 You can gain knowledge right now from someone who is crushing it versus someone who's never done it before or someone who hasn't done it in 20 years. Today we're going to be talking about college and if college is still necessary in life, if it's necessary for success, if it ever was necessary for success, we're going to talk about college and this will benefit you. If you're young and you're thinking about going to college, this will benefit you. If you have children, this will benefit you. If you have grandchildren, this will benefit you. If you're thinking about going back to school or if you're thinking about having kids that might eventually want to go to college. So we're going to dive into it. I will say this before I say anything else. There is no correct path for anybody. Like for every person's path is different for me. I went to college for three years and I hated it and I dropped out and it worked out for me to be that way. I'm not saying that my path is the path for you. I'm not saying it's a path for anybody else. It's just the path that I went on. So to say that somebody's path, everybody's path should be the same. It's kind of crazy because everybody needs something different. Uh, but I get so many messages. The reason I wanted to cover this, because I've been getting messages for years from people asking, you know, Hey, I'm 18 years old. I'm about to graduate college. I'm about to graduate high school. I think I'm going to go to college. My parents want me to. I don't really want to go to college. What is your advice? I get messages of, Hey, I'm 20 years old. I've been in college for two years. I don't know what I want to do. I hate it and I feel like I'm just wasting my time and I'm wasting my money and I'm going more in debt. I get messages from people who are, Hey, my son's about to graduate high school and I'm not sure if he should go to college or not. What's your advice? I won't tell you what my advice is. I'll just tell you what I think just from seeing the world. And I'm going to tell you what I would do with the knowledge that I now have as a 35 year old business owner, uh, who's run his own business for the past 15 years. Now I have employees and I've been an, I've been an employee. Then I, when I was 19 years old for the next four years, I had my own company and I was literally had my own company. I paid myself. Then I went back into the corporate world for five years and now I'm back into where I am now, which is only in my own business and having a business. So I've played and I've worn multiple hats. I've also gone to college. I've dropped out of college. I've thought that I was stupid for dropping out of college. I resent to myself. I've thought about going back to college years ago. So I at least feel like I have at least some qualification to tell you what I think, but I'm going to tell you what I would do. If I were 18, 17 years old, 16 years old, and I was about to be graduating or if I was, you know, 50 years old and I had somebody who was my grand kid who was about to graduate. And this all came because I was at a event not long ago and there's a lady that came up and started talking to us, the people that were at the table. And she was in her mid sixties and she's like, she's telling us about her grandkids and she was there for a while. She's talking a lot. This woman was talking a lot. I'll tell you that. And she was talking about her two grandsons. One of them is so good in school and they're twins. He's so good in school and he does so well, but his brother, I'm so worried about his brother and, you know, he has to go to college because what is he going to do with his life if he doesn't go to college? She's on this whole thing. And she's worried about her grandson who doesn't do well in school and doesn't want to go to college. And I said, Hey, well, if it makes you feel better, I don't think that college is necessary for everybody. And I think that it's actually becoming less and less necessary. And in my personal opinion, I think it's going to be mostly obsolete in the next 15 to 20 years. And she's like, Whoa, what are you talking about? They started talking to her about this and made her feel better about it. But really what I did was open her mind up to the fact that the world is not the same now as it was when she was younger. So for everyone that's out there, if you went to college or if you're older, realize that now in 2021 the world is not the same as it was five years ago, 10 years ago, 17 years ago, when I first got into college, it's not the same, completely different. We're not playing the same game anymore. So what was the rules of the old game are not going to work in this, this day and age that we're in. So if I was young and I was graduating, here's what I would do. And let me tell you why I would do this, knowing what I know now. The first thing that I would do is I would not go to college immediately after graduating. I would take a gap year. I didn't do this myself. I went immediately to, you know, Florida Atlantic University when I was, you know, right after taking a summer off, I went straight to school. I would take a gap year though. And what I would do is I would save money. I would work. I would, I would save money for the entire time I was in high school. Save up, save up, save up, save up, save up. Every time somebody wanted to give me a birthday gift or a Christmas gift or whatever it is, I'd say, just give me money. I want to put it in my bank account. And I would stack away money, a few thousand bucks if I could, so that therefore if I needed to pay some bills, if, you know, you're not living with your parents, you can pay bills, whatever it