I was the first in my family to go to college, and I waitressed all the way through, using my earnings to pay for a bachelor's degree first and then a master's. I resented classmates who didn't have to work real jobs, the ones who had the luxury of taking unpaid internships that would eventually position them for high-paying careers.
The ticket out of the Depression was an education, a college degree. It really didn't matter if you knew anything. You just had to have the degree. My dad, up until the last two years of his life, thought he had failed miserably with me 'cause I didn't go to college. I mean, you've seen postgame interviews with the star of the game and the players always talk about how proud his parents are because he's the first guy in his family ever to attend college. I'm the first in my family not to! I'm the first of my family not to have a degree. It's thrown everybody for a loop.
I eventually moved to New York with just a couple unpaid internships. Meeting people and going to go the Upright Citizens Brigade, I was able to get a lot of connections, find some odd jobs, and be taken more seriously.
At graduation, I assumed I'd be in publishing, but first I went to England and got a master's degree in English Literature. And then I came back to New York and had a series of publishing jobs, the way one does.
Everybody had to go to some college or other. A business college, a junior college, a state college, a secretarial college, an Ivy League college, a pig farmer's college. The book first, then the work.
I started writing in fourth grade and never stopped. I faked my way through high school and nearly was flushed from college - I still can't pay attention - and then had a series of day jobs. But always, continuously, I have written.
I remember when I was a young social worker, the first time I went to the state capital in Arizona, where I eventually served for seven years, I was so nervous to go and lobby my state legislators. Because I only had a master's degree at the time in social work.
I had gotten a master's degree in administration supervision with it in mind that I would some day be a professor, then get a doctorate degree and move up and eventually be president of a university.
Now if you not only support them through that pregnancy, but now provide childcare for them so they can go back to school and get their GED or their associate's degree or bachelor's degree or their master's degree, learn how to take care of themselves, teach their baby how to take care of themselves so that you break the cycle of the dependency.
I obtained my first job with the Eagles through a series of internships that began during my junior year of college. From there, after obtaining the job, it was a combination of hard work and perseverance and showing them the type of person that I was that helped me climb the coaching ladder.
When I first started YouTube, I was using an old computer that I had had in high school that stayed with me through college that was on its last leg. The boot-up was, like, 25 minutes.
I was 27 when I uploaded my first YouTube video. I had a master's degree and was running a small business. I had had good jobs and bad jobs and was fairly secure in my identity and understood who I was. When my audience or the algorithm wanted me to be something, I knew with a fair amount of certainty whether I wanted to be that thing or not.
I grew up on Long Island, and from as early as I can remember, as far back as first grade, I had two real passions - one of them was putting on plays, and the other was journalism. I was directing plays and editing school papers from first grade on, all the way through college.
People of my age who went to college, go into college, you know what it cost back then? Nothing or next to nothing. At the most, you had to work at Dairy Queen during the summer and that would pay for your college education.
A typical Ponzi scheme involves taking money from investors, then paying them off with money taken from new investors, rather than paying them from actual earnings.
The chaotic theory of education is that you go to college, earn a degree and then that degree may be used in something completely different. It's about achieving the goal first.
When I went to college, it was so easy. And I worked two jobs while I was in school all the way through; I put myself through school. But working and studying was easy for me because I had worked so hard in high school, studying all the time. Taking only three classes and then working was an easy life in comparison.