What Do You Choose: Blogging or Going to College?
Blogging may be a better platform for you than a college education
I’ve been lucky. The 18-year-old version of me gathered enough courage to go against his father’s dogma that all successful entrepreneurs receive a good business education. I got accepted into the best undergraduate business school in the U.S.
And then I dropped out after 7 months.
For the past 3 years, I’ve been free from academia to work, make my own money, try my own projects, and really, just learn what it’s like to live.
While my former classmates will all graduate in 8 months with a business diploma and a head full of ‘in-the-box’ thinking. They will only start figuring out that the real world is different from what they’ve been taught, while I already know how tough it can be.
It’ll be my 4th year as an entrepreneur (not as much by action, as by mindset) and a blogger. I’ve been learning and building a platform for myself, and I am still on my way up.
Or maybe I haven’t been lucky. And I made the biggest mistake of my life.
Maybe having no college education is something I will regret later on. I just don’t realize it yet. You might argue that your parents might agree with you, and maybe you’re all even right.
But I would argue that there is no real difference between having a good college education and having a solid blog. In fact, having a blog may be even better.
Let me explain why.
What is a college education, really?
Let’s break it down.
Network
It’s the connections and the essential relationships you build with your classmates, professors, and alumni.
Brand
Having a Harvard diploma speaks for itself for potential employers, investors, and partners. (Although I would argue that simply being accepted to Harvard is good enough)
Place to learn
Instead of deciding to go to work immediately after school, you rather choose to spend a few more years studying, educating yourself on things that interest you.
An investment
But let’s not forget the real reason why your parents want you to go to college. You invest a considerable sum of money ($100k-$250k) and time (3–5 years) and you intend to make a good return on that investment in the future by landing a secure job after school.
All of this is what a good college education can provide.
College is one of the ‘platforms’ in life
When something is providing opportunities for something else, we call it a ‘platform’. A college education is a platform.
But it’s not the only one.
Other examples of platforms:
- A trust fund that you inherited from your rich father
- Fame and popularity
- A working and profitable business
- A rare (and valuable) skill
- A published book under your name
- Recommendation letter from Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk
For many years, you’ve been tricked by society, family, and media that college is the only viable platform out there. That’s not true. There are other platforms out there, some of them are better, some of them are worse.
Why you need platforms in the first place
Platforms give you leverage.
They allow you to do more stuff more efficiently in less time and with fewer resources. If you want to achieve any kind of success in life, you’ll need a platform. Otherwise, you’ll be working paycheck to paycheck all your life.
A good, thought-provoking and insightful blog is one of the platforms that you can build for yourself.
Blogging instead of going to college
Let’s break down what a blog is, in the sense of being a platform. Just like we did for a college education.
Audience
The college has a network of relationships and connections with peers and professors. A good blog has a loyal audience that trusts you.
Brand, portfolio and a CV
A good college is a brand, so is a good blog. When you have 100,000 followers on Medium, it speaks for itself.
You don’t need to describe your track record to potential investors and employers. People know that if you did it for yourself, you can do the same for them. Your blog is your brand, your portfolio, and your resume, 3 in 1.
Self-education
In college, you learn for 3–5 years and then you’re done. But in today’s world, that’s not enough. The smartest people in the world gathered together and are trying to figure out a way for people to educate themselves all their lives.
If you want to learn all your life, blogging is the way.
When I want to educate myself on something, I start blogging about it. That way, I am motivated to do my research and to structure my thinking for readers.
Blogging is about learning by teaching others.
An investment
You expect to graduate from college and start paying off your $200k-college debt (which you can’t even declare bankruptcy against). If you invested that money in the blog (i.e., in ads and followers), you would have become a millionaire by the end of 2020.
Why is a good blog — a platform?
Because it gives you much more opportunities than you can imagine. It has a positive ROI. And I would argue, that it’s the best platform to build in 2020.
Among other things, blogging can give you fame, potential book deals, ad revenue, recognition, credibility, an alternative to a resume, ability to build businesses on top of it.
But most importantly, it will give you 2 rarest assets in today’s world (spoiler: it’s not money).
Trust and attention.
And with those two, you can do just about anything.
The pursuit of trust
Seth Godin often says that his decision to start blogging daily was one of the best he has made in his career. I would agree.
I first started blogging when I was 16. I didn’t know what I was doing. Everybody else was doing it, and I thought it kind of cool — to be able to transmit your thoughts and ideas into the masses.
I still think it’s cool.
6 years later, I have 3 blogs — in 2 languages (my Medium blog is the recent one).
My blog about content marketing gives me clients for my video production business back in Russia. My personal blog in Telegram allows me to make money off webinars about things I am interested in. And Medium pays me monthly to tell the world what I can’t stop thinking about.
It’s amazing.
But what’s even more amazing, is that by showing up daily the way you want other people to show up for you (Seth, love you for this idea) — you gain people’s trust.
Follower count and engagement is nothing more (or less) than your reputation. And just like in real life, it’s hard to build and easy to break.
You don’t capitalize on trust (i.e., by selling ads on a daily basis). You build on top of it (i.e., by building a company and using your blog as an alternative to marketing).
Buzzfeed’s Tasty example
A few years ago the Buzzfeed employees noticed that certain videos on Facebook get more reach and engagement than others. These videos were about food recipes.
So they decided, as an experiment, to create a separate Facebook Page and call it ‘Tasty’. The idea was to create a whole blog dedicated to food recipes and everything else for foodies.
In months, the page exploded into a 1M+ followers blog. Today, Tasty is not a blog anymore, it’s a product company that sells content and physical products, as well as recipes for the audience of this blog.
That’s the power of a platform. There are companies today built completely from media. When you blog, you become your own business.
Don’t listen to your parents
Listen, I get it.
I imagine what they’ll tell you if you decide not to go to college and start blogging instead. After all, it’s risky. There is always a risk it wouldn’t work out.
In fact, it probably won’t.
My first blog didn’t. Neither did my next one. Nor the next one. It took me 4 years of daily blogging to actually understand how the whole game works and gather enough courage to go full-time on it.
Your parents were brainwashed by the society that college = job = security. That may work for some of you still, but both of the equation parts are working less and less efficiently.
Everybody has a good college diploma. What else can you do? What else do you have? Everybody can follow instructions. But can you learn on the spot? Do you understand the new landscape of media, that’s driving the world?
Having a blog as a platform allows you to answer all of these questions.
Thanks for reading.
