My mommy and daddy did not give me a penny for college or law school if that is what you are wondering.
Parents split up when I was 13. Raised by a single mom after that. Been self supporting since I was 17. Worked my way through college as a blue collar laborer -- offset lithography, pre-press department. One class a semester if I had a day job, two classes a semester if I had a night job. Did not start law school until I was 30. Worked all the way through law school, but as a law clerk, not a blue collar worker. Navy blue suits and shiny shoes, not blue jeans, dirty hands, and breaking my back leaning over a light table all day long.
Hooray for navy blue suits and shiny shoes! Although it took me a long time to make as much money as a lawyer as I had made in prepress, which is a skilled trade. These days mostly done by computer but no computers when I did it, all by hand.
Did not know what I wanted to be until I was 27. Just knew that I wanted to better myself, and looked to my own father as an example.
My father's father died when my father was 12. His mother worked in a hardware store. His father had worked in a haberdashery. My father worked his way through college and dental school. He flunked out of college and got drafted by the Navy during the Korean War, and did not decide to become a dentist until he was 25. He became a dentist when I was 8, left home when I was 13, so I did have a few years of middle class life growing up, but before that we lived in a housing project.
My best friend growing up never went to college, and is still a cashier at a Rite Aid. Nobody stopped her from going to college, she just made other choices.
I once asked a paralegal why she did not go to law school. She did not want all that pressure, she said. Nobody stopped her, she just made other choices.
So, no, you don't have to decide what you want to do when you are 17 or 18. You can start on one path, and then change directions. Some do it multiple times. But if you don't start you are never going to get there. People tell me, "but I am too old now." I've known successful lawyers who started law school when they were 50.
I am NOT saying that everybody can do it. I AM saying that if you don't try, that's the choice you made. |