is. Here's what I would do in that gap year. First off, I would travel. Oh, travel some places. The beautiful thing about when I did graduate high school, when I graduated high school that summer, I saved up literally for two years working at PetSmart as a bird and fish specialist from 16 to 18 years old. True story. I saved up almost every dollar that I possibly could. And when I graduated high school, me and three of my friends went on a surf trip and we went on a surf trip to Costa Rica for three weeks, backpacked off through Costa Rica, one of the best experiences of my entire life. It changed my perception of the world and it made me fall in love with other cultures. It made me fall in love with nature. It made me fall in love with being able to travel. It changed my life completely. I would recommend travel if somebody wants to go on travel. What I would also recommend is to do different things that you've never done before. Part of the problem of being 18, I don't know if I want to call it a problem, part of the issue of reason why people it's so hard to figure out what people want to do with their life is by 18, you don't have a whole lot of life experiences. So from 18 to 25, 26, 27 for a lot of people is just should just be trying new things, just doing new things and finding what you fall in love with. That's really what it should be versus going to school and starting to just learn stuff like just things. I don't I don't think that's the best way to do it. What I would think that people should do is they should just go do things. And what I would recommend is, you know, because you don't know who you are, try to discover by going and doing things that you might be interested in. What I would do is I would travel and I would start to go to conferences that semi interested me. You know, you can go to so many different conferences nowadays. That's what's so beautiful. And you have the internet to literally Google. If you're into fitness, Google Fitness Conference, Texas. If you live in Texas, fitness conferences coming up in 2021, 2022, whatever it is that you want. You can literally figure these things out. I would go to every single conference that I could to meet people in the industry that I might be interested in and just see what their life is like. See what they think. See how they view the world. See how they enjoy what they do. I went to college when I was 19, 18 years old and into my 19th year to be a ocean engineer. I went to ocean engineering and I ended up finding out after spending $20,000 my first year that I hated engineering. What if I would have just had the opportunity to go and hang out with an ocean engineer for a week, I would have figured it out right away. Would have been much easier. Would I say myself a year and a whole lot of money? That's the beautiful thing about conferences. You can immerse yourself and be around people who are doing the thing that you might be interested in. So there's so many different types of literally every type of conference you could want to go to. There is, you know, if you want to learn how to make money online, there's tons of conferences on how to make money online. All you do is this Google how to make money online conferences 2021 and just see if some pop up. There's marketing conferences. There's music conferences. There's fitness conferences. There's film conferences. There's fashion conferences. There's podcasting conferences. There's public speaking conferences. Whatever you might be a little bit into or your child or your grandchild might be a little bit into. Push them to go to these conferences and meet people who are in that. A lot of times people say, oh, yeah, well, the thing about college is you get to meet people for sure. But you also meet a bunch of other people who are broke like you who aren't doing anything as far as like in an industry making money. What if you could go and meet someone who's 10 or 15 years older than you that's been in the industry for five or 10 years that's making money and just see what their life looks like and meet them and network. You get more value from meeting somebody who's 10 years down the road than somebody else who's just figuring it out at the same time issue. So once again, this is I'm not telling you this is what's right or wrong. This is what I would do with all of the knowledge that I have now. So I would go to all of these conferences, marketing conferences, music, film, all of those conferences, and I would try to figure out if I enjoyed that. And then here's what I would do. You know, unless unless I want to be a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer, which if you want to be those things you can go to doctor's conferences, lawyer conferences, engineer conferences and see what it's like before you actually enroll in any classes to see if maybe that's something that you actually truly want to do. Like if you want to become a police officer, if you want to become a firefighter, if you want to become an EMT, you can do a ride along and you can literally call up the station that's around your house and say, Hey, can I do can I schedule a ride along and you can go ride with them for a day? What if you could do that for any profession? Well, this is kind of how you do it. You go out and you start to meet people. The beautiful thing about 2021 is almost everything can be learned online right now. So I would start investing my time and investing my money into learning more about whatever it is that I want to get better at. Let's say that that I want to learn how to make money online, right? I would go to the first online money making conference that I could go to in my area. There's quite