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I spent forty years telling myself I was less than. Less educated. Less qualified. Less worthy of having an opinion on anything that mattered. All because I didn’t have a piece of paper with a university seal on it.
Started when I was eighteen. Everyone else was heading off to college, and I was heading to a job site with a toolbox. One semester at community college was all I managed before I dropped out to become an electrician’s apprentice. Made sense at the time—I needed money, and sitting in a classroom felt like wearing a suit that didn’t fit.
But that decision followed me everywhere. Every time someone mentioned their degree, I’d change the subject. Every parent-teacher conference, I’d hope nobody asked about my education. Hell, I even avoided certain conversations at the bar because I figured my opinion didn’t count without those letters after my name.
Then something shifted. And it wasn’t some big revelation. It was just me, sitting in my garage one night, looking at the bookshelf I’d built and realizing it was completely full.
The education I didn’t know I was getting
It started with reading to my kids at bedtime. Turns out I do a pretty good monster voice, and they loved it. But something else happened—I started enjoying the stories too.
After they grew up, I kept reading. First it was just to fall asleep. Then it was during lunch breaks. Then it was whenever I had a spare minute.
I read everything. History books about the wars my father never talked about. Biographies of people who built things, failed at things, figured things out. Books about electricity and engineering that actually explained the work I’d been doing for decades. Philosophy books that made me think about questions I’d never asked.
One night, I tried counting them all up. Lost track somewhere around three hundred.
That’s when it hit me. While I was beating myself up for not having a degree, I’d been giving myself an education. A different kind, sure. But an education all the same.
What they don’t teach in classrooms
You know what reading on your own teaches you? How to think without someone telling you what to think.
In college, you read what’s assigned. You write papers arguing what the professor wants to hear. You memorize for tests and forget it a week later.
When you read because you want to, it’s different. You follow your curiosity. You argue with the author in your head. You put the book down and think about it while you’re working. You connect it to your life, your work, your experience.
I read a book about the history of electricity and suddenly understood why certain codes existed. Read about the Great Depression and recognized my grandfather’s stories. Read about business management and realized I’d been doing half of it wrong for twenty years.
Nobody graded me. Nobody tested me. But I learned more from those books than I ever did in that one semester of college.
The real difference between education and learning
Here’s what took me too long to figure out: education and learning aren’t the same thing.
Education is what happens to you. Someone decides what you need to know, how you need to know it, and whether you’ve learned it well enough. It’s external. It’s formal. It’s someone else’s agenda.
Learning is what you do for yourself. It’s following a question until you find an answer. It’s reading something that challenges what you thought you knew. It’s connecting dots that nobody else connected for you.
I watched guys with degrees come onto job sites and not know which end of a screwdriver to hold. But they had the paper, so they got promoted to management.
Meanwhile, I could troubleshoot a problem they couldn’t even identify. I could read a situation, read people, read between the lines of what a customer was really asking for. Where’d I learn that? Not in any classroom.
Life taught me. Work taught me. Books taught me. Mistakes taught me.
Why shame is a terrible teacher
For decades, I carried this shame around like a tool in my belt. Always there, always heavy, always reminding me I wasn’t enough.
You know what shame does? It makes you small. Makes you quiet when you should speak up. Makes you doubt what you know, even when you know it cold.
I can’t count the times I kept my mouth shut in a conversation because I figured everyone else knew better. They went to college, after all. What did I know?
Turns out, I knew plenty. Just took me sixty years to realize it.
The books helped with that. Reading about successful people who dropped out of school. Reading about ideas from people who were self-taught. Reading philosophy from ancient Greeks who never set foot in a modern university.
Knowledge doesn’t care how you got it. It just cares that you have it and what you do with it.
What I know now
My wife bought me a journal as a joke after I retired. Figured I needed something to do with my hands. The joke was on both of us—I couldn’t stop writing.
And you know what I discovered? All those books I’d read, all those ideas I’d absorbed, all those connections I’d made—they were in there, waiting to come out.
I write about work, about life, about getting older. And people actually read it. People with degrees. People without them. Doesn’t matter.
Because here’s what I finally understand: real education isn’t about where you got it. It’s about what you did with it.
Those hundreds of books? They gave me perspectives I never would have gotten in a classroom. They let me learn at my own pace, follow my own interests, make my own connections.
Did I miss out on some things by not going to university? Probably. The connections, the structure, the piece of paper that opens certain doors.
But did I get something else instead? Absolutely.
I got an education that was entirely mine. No one else’s curriculum. No one else’s timeline. No one else’s definition of what I should know.
Bottom line
If you’re carrying around shame about your education—or lack of it—put it down. It’s not helping you.
Education comes in all forms. Sometimes it’s a classroom. Sometimes it’s a job site. Sometimes it’s a library card and the curiosity to use it.
I spent decades thinking I was less than because I didn’t have a degree. Now I realize I was just different than. And that’s fine by me.
The books are still coming. Still reading. Still learning. At sixty-four, I’m probably better educated than I’ve ever been. Not because someone gave me a diploma, but because I never stopped being curious.
That’s the real education. And nobody can take that away from you.
