SI
SI
discoversearch

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor.  We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community.  If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.
Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: paul61 who wrote (81720)10/19/2011 2:01:07 PM
From: Ilaine9 Recommendations  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 220056
 
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.



To: paul61 who wrote (81720)10/19/2011 3:17:49 PM
From: Maurice Winn1 Recommendation  Respond to of 220056
 
People are not pathetic at 16. Years before that I was making good choices: <Just like I KNEW what to choose when I was 17 or 18 years old !!!! Thank You for your ..........input ! ! ! paul > But knew only in the widest sense what I wanted "to do" by way of earning a living as an adult and have never had a firm path. It has blown all over the place as different things happened and I learned about different things, had different ideas and did different things.

The day I turned 18 I got a truck driving licence [actually that was a car licence the literal day I turned 15, the truck one took a week if I remember rightly]. That was a way to earn money.

Not everything I tried worked out well. I tried launching and running a global satellite phone service [Globalstar] but my management didn't do it right and the satellites didn't work properly. I didn't think to ask the government for a bailout [silly me]. The creditors took possession and sold the assets. I'm trying again now. I'm persistent.

Mqurice