a few that I've been to and I've met people and they have expanded my mindset because when I first started getting into trying to make money online, I thought, man, I'd be excited just to be able to pay my bills and travel a little bit. And then I started meeting people that are making 200, 400, a million, 5 million, 10 million dollars online. And I went, holy s**t, this is possible for them, which means it's also possible for me. So they blew up my mindset of what was possible for me. It was amazing. And I'm super grateful that I went to all of those conferences. What's cool about it is now you can go to those conferences and you can start to meet people and actually see if it's possible for you to shadow them, do a ride along, essentially. I think that if I were to find something, let's say for instance, I go to a film conference and I love film and FYI, I took film classes in college and I learned, I'm not saying I didn't learn, I learned, but if I were to go to college to learn film, I would learn a little bit about film. But if I were to go to a film conference in my area and meet somebody who is in my area, who made incredible YouTube videos and their lighting is amazing and their production is amazing and their writing is amazing, and I went up to them and I said, hey, say his name's Tim. Hey, Tim, I love everything that you do. Is it possible for me to just shadow you and just see what you do? Or can I work for you for free? I would love to work for somebody for free that is 10, 15 years ahead of me in the industry I want to get better at. That's called being an apprentice, which is something that is not used enough anymore. Not even close. When you go to Florence and you learn about Michelangelo, over there they call him Michelangelo. When you learn about him, you realize the reason why he became so good was not because he went to school for it, but because he became an apprentice of somebody who was really good before him and he learned from him, built on his foundation and became even better. That's what an apprentice does. So can you get some form of an apprenticeship with somebody who's already doing what you want? So you can either go to film school if you want, and I'm sure you're going to learn a lot, or you could go ahead and you could find someone in your area and you could ask to shadow them and you could pay them to shadow them. Hey, do you know how many people want free labor? They would love for a motivated young person to come that they can teach and they can literally have them work for free in order to learn. That shows hustle. That shows that they want to grind. That shows they want to become better. They would love that. And usually they get a lot of fulfillment from teaching to somebody else and seeing somebody else grown, seeing somebody else get better. Usually what happens, they go, oh, man, I wouldn't want you to work for free. I'll at least pay you a little bit. Holy crap. What if I could make a little bit of money and film instead of spending $20,000 a year to go to a film school? That would be amazing, wouldn't it? And I'd probably learn a lot more and I'd also save money or at least be able to pay my bills versus going into debt. These are all options that are available to every single person nowadays. You just have to decide, here's a few things that I'm interested in. I want to go to a few conferences. I want to see if I can get better at it. I want to see if I can meet a few people, I want to see if I can get a mentor. And if you don't have anything that's in your area, you don't have a mentor in your area, you can always pay for courses. Right. So there's people who teach film online. You can go onto YouTube and you can see some of your favorite creators. Many of them, if we're just going on with this film, many of them have their own courses where they teach you how to do the editing, where they teach you how to do the shooting, where they teach you how to do the lighting. You can go on to Udemy, U-D-E-M-Y. They're not sponsoring this, they should for me, giving them a shot like this. You can learn from them. You can learn from Skillshare. You can learn from so many different places to get better at something and not have to invest an entire year, have to move to a different area, have to pay room and board in order to find from somebody who's been teaching the exact same thing for the past 15 years. I'm not saying that somebody working in film wouldn't be able to help you, but a lot has changed with production in the past couple of years. Wouldn't you rather learn from someone who's in it? Okay, let's flip it. Let's say that you want to be a successful business person, right? Think about this, for instance, I was in school after I decided I didn't want to be an ocean engineer. I went to school for business. Why? I don't know just because it felt like that's what I was supposed to go to school for. I went to school for business and learned in school from teachers how to grow a business. And these are teachers that did not have, didn't have a business. That's like me going up to somebody who's never played basketball and be like, hey, can you teach me how to play basketball? Like that's not going to help me very much. So imagine this is what I would do had I known this when I was younger, if I could go and find a successful business person in my area, that's in an industry that I think is kind of cool. And I would walk into their door, cold call them, go up to their door and I would say, you know, walk right up to them and I'd say, hey, listen, do you know what? I'm 18 years old. I'm thinking about going to college in being a business major, but I wanted and I love what you