What were you doing when you were 23?

The Forbes list of the world's wealthiest people is out... And number 785, with a net worth of a cool $1.5 billion, is a 23-year-old:

One rich kid!

And for the first time in 13 years, Bill Gates isn't the wealthiest man in the world.

Sorry Bill

 

I was eating Domino's when I was 23-years-old, BYH... The year after college, I was a bit lost. I spent half a year to a year refusing to leave the college town I had attended. I turned into that guy. The junk food wasn't the biggest problem. It was the booze. I think I spent a whole year drunk and I put on a gut for the first time in my life. I tended bar (not very well) at night and pretty much stayed soused for hours at a time. Then I'd sleep all day, wake up hung over, transfer myself to a ratty old couch with great effort, scratch myself and watch World Cup Soccer on the Spanish station (the only place you could find it) for several hours with my hand in my boxer shorts, until I had to go back out and press on a tap over and over again. It contrasted in a scary way with a friend who was younger, who was still in school, that first summer. He woke every day at 5 a.m., rowed, went to a research job and was a productive member of society. He went to medical school.

One day, I was out sunbathing--if you can call it that--on this beautiful quad in the middle of the campus and this woman we sort of knew walked by. Without even thinking, I said, "hubba hubba," except a bit too loud. I am really self-conscious and shy and reserved for real, but I was drunk... My best friend was really embarrassed for me and decided to do an intervention... before people did interventions. My friends tricked me, got to together, and when I walked in, they locked the door and read me the riot act about how I was a disgrace. I had taken the LSATs, done well, and gotten into some decent law schools (before I decided there was no fucking way in hell I was doing that and randomly stopped the application process after sending off the first five applications at the top of the pile). I was under tremendous pressure to go, because I had no other plan. I had taken the GMATs (or is it the GREs?) and had an amazing grant to do a combined journalism/economics program at a very good school that would have been all paid for, including most expenses. I couldn't bring myself to do that one either, even though it should have been a no brainer. I had nothing against it. I was good at it. But I was afraid to be an adult.

My mom died my senior year of college and I didn't know how to process it. I am not very emotionally evolved. I think it stifled my ability to get on with life. So there I was, the loser who refuses to leave college, who had lost all social skills.

I eventually ended up taking the grant and getting those advanced degrees... they actually showed two-years worth of understanding and welcomed me despite how idiotic I had been. They were both useless for different reasons, although there were secondary benefits about where they took me to and the opportunities I was able to create as a result that made me life into what it is today. I won't get into the Master's in Journalism I have or the school I got it from. The Economics program was hardcore, but unless I took up the PhD track they wanted me to continue on--and I didn't want that to be my life--it was of limited value.

Since then, I have always had a knack for creating opportunities that give me a great deal of independence (what I need most in life) and pay a bit better than I could make with a traditional media job. Really offbeat ones that have given me a lot of independence in the work I do. It comes with choices. I like certain things about what I am doing now, but miss some of what I had to give up in what I was doing before.

But at 23, damn, I was eating the Dominos (with pepperoni, BYH!) and drinking more beer than my liver could handle.