Without a goal, you can't score: create your professional destiny

Talented, driven people are increasingly eschewing the typical college path. These people come from various walks of life, but their successes all point to experience as the key factor separating them from the pack. There are many highlighting professionals who’ve taken control of their destiny and discovered their professional calling outside the traditional education path without getting a college degree.

You could learn more about how to create and achieve a professional destiny with the following examples:

• Sir Richard Branson left school at age sixteen, with his headmaster telling him he would either end up in prison or become a millionaire. After advertising records in “The Student,” a magazine he founded, Branson started Virgin Records at age 20, and has since grown his ventures to a personal worth of nearly $5 billion. Read more…
• Lady Gaga took a her own way to reach worldwide success. After dropping out of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, CAP21, Gaga worked as a songwriter for Sony. It was while working as a writer that fellow musician Akon discovered her talent, and her career took off as she broke into the spotlight as a solo artist. Read more…
• Twitter co-founder Evan Williams dropped out of the University of Nebraska after a year and a half because he felt college was a “waste of time”. But the decision to forge his own path didn’t always go his way. A few years later, he essentially launched the blogging industry when he started Blogger. Read more…
• Casey Neistat is the co-founder of Beme, a new disruptive social network. He also is a vlogger and filmmaker that surprisingly never attended college or film school. He created his own career in the filmmaking industry and a new way to engage with social community. He has achieved more than 1 million subscribers on YouTube. Read more…
• Vlogger Michelle Phan found success through posting several makeup tutorials that went viral, leading to an enormous online following; her engaging, easy-to-follow tutorials teach her audience how to design their makeup to match popular characters from Game of Thrones and Sailor Moon, look like a zombie or a Barbie. Read more…