“Some people get an education without going to college. The rest get it after they get out.” — Mark Twain
One of the most damaging stories a man can carry is the one that tells him he’s fallen behind. He’s fallen behind the man with the degree, or the man with the money, or the man who seems perfect. Those are stories all men tell themselves at one time or another. They’re lies — and for a long time, I believed them too.
I built a company from the ground up starting at eighteen with a few hundred dollars and no roadmap. I didn’t have a business school framework to fall back on. I had problems, and I had to solve them. Looking back, I understand now that the education I was getting wasn’t inferior to anyone else’s. It was just happening in a different classroom. The tuition was paid in failure, in hard conversations, and in decisions that kept me up at night.
That’s the throughline I keep coming back to this week: the classroom you can’t opt out of: Life. Life is teaching you something every day. The question isn’t whether you’re enrolled. The question is whether you’re paying attention.
Here’s what happened this week that drove that idea home for me.
We’ve been adding to the farm — chickens now, eight of them, living in a coop I sourced from an Amish craftsman after a lesson in patience courtesy of Temu and a shipping delay that never resolved. My daughter Savanna has taken full ownership of their care. Every morning she’s out there with food and water, making sure they’re not stuck in the coop. Every night she closes them in. She’s thirteen years old, and she has something that no classroom in the country teaches: to have living things depending on her.
What’s that teaching? It’s teaching her that the world doesn’t pause because you’re tired. Responsibility is daily, not occasional. I was out in the yard the other day digging up a stump and I found a few big grubs. I dropped one into the run, and every chicken in that coop turned into a linebacker. One bird grabbed it and all seven of the others took off in pursuit. Desiree and I stood there laughing, watching eight birds sort out the world’s most animated game of keep-away. There’s always someone who wants what the other one has. That’s not just for chickens. That’s people too. And watching it play out in the backyard, in a completely unfiltered way, is its own kind of education.
Meanwhile, one of my crew leaders came to me this week with a story that stopped me. His team arrived at a job site — smart film installation — to find that the environment had completely changed since the project was sold six months ago. Access was different. The setup was wrong. By eight in the morning, they were looking at something that seemed insurmountable. And the leader said three words that every man needs to hear himself say at some point: No matter what.
No matter what, we’re going to get it done. They broke the job into one challenge at a time. They didn’t try to solve the whole problem at once. They just found the first thing they could do and did it. Then the next. Then the next. The project took longer than it should have. But it got done. The client was happy. And those men drove home that evening having done something that looked impossible at seven that morning.
That job site was a classroom. Savanna’s chicken coop is a classroom. The lesson in both of them is the same: you learn by doing the hard thing, and then you do the next hard thing.
This week’s lesson: The best education you’ll ever get isn’t in a building. It’s in the problems you don’t get to walk away from.