do. And I've seen what you've done in the community. I see the way that you act and I would I would love to just work for you for free as like an intern for a summer. Is that OK? Can I do that? Can I just learn from you and just be around you and be able to see what you do? Most people would say yes to that. If they don't say yes to that, there's three or four or five other business people in your area that would say yes to you just have to find that person. So would you rather learn from a teacher who doesn't have a business on how to grow a business or would you rather learn from somebody who is currently running a successful business? It's obvious, right? The person is running a successful business. So the beautiful thing about the decentralization of knowledge which the Internet is causing is that we can learn anything at any point in time. You don't have to go to college specifically to learn something anymore. Now, do you have to get degrees or degrees required in some industries? Absolutely. If that's the industry you want to get into, first I would go to a couple of conferences and try to shadow people if you can before you start spending money and time into it. But then you can go to college if that's what you want to do, if that's what you feel is right, if that's what your children or your grandchildren feel is right. But the beautiful thing about it is that you can gain knowledge right now from someone who is crushing it versus someone who's never done it before or someone who hasn't done it in 20 years. It's the difference between going to school twice a week to learn Spanish versus moving to Spain. Which one are you going to pick up Spanish quicker? You're going to pick up Spanish quicker in Spain. You're going to become more fluent, faster, you're going to become better at the language, simply from being there. It's the exact same thing. It's just it's in film. It's in fashion. It's in, you know, making money online. It's in marketing. It's whatever industry you want to grow in. If it's not required for somebody to get a degree, I think 90 to 95 percent of the time for them to go to college is not going to benefit them as much as taking the route that I'm talking about. The reason why is because I went to college for years, three years, and I learned more outside of college than I did in college. There's just no comparison because mentors collapse time for you. If you go to somebody who's been running a successful business for 20 years, they collapse those 20 years into a year, two years of learning from them, of working from them. It's the difference between, like I said, going to school to learn Spanish versus going to Spain and picking up the language. You immerse yourself into it. If you want to learn how to run Facebook ads, because you've heard that, you know, Facebook ads are fun and you like numbers and you've heard that you can make a lot of money doing it. Go to a Facebook ads conference, go to the next conference that's on internet marketing and try to find someone who does it and say, hey, can I work for you for free? Now I realize you still have to pay bills. If you're 25 years old and you dropped out of college and you think about going back to it, well, now you could go, I still got to pay my bills. Okay, but could you work for this person on the weekends? Could you work part time and pay your bills and grind it out for a few years to be able to take knowledge from this person and give them very cheap labor or give them free labor simply to gain knowledge? I don't know about you. College costs money. I'd rather work for free and not have that money be taken from me or maybe make a little bit of money so that therefore I can gain knowledge for free or at least make a little bit of money. This is an investment, not an expense to pay someone to work for them if it comes down to that. That's how I see it. If you find something that you want and you go into a course for it, it's an investment. It's not expensive. If somebody, if you say, hey, I'll pay you a hundred bucks a week for me to be able to work for you and, you know, just be able to follow you around, that's an investment. It's not an expense. You know, if you got to go knock on doors, go knock on some doors. These people have the knowledge that you want. Why don't you just ask me if you can get it from them? People love once they've hit a certain level of success. Making money doesn't make them excited anymore, helping other people succeed. It's actually what makes them more excited. So that would be my recommendation for you. If you're out there and you either think about going to college, you're thinking about going back to college, you're thinking about going to get your masters, you have children that are eventually going to college, you have grandchildren that are going to eventually be going to college. In my personal opinion of seeing how the world is working, I don't think that college is necessary anymore. A majority of companies are not hiring people, not requiring people to go to college in order to be hired. The biggest companies in the world, Apple, Amazon, Tesla, those companies don't require you to have a degree anymore. So what's the point? Why don't you learn your knowledge in another way and get better at it? It's way less time, it's less money, and it's less debt, but it ends up being more knowledge. It's a collapsing of time so that you can expedite your success much, much faster. Hey, thanks so much for watching this video. If you want to learn even more about Master Your Mind, click right here and watch this video as well. That was the best money I've ever spent. By far, I'm never not working with a mentor again.