He who slings mud loses ground . <| sep |> Elimination Communication which is one of those parenting movements with an awful nameI ' m lost on why the name is awful . Seems fine to me ? <| sep |> Oh it certainly wouldn ' t the limited time frame of the class made it easy but yeah . Not quite practical . <| sep |> I can probably give you some perspective on this . I moved to the US from rural Guatemala when I was 21 in 2000 . I had no degree but a little self taught knowledge on how to fix computers . When I was 10 my dad bought me a computer with the hopes it would change my life and it kind of did . My first job was at a video rental store . I made $ 7 . 50 hr and it felt reaaaaally good . I was bragging about it with my friends back in Guatemala , lol . Bought a car for myself that I would ' ve never been able to afford Geo Metro and I was planning on staying there for a while until I found out my coworker was earning $ 8 . 50 . I decided to look for jobs and within a month I was hired to do bilingual customer service for an MLM that sold websites . I got $ 13 . 50 and I felt really good about myself . I was the highest paid guy on the floor because I knew Spanish , even though I never had a Spanish speaker actually call . But then I learned about how much our level 2 s were making so I looked for work again with my now six months of experience and went up to $ 15 hr . I figured I had peaked at $ 15 with a few jobs that I had for the course of two years and then I got into customer service with GoDaddy . Turned out I had a knack for sales and made about $ 20 hr then I discovered contracting for other companies at $ 30 hr so I did that on the weekends on top of my regular job . The $ 30 hr was more like $ 20 hr because of the driving time and what not but I found it interesting . By now , I had been in the US for 5 years . Now . The guy who ran the contracting agency looooved to brag about how he found contracts so I extracted as much knowledge from him as I could and when his company got banned for hiring criminals , I quickly moved in and offered to pick up where he had left off and ended up building a small team of techs and got more contracts . I got up to $ 60 kyear . I paid my techs fairly because I knew what it was like to be on the other side . I would pay them for their idle time even though they were contractors to keep them happy and I didn ' t mind not making more . By now I thought of myself as a successful business man . Did this for a year and would always talk to my clients about my life , experience , etc . One of them liked me a lot and offered me a full time job as a project manager which I refused but he insisted and said I could run both my business and work for him at $ 65 kyear . At my sixth year , I had worked my way up to making around $ 80100 k , had my own house , a crazy European wife who made sure I was always in debt and miserable despite my financial success , two cars , and still no degree . Got sick of the wife treating me like horseshit so I lawyered up and left her , my dad also had a heart attack around the same time , and I took a Fukitol pill and went back to Guatemala to take care of my dad . When I came back , I enrolled in college to get an associate ' s degree , I also hit the gym , and opened up my first Facebook account where I ran into and friended my now wife who I had met years before while I was doing volunteer work . It was now my 8 th year in the US and I ' m living off the little savings I had made in between the divorce and my dad getting sick . My fiancee had a master ' s degree and I felt a little embarrassed that I was just aiming for an associate ' s degree so I kept pumping through and got my bachelor ' s despite my difficulty to focus . In Guatemala I never read a book from cover to cover and the school system was horrible . We would mostly trick our teachers to talk about sports , religion , or any off topic to prevent them from going too deep into the book so we would probably only study a good 30 pages on each subject every year . I would fall asleep constantly while reading and decided to pick up the book again once I would wake up . It took me a month or two to finally get into a good reading habit . Upon graduation I thought companies would love me but I quickly realized that a bachelor ' s degree is nothing , even though I went to an okay state university . So I kept studying and got my masters and a certificate in project management . I managed to study my ass off day and night , take 2125 credits per semester , and even one time I completed 9 credits in two weeks that I finished just about everything in 3 years . I got hired at $ 80 k and continued doing IT consulting where I would reel in about $ 2030 kyear extra on the side . I ' m now looking into opening my own business . Now , I was making $ 80100 k around your age but it took a lot of effort and a little ambition for success . Many of the guys I went to university with in Guatemala ridiculed me for being from a village and would make fun of me for being dumb and for having failed there but now I ' m doing way better than most of them but I never rubbed it in their faces .