Why I dropped out of college

About a year and a half ago, I was running a six-figure ghostwriting agency while being a freshman in college.

I got the opportunity to work with Alex and Leila Hormozi at Acquisition.com, and I felt two strong emotions:

1. FOMO, because I didn't want to miss out on all my friends having fun in college.

2. I didn't want to disappoint Alex and Leila.

I ended up saying, "Screw emotion. I'm going to think about this decision as logically as possible." I came up with a decision-making framework that I've since used for the rest of my career.

This is an excerpt from my new book ‘Work With The Best’:

I weigh career opportunities across four categories: Learning, Earning, Network, & Story (LENS).

I rank each one out of ten and add them up. The opportunity with the highest total out of 40 wins.

Learning is about the skills and knowledge you’ll gain.

What are the constraints currently preventing you from getting to your North Star? Does this opportunity help you close those gaps?

Be honest with yourself about what you’re going to learn. It’s easy to tell your parents and friends that you’re joining a company because you’re going to “learn a lot.” But what specifically are you going to learn, and is the role going to give you reps in the thing that’s holding your career back?

For example, say you’re a marketer who’s great at organic and social but has never run a paid media campaign, and you know that’s your missing skill. If you join a company that’s world-class at marketing, but you come in as a salesperson, then you’re getting reps in sales every day, but zero reps in paid media. Not great.

That doesn’t mean it’s a bad opportunity. Maybe it’s the right foot in the door, maybe the network is incredible, maybe the earning is great. But the learning score isn’t an 8. It’s a 3.

Another important caveat is who you will be directly working under. A good company with a bad boss stifles your growth. One factor that led me to scoring Acquisition.com high in the learning category was that I would be working directly under Michael Lim, the Director of Media, who previously worked with MrBeast and was someone that I looked up to as a “career older brother.”

Earning is straightforward. How much money will you make?

Note: this matters much less when you’re early in your career. Money is the byproduct of the value you create in the marketplace, and the best way to create more value is to stack more skills and make yourself more valuable.

Rather than asking “how much money will I make immediately?” I like to ask, “how much will this opportunity increase my future earning capacity?”

That said, don’t sell yourself short. You still need to make enough to not be drowning. If you’re stressed about rent every month, you’re not going to be in a position to learn or do your best work.

Network is the people you’ll work with AND the people you’ll meet because of the opportunity.

Network, other than learning, is the single greatest thing to optimize for when you’re early in your career, because those people will eventually become your future investors, co-founders, employees, customers, and partners.

It’s hard to calculate the benefits of compounding relationships, but I tend to score this one generously.

Story is how well you can leverage this experience to get future opportunities.

For example, working at a prestigious company or on a high-profile project creates credibility that opens doors you can’t see yet.

John D. Rockefeller became the richest man in history (over $400 billion in today’s dollars). But at 25, when he was building Standard Oil in Cleveland, nobody knew who he was.

The oil refining industry was a mess. Dozens of refiners were undercutting each other into the ground, and Rockefeller knew someone was going to consolidate the market. He wanted it to be him. The problem was that he was just another small refiner asking established refiners to sell their life’s work to him.

So instead of going after the small refineries, he went straight for the biggest competitor in Cleveland: Clark, Payne & Co. And he overpaid for it on purpose. The seller laughed and walked away thinking he’d fleeced an ambitious kid who didn’t know what things were worth.

But the day the deal closed, Rockefeller was now the largest oil refiner in Cleveland, and over the next twelve months, 22 more refineries sold to him.

Your personal narrative and story are one of the most undervalued assets you have. People make decisions about you before they ever meet you, and your story creates ripples in the room even when you’re not there.

How I used The Four Pillar Framework for my life:

When I was deciding whether to drop out of college and join Acquisition.com or stay in school and continue running my ghostwriting agency, I sat down with a notebook and wrote out these four columns.

My current path looked like this:

• Learning: 6. I was still learning how to run a business by running one, which was valuable. But I didn’t know what I didn’t know. My agency had hit a ceiling and I didn’t know how to scale past it.

• Earning: 6. High cash flow but was constrained by my time.

• Network: 3. My only real network was from social media, and the people around me in college were mostly asking me for advice (which fed my ego but not my learning).

• Story: 2. Being in college didn’t open many doors for me and didn’t give me much credibility.

Total: 17.

Acquisition.com looked like this:

• Learning was an 8. I’d be working inside one of the biggest business media teams in the world, getting exposed to paid marketing, operations, and content at a level I couldn’t get anywhere else.

• Earning was a 4. I took a 50% pay cut from running my own business to become an employee. It was still a six-figure salary, but it was a sizable step down.

• Network was a 9. The people at that company were A players and subject matter experts in their respective fields. Some have become some of my closest friends.

• Story was a 9. I bet that working at a high-caliber company would put me in front of opportunities and people that being in college never could. After I left, I had over a dozen job offers within days, including one for $500k that I would never have been considered for two years earlier.

Total: 30.

I added up the scores and compared them to my current path. Acquisition.com won.

What I liked about that process was that it was black and white. I had a lot of emotions pulling me in different directions. I looked up to Alex and Leila and didn’t want to disappoint them. I was also terrified to drop out of college and leave my friends.

A few caveats before you start scoring your own opportunities:

These four categories are what matter most to me at this stage of my career, given my North Star. They don’t have to be yours.

Maybe proximity to family matters more right now because you’re caring for someone at home. Maybe values alignment is high on your list because you need to believe in the mission to do your best work. Maybe you’re about to have a kid and you want to make as much money as possible beforehand. The exact categories matter less than defining them for yourself.

Pro Tip: If you need help defining your categories, go back to your North Star. Whatever you wrote down in that exercise