After graduating from Berkeley’s MBA program in 2006, I wanted to start Financial Samurai. But even after taking entrepreneurship, marketing, and finance courses, everything I needed to launch a business, I didn’t.
My excuse was that my firm, Credit Suisse, had paid for 80% of my MBA education, and I felt obligated to repay them with focus and loyalty. In addition, I wanted more experience before I launched. Most of my fellow MBA classmates made the same retreat back to corporate life.
Going back to corporate is the safe route. The cushy paycheck, the health and retirement benefits, the false sense of financial security, it’s comfortable. Comforting, even. But comfort has a price, and that price is spiritual growth and potentially huge financial opportunity cost.
This year marks 20 years since I got my MBA, and one thing has never been clearer: you don’t need one. You can do remarkable, profitable, meaningful things whether or not you have the credentials, the experience, or the pedigree. And if you live in a free country with unlimited potential, not taking the leap of faith might be the riskiest decision of all.
The Inspiring Audacity of Just Doing Things
In 2008, I was stopped cold by a bestselling book on how to get rich, written by a 26-year-old who wasn’t rich. He had almost no relevant experience and was selling courses on how to get promoted at work. People loved it. They paid him a small fortune. It was the darndest thing.
Meanwhile, I was waiting until I had at least 10 years of post-finance experience, until I was 33 and credentialed enough to be “taken seriously,” before launching Financial Samurai. Waiting three years after graduating business school was a costly mistake. I lost years of compounding readership, compounding trust, and compounding impact.
I should have just launched and figured it out along the way. The more you do, the more you learn. The more you learn, the more you earn.
Today, that same 26-year-old author has pivoted to become a relationship guru, dispensing family advice despite having no kids of his own. It doesn’t matter. He’s out there doing things. Taking action. Making a fortune, and not caring what anybody thinks.
Related: A $20 Million Net Worth Should Be Enough To Feel Happy And Free
You Don’t Need Permission – History Proves It
The most inspiring thing about the examples below isn’t that these people succeeded. It’s how little they started with.
Sara Blakely was a door-to-door fax machine salesperson when she had the idea for Spanx. She invested her entire life savings of $5,000 to launch the company, with no fashion background, no investors, and no retail experience. She personally cold-called manufacturers and taught herself patent law because she couldn’t afford a lawyer. By 2012, she was one of the youngest self-made female billionaire in the world.
Jan Koum, co-founder of WhatsApp, came to America as a teenager from a small Ukrainian village. He lived on food stamps while his mother worked as a babysitter, and taught himself programming from library manuals. He never finished college. He went on to sell WhatsApp to Facebook for $19 billion.
Colonel Harland Sanders didn’t open his first KFC franchise until he was in his 60s. The only cooking experience he had was making meals for his siblings as a child, plus a string of odd jobs. He drove across the country sleeping in his car, pitching his recipe to restaurant owners. He was rejected over 1,000 times.
Richard Branson was a high school dropout who started a student magazine before moving into mail-order records, then airlines, then space travel, freely admitting he knew little or nothing about the industries he entered.
None of these people waited until they were ready. None of them had the “right” background. They simply started, and pivoted accordingly. Here’s a great talk from Jon Xu, a partner at YC Combinator, that talks about the act of just starting.
Make a Fortune in Money Management, Even with Poor Performance
In my previous post on how a FIRE investor can’t be too wrong, I mentioned you can make $500,000 to $2 million a year as a Wall Street strategist and not have to actually be right most of the time. But even as a money manager, you can still make money losing people money.
All you need is one spectacular year, one big audacious bet that pays off, and you can collect fees from investors essentially forever, regardless of how you perform afterward. Michael Burry from The Big Short is the classic example. He made a fortune shorting subprime debt before the 2008 crisis. Since then, his performance has been consistently underwhelming. But his brand is set. His aura is intact.
In a more recent example, a fund manager below posted a refreshingly transparent tweet admitting his fund was down 25.5% for the first quarter of 2026, with a -3.4% return in March alone, net of fees. This compares to the S&P 500 being down 4.3% in 2026. Despite the 21.2% underperformance, the fund was still able to charge fees because that’s what his clients signed up for.
Consistently outperforming the market is hard, but most of us always have hope we can.
You can just do things and build a fortune. The gatekeepers aren’t as powerful as you think.
EQ and the Art of Human Connection
Here’s something the credential obsessors seldom mention: perhaps the single biggest differentiator between people who succeed and people who don’t isn’t their resume. It’s their emotional intelligence, their ability to connect, communicate, listen, and move people.
IQ gets you in the room. EQ keeps you in it.
Think about the entrepreneurs above. Sara Blakely didn’t just have a good product. She personally demonstrated it to Neiman Marcus buyers in a bathroom fitting room. Colonel Sanders wasn’t selling chicken. He was selling a story, a handshake, and a dream..
Here’s what developing your EQ actually looks like in practice:
Listen more than you talk. Most people are waiting for their turn to speak. The rare person who genuinely listens, who asks follow-up questions and remembers what you said last week, becomes unforgettable. Clients, investors, and partners are drawn to people who make them feel heard.
Learn to communicate clearly and compellingly. Whether you’re writing a newsletter, pitching a product, or posting on social media, the ability to put ideas into clear, honest, relatable language is a superpower. You don’t need an MFA. You need to practice. Write every day. Speak in public. Embarrass yourself a few times. Get better.
Build genuine relationships, not just a network. There’s a difference between collecting LinkedIn connections and actually knowing people. The former is hollow. The latter is how opportunities appear out of nowhere. Show up for people when they don’t need you, and they’ll show up for you when you do.
Market yourself unapologetically. This one makes a lot of introverted, smart people squirm. But if you’ve done something good and nobody knows about it, it might as well not have happened. You don’t have to be loud, but you have to be visible.
Develop empathy as a business skill. The best products, services, and pieces of content all start with a deep understanding of what someone else is feeling. What problems do you feel in your own life that nobody has solved well yet?
EQ doesn’t show up on a diploma. You can’t buy it at a top school. But you can build it, starting today, and it will take you further than almost anything else.
What Do You Have to Lose?
I left my day job in 2012 because I thought I had enough and wanted to be free. These days I almost always do school pickup and drop-off, and volunteer regularly. And something there worries me a little.
I see shy kids who seem afraid to say hello to a stranger or start a conversation. And I wonder if school is quietly training them to stay inside the box. Get good grades. Attend the best university you can. Then go sell your time to a company whose product you don’t even love.
I’m not sure I want this for my children.
Yes, get that steady paycheck if you like your work and need to grow a financial base. I ground away for 13 years on Wall Street before I’d had enough, and that paycheck built the foundation I have now.
But if you’ve had enough of being part of the red army, if you lie awake wondering what would have happened if you’d tried, something has to change. Because failure fades. Regret compounds.
Look Past the Gatekeepers
People will still notice where you went to school or what title is on your business card. That’s human nature and it probably won’t disappear entirely. But the gatekeepers’ power is eroding fast.
With technology and AI, there is no monopoly on knowledge. You can start something real, from scratch, for almost nothing. You don’t need a prestigious degree, a VC check, or a famous last name. You don’t need permission.
So please, dear son, dear daughter, dear reader, start before you’re ready. The best entrepreneurs in history did exactly that. Not because they were reckless, but because they understood that the cost of inaction, the slow erosion of possibility, is far higher than the cost of failure.
If you wait for permission, I promise the outcome won’t be as profound as if you take the leap and try.
The stacks of $100 bills won’t come find you. But if you start walking, you might just stumble right into them.
Related posts:
Why I’ll Always Regret Selling My Online Business for Millions
The Average Net Worth For The Above Average Person
Readers, why don’t more people take a leap of faith and just do things without the experience or credentials? What’s stopping you from starting a business that solves a problem you and others have? And how much more important is marketing and creating the illusion of competency than actually being competent?
Subscribe and Support
If you’ve enjoyed my work over the years, pick up a copy of Millionaire Milestones, my USA TODAY bestseller. Build more wealth in a strategically sound way so you can break free sooner and do more of what you want.
To never miss a thing and build financial freedom sooner, subscribe to my free weekly newsletter and join 60,000+ readers. Everything is written based on firsthand experience, because money is too important to be left to pontification.
