that, though, I had started to see some holes in my perfect, clear path to success; little potholes that were starting to become too numerous and severe to ignore.

When you discover that what you’re furiously, voraciously studying for — the life you’re preparing yourself for — isn’t quite what thought it was, it becomes harder and harder to stay on track.

Detours can become unavoidable.

. . .

Lamentations and Regret are Useless

I spent years lamenting the Journalism degree that I ran from. I worked, of course, and made a decent living employed by the government, but I never considered what I was doing to be a “career.”

A better term for what I was doing was “biding my time” or “waiting for my ship to come in.”

The truth is, though, there is no ship. Nothing was going to just fall into my lap by chance. By not completing my degree, I narrowed down my choices for financial freedom because I greatly narrowed down my employment options.

My hands were effectively tied — but times have changed.

I touched on this theory in another article, but it seems to be more common these days to skip out on traditional education altogether and spend that time creating instead. Building a business and becoming a quick-thinking entrepreneur starts to look really attractive as the cost and sacrifice demanded by an education increases.

I’m not suggesting that everyone start up their own YouTube channel and just wait for the money to roll in. Many people have seen some incredible success on YouTube and other platforms like it (Medium falls into this category, too) and they did it not with an education, but with just one of two very important tools:

1. Luck
2. Tenacity

Obviously, not everyone can simply “use” good luck, because luck isn’t something that can be relied upon.

But tenacity? Hard work? Drive? Everyone can learn how to harness those skills, and doing so is vital if you ever hope to succeed. The two YouTubers I mentioned in my article had neither education nor money when they started, but they worked their butts off for years without giving up. They now have well over 6 million followers on YouTube and a healthy investment for their futures.

One thing is very clear to me as I near the age of 40, and as I change career paths from government monkey to full-time, self-employed creator: nothing good comes from sitting back and doing nothing. If you want to earn money, you have to learn a skill and excel at it.

Sometimes that involves a degree. But if that’s not in the cards for you, there’s no reason you can’t be successful, too.

Tenacity, hard work, and the ability to never stop trying are all things that you can’t learn by simply completing a degree. You don’t have to break your back to create content or to make a home business flourish, but you do need the work ethic and the will to never stop trying.

You don’t get those things from a piece of paper.

And it’s undeniable that as time moves ever forward, the value of that once-critical piece of paper diminishes. Not only did fewer high school graduates move on to college in 2020 — more than likely as a result of Covid, since the numbers were expected to rise that year, not fall — but tuition costs continue to soar, making college an impossible dream for many.

Further to the rising cost of tuition is the not-so-great increase in salaries. According to the information available from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, the average household income only rose 0.3% between 1989 and 2016, which means that tuition costs actually increased eight times faster than average income.

In other words, the cost of tuition more than doubled (a college degree will cost more than $100,000) while average household income only increased by about $4,997.

Those numbers straight-up suck.

. . .

Education Isn’t Always a Choice

Looking back at my attempt at higher education, I’ve come to realize something: education isn’t always a choice, especially with the rising cost of tuition and fees.

I didn’t have the money to earn my degree back then, let alone now, and loans would only go so far. I had to work, had to apply myself in other areas of my life to keep my job (I took the closing shifts because that meant I could attend all of my classes and daytime extracurriculars) and I had to study hard to keep up my average.

But once my health started to fail and my body and mind stopped functioning, the sacrifices I’d made for the sake of my education had become too much to bear.

Higher education for me was, by that point, well beyond my reach. And that was back then.

There were things in life that held more value, anyway: things like my health. Things like my friends; my family. I needed to stop putting the degree that I was so relentlessly pursuing on a pedestal and look at it honestly for once. I needed to turn it over in my hands. I needed to inspect its genuine worth.

When I did, I found that not only was an education insanely expensive for what I could hope to earn one day, but the lifestyle of a journalist wasn’t what I’d expected.

It wasn’t what I wanted — at least, not anymore.

The degree I’d once wanted so badly had become utterly worthless to me.

. . .

Broken Expectations

Back in the early days of my studies, I remember going with a fellow student to The National Post’s local office to interview a journalist there, and to get a feel for the environment and what the work would entail.

My friend was elated as she looked around the cluttered room of scattered desks while the irritating sound of ringing phones attacked our senses — I, meanwhile, inwardly gaped in horror.

Everywhere we looked, there were haggard, frazzled journalists typing away furiously, cradling phones on their shoulders as they wrote. There were no family photos on the desks. There were no happy little plants flourishing by the windows. There was no radio playing the hits of the ’90s in the corner. There were no casual watercooler conversations going on. No smiles; no laughter.

Everyone looked stressed out and miserable, but my friend didn’t seem to notice as she gushed about the brilliant minds we were surrounded by.

I, on the other hand, saw no yellow jumpsuits whatsoever. Not even one.

Obviously, I knew by this age that my life wasn’t going to mirror that of a fictional cartoon character from the ’80s, but I expected something different, I suppose. I expected more privacy to think, more serenity to create. Not this. Not this word-factory sweatshop; this room of dejection and crushed dreams.

I’m being dramatic, sure, but that’s how it felt at the time.

The conversation with the journalist we spoke to solidified my concern that what we saw was the reality of the work: long hours, stingy pay, and being work-ready 24 hours a day.

All for the glory of a press pass and a coveted occupation to put our names to.

Even if I could accept the reality of what was unfolding around me, it started to occur to me that the life I’d envisioned for myself wasn’t going to happen in the environment I was working towards. It wasn’t going to be found while covering car accidents and fraud arrests. I wasn’t going to be fulfilled writing about current events and politics and classifieds and generic copy. Having a family in that line of work would be that much harder if I wanted my career to remain intact.

And even if I could accept all of that, it just wasn’t worth the cost.

. . .

Meandering Can Be Useful, Too

I left school without much ceremony.

I wandered a bit, professionally. I eventually began working in office administration, which led to well-paying, steady work with the government, where I stayed and found myself to be moderately happy for the next 12 years.

But writing was still a constant force in my life.

Over my time working in the office and writing part-time, I found that writing was a passion that I still wanted to pursue. Journalism wasn’t quite the right fit, I realized, and that was unfortunate but I’d long since accepted the loss.

I still wanted to write, but I wanted to write about the kinds of things that I liked to read about — the newspaper was never something I literally or figurately subscribed to.

I’d long since realized that I was not, nor would I ever be, April O’Neil. But I could still be me.

I started blogs; I deleted blogs. I pitched to various magazines and publications and was often rejected.

I was also occasionally accepted; that felt good. It kept me going.

It was a slow process, especially as I worked a day job and began a family at the same time, but in my years writing without a degree, I’ve learned so much:

• I’ve learned to make time to write and not to squander the time I have with my husband and kids.
• I’ve learned to create rather than just write.
• I’ve learned how to pitch and accept rejection.
• I’ve learned how to meet tight deadlines and maturely handle revisions.
• I’ve learned how to avoid being taken advantage of by clients and how to assess and invoice for what my work is worth.

Most importantly, in following my own path I’ve learned more about the business of writing and working for myself than I ever did during my studies.

And that’s more valuable than any degree if you ask me.

. . .

A World of Opportunity

A list of career opportunities I might have expected once I’d completed my journalism degree:

• Multimedia journalist
• News reporter and editor
• Social media specialist
• Communications manager
• Advocacy communicator
• Policy researcher
• Podcast producer
• Documentary maker

I can honestly say that none of those look appealing to me now.

In fact, as a self-employed writer and content creator, my opportunities feel relatively endless. I can write fiction or non-fiction. I can write about parenting while it’s applicable to me and my life and when it’s not, I can write about whatever that brings with it. I can write about relationships, marriage and love. I can write about my accomplishments — huge accomplishments like losing a whole mess of weight and getting sober.

I can write about babies all day if I want to — motherhood is incredible and inspiring.

I could do all of that with a degree too but the difference is that to write what I want to write, I don’t need one.

Further to all of that, there are a number of companies who are no longer interested in hiring educated people alone, opting instead to offer on the job training and valuing experience over just education. Big players like Google, Apple, IBM, and Penguin Random House, advertise a number of positions for which the requirements are the relevant education “or equivalent practical experience.”

This tells me that companies are looking to fill their positions faster than educated people become available to fill them, and that’s great news for the underdog.

. . .

A Degree Doesn’t Always Equal Success

I spent years haunted by the ghost of my unfinished degree.

I spent years feeling worthless, unable to say I’d achieved something that so many of my peers had managed. I felt like something was wrong with me.

I felt stupid.

In time, I began to recognize that I’m not stupid; that nothing is wrong with me. I just chose differently, and that’s perfectly fine. If I could go back in time? Sure. I’d do things a little differently. Who wouldn’t?

But I still wouldn’t finish my degree.

Obviously, there are some things that we need educated people for — you wouldn’t have your appendix removed by someone who just really liked medicine and researched a bit before they took the scalpel to your belly. We need bright, educated minds for some very important roles in our society.

A writer has a different set of skills, however, and as an occupation, it’s pretty unique in that way.

I have a friend who has a Ph.D. in psychology. She’s brilliant. She’s capable. She got top grades in all her classes. Her Ph.D. is hung proudly in her home office above her desk in a beautifully embossed wooden frame.

She is also a mom of four, and she has yet to actually use her education to earn any money. She’s busy raising her kids — and that’s what makes her happiest.

Another friend has a degree in paleontology. She got a great job and moved to a town in Alberta where she was near multiple active dig sites — it was a young paleontologist’s dream.

That was10 years ago. Within her first week, she quit.

She currently runs a wildly successful doggy daycare centre and has zero plans to continue pursuing her paleontology career.

“I guess I prefer live animals to the crumbling fossils of dead ones,” she told me one day as we laughed over our laid-aside educations.

A degree isn’t necessarily going to lead you to a successful career — that depends entirely on you. Regardless of your education, no piece of paper is going to thrust you into the open, loving arms of your idea of a perfect job.

We all have to work hard to get to where we want to be; degree or no degree.

There’s no sense lamenting your unfinished degree, especially as a creator. When we create, we are making something of intrinsic value, and you don’t need a degree to tap into your creative genius.

As Sylvia Plath, an American poet, once said, “the worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” Don’t let your lack of a degree determine your creative worth. The takeaway here is that as an entrepreneur and a content creator, the world is your oyster — you can follow your dreams, you can create, and you can do it all without a degree.

You and your wonderful mind are worth so much more than a piece of paper.

—

This post was previously published on ILLUMINATION.

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The post You Can Still Be Wildly Successful Without a College Degree appeared first on The Good Men Project.