If you’ve ever read that I blog for my own benefit and not yours, this is one of those posts.

So who the hell am I and why should you read this (another great question posed by Carol Roth)? She didn’t ask me personally, but I’m going to try to answer this question for my own benefit.

In addition to buying the wrong plan in life, I had the wrong friends i.e. a group of attorneys and businesspeople in my hometown who frequently confused the activities “networking” and “alcoholism.” It was the late 1990’s and everyone was making money and times were good. I was waiting tables at the time (and still do, but hey, the bills are getting paid).

What was the first thing I did when I got out of the Navy, i.e. entered the “real” world? I started my own business and failed miserably. Upon recent investigation, I never had a business, but donated my money to someone else’s “get-rich-quick” scheme. They didn’t. They went bankrupt.

What did I do then? I got a job as a salesman in a retail jewelry business which doesn’t exist anymore. I got my first taste of sales and I was pretty good at it. I made a litle bit of money and got my first taste of corporate politics that ultimately got me fired. That was over 20 years ago and I still detest politics, whether it is on TV or in my face.

Why did I go into sales when my background was in a highly technical field (nuclear power plant operation)? Because I wanted to become successful in business and someone convinced me that you HAVE to have a college degree to succeed in business or in life, for that matter. It was the early 1990’s and the internet revolution hadn’t quite made it to where I was living yet. Education was a lot more expensive than it is today. I am CERTAINLY not advocating dropping out of college for the sheer hell of it, but I am saying that there are other sources of education (i.e. Amazon.com). This has been a fallacy that I have to counter every day of my life. Of all the erroneous beliefs that have held me back in life, this has to be the most damaging.

Why didn’t I go back to college? I was trying to make it in sales early in my sales career and I was surrounded by other sales people that didn’t have degrees. Guess what “advice” I got? “You don’t need to go back to college, just make taht next sale.”

What am I doing about it?

At last something to work on with some merit…