After graduating from the part-time Berkeley MBA program in 2006, I wanted to start Financial Samurai. But even after taking courses in entrepreneurship, marketing and finance, everything I needed to start a business, I didn’t.
My reasoning was that my firm, Credit Suisse, had paid for 80% of mine MBA educationand I felt compelled to repay them with focus and loyalty. Besides, I wanted more experience before launching. Most of my MBA classmates made the same retreat into corporate life.
Going back to corporate is the safe route. The comfortable salary, the health and retirement benefits, the false sense of financial security, it’s comfortable. Comforting, even. But comfort comes at a price, and that price is spiritual growth and the potentially huge cost of financial opportunity.
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 extraordinary, profitable, meaningful things regardless of your credentials, experience, or background. And if you live in a free country with unlimited potential, no taking the leap of faith it may be the most dangerous decision of all.
Inspiring courage alone to do things
In 2008, I was stopped by a bestselling how-to-get-rich book 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. Pays him a small fortune. It was the most horrible thing.
Meanwhile, I waited until I was 33 years old and credentialed enough to be “taken seriously” before I launched Financial Samurai. Waiting three years after graduating from business school was a costly mistake. I lost years of readers’ sophistication, increased confidence, and mixed impact.
I should have started it and figured it out along the way. The more you do, the more you learn. The more you learn, the more you earn.
Today, the same 26-year-old author has decided to become a relationship guru, giving family advice despite having no children of his own. It doesn’t matter. He’s out there doing stuff. Taking action. Making a fortune and not caring what anyone thinks.
You don’t need permission – History proves it
The most inspiring thing about the following examples is not that these people succeeded. How little they started with.
Sarah Blakely was a door-to-door fax saleswoman when she got the idea for Spanx. She invested her entire life savings of $5,000 to start the company, with no fashion background, no investors and no retail experience. She personally called manufacturers and taught herself patent law because she couldn’t afford a lawyer. In 2012, she was one of the youngest female billionaires in the world.
Jan cameco-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. Never finished college. He went on to sell WhatsApp to Facebook for $19 billion.
Colonel Harland Sanders he didn’t open his first KFC franchise until he was in his 60s. The only cooking experience he had was cooking meals for his siblings as a child, plus a variety of odd jobs. He traveled across the country sleeping in his car, offering his recipe to restaurant owners. He was rejected over 1000 times.
Richard Branson was a high school dropout who started a student magazine before moving on to 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 turned accordingly.
Make a killing in money management, even with poor performance
In my previous post about how a The FIRE investor can’t be far wrongI mentioned that you can make $500,000 to $2 million a year as a Wall Street strategist and you don’t have to be right most of the time. But even as a money manager, you can make money by losing people’s money.
All you need is one spectacular year, one big bold bet that pays off, and you can collect fees from investors essentially forever, regardless of how you perform afterward. Michael Burry from Big Short is the classic example. He made a fortune shorting subprime debt before the 2008 crisis. Since then, his performance has been consistently poor. But his brand is established. His aura is intact.
In a more recent example, a fund manager below posted a refreshingly transparent tweet admitting that his fund was down 25.5% for the first quarter of 2026, with a -3.4% return in March alone, net of fees. That compares with the S&P 500’s 4.3% decline in 2026. Despite the underperformance of 21.2%, the fund was still able to charge fees because that’s what its clients signed up for.
c Consistently outperforming the market it’s hard, but most of us always have hope that we can.
You can just do things and build a fortune. Goalkeepers are not as powerful as you think.
EQ and the Art of Human Connection
Here’s something credential obsessives rarely mention: Perhaps the biggest difference between people who succeed and those who don’t is not their resume. It’s theirs emotional intelligencetheir ability to connect, communicate, listen and move people.
IQ gets you into 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 shoppers in a bathroom fitting room. Jan Koum built WhatsApp around a simple insight into what people actually needed. 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 wait their turn to speak. The rare person who genuinely listens, asks follow-up questions, and remembers what you said last week becomes memorable. Customers, investors and partners are attracted to people who make them feel heard.
Learn to communicate clearly and convincingly. Regardless of whether you are writing a newsletterproduct launch or social media post, the ability to put ideas into clear, honest, relatable language is a superpower. You don’t need an MFA. You have to practice. Write every day. Speak in public. Embarrass yourself a few times. Get better.
Build real relationships, not a network. There’s a difference between collecting LinkedIn connections and actually getting to know people. The first one is empty. 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.
Show yourself unapologetically. This makes many introverted and bright people squirm. But if you did something good and no one knows about it, it might not have happened. You don’t have to be loud, though you must be visible.
Develop empathy as a business skill. The best products, services and pieces of content start with a deep understanding of what someone else feels. What problems do you feel in your life that no one has yet solved well?
EQ does not appear on a degree. 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?
The I quit my day job in 2012 because I thought I had enough and I wanted to be free. These days I almost always do school pick up and drop off and volunteer regularly. And something there bothers me a little.
I see shy children who seem afraid to say hello to a stranger or start a conversation. And I wonder if the school is quietly training them to stay inside the box. Get good grades. Attend the best university you can. Then you go sell your time to a company whose product you don’t even like.
I’m not sure I want that for my kids.
I’m not knocking the steady paycheck. I left for 13 years on Wall Street before I had enough, and that salary built the foundation I have now. If you like your job, or need it, stay. Build your security.
But if being part of the red army is enough for you, if you lie awake wondering what would have happened if you tried, something has to change. Because failure fades. Compounds of regret.
Look behind the goalies
People will still notice where you went to school or what title is on your business card. This is human nature, and it probably won’t go away completely. But the power of the goalkeepers is eroding fast.
With technology and AI, there is no monopoly on knowledge. You can start something real, from scratch, for next to 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 just that. Not because they were reckless, but because they realized that the cost of inaction, the slow erosion of opportunity, is far greater than the cost of failure.
If you wait for permission, I promise the result won’t be as profound as if you take the plunge and try.
Stacks of $100 bills won’t find you. But if you start walking, you might just stumble into them.
Related posts:
Why I will always regret selling my online business for millions
Average net worth for above average person
Readers, why don’t more people take a leap of faith and just do things without experience or credentials? What’s holding you back from starting a business that solves a problem you and others have? And how much more important is marketing and creating the illusion of competence than actually being competent?
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