If you have the opportunity to have a high level college education, by all means take advantage of it. If you haven’t been fortunate enough to have an impressive formal education, don’t forget that the ranks of the high achievers are filled with people with very little education. There are some fields that require many years of school such as medicine and engineering, but if you don’t want to live a life studying staring at text books to impress your family, there are many other routes you can take.
A lack of a college education will only hinder you if you let it, and for the majority of careers, there are steps you can take to offset the lack of it.
How to be successful without a formal college education
1. Take Advantage of Free Education Resources
We mentioned many ways you can teach yourself the basics in any field by taking advantage of readily available free online courses in our free education post here. With the amount information that is available at your finger tips, you can easily compensate for the lack of a lecturer by applying what you are learning to your work, as you study the free course materials. You will have the advantage of being able to apply what you learn, which is a big advantage compared to someone in school who is unable to work to advance their career until they complete their course.
2. Read as Many Books on the Subject as You Can Get Your Hands On
In a recent post, we gave you 10 legal websites where you can download free ebooks, but there are hundreds of sites like this, with many of them providing access to essay writing service, textbooks and studies. There free resources only need one thing; an aspiring entrepreneur who is willing to put in the time to read and apply what he or she is learning as they work and advance their career. Add that ingredient and everything else is already ready for you.
3. Find People in Your Field Who Are Already Successful
Find 50 successful people in the field that you are interested in and contact them. Offer to buy them lunch or dinner, if they would give you the chance to ask them some questions. Many of them will say no, but not all of them. Even if they all do, find another 50. They don’t have to be in your city or state. With Skype, you can arrange a date with anyone around the world, and if they have Dominos pizza, you can order it for them.
This technique will not only give you an opportunity to meet and learn from the masters, but it will also make you some good connections and get you known.
4. Get Any Job You Can in Your Field
Get any kind of job in the field you’d like to be in and observe everything you can. Offer to work longer and work harder than anybody else. Work for free if you have to. If you want to be successful in your field badly enough, you will do anything for it, even if you don’t have someone holding your hands at every step of the way.
“It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.”
― Leonardo da Vinci
