Education won’t help.

Too many people rely on education for career advancement. And I get it. I do. My parents — especially my father — used education as a social lift to build the life they have today. For them, education was a practical way to get out of their immediate environment into a better world they imagined for themselves. If it weren’t for Stanford MBA, my father would probably still be operating a sports bar called Doping on the outskirts of Moscow.

But then, in some fields, and some circumstances, education is overrated. People use education as an excuse not to do the work or take risks. They assume that having a prestigious degree will open the doors for them. But if that used to be two decades ago, in 2022, that’s just not the case. It’s much more practical to focus on what you actually can control: choosing yourself.

In 2016, after a few weeks of deliberation, I left Babson College after seven months of studying. I didn’t understand what I was doing there. Here I was, binge-drinking on California wine in my dorm room in the middle of the workweek, too bored to go to class when my father was paying $7,000 per month to keep me there. I was supposed to be studying business — but even at 18, I was sceptical that you could actually study business. I didn’t know any successful startup founder who finished a course on “business”. Steve Jobs studied liberal arts, the founder of Snapchat studied design; most founders were IT guys to start with. The only people who studied business were boring consultants and hypocritical top managers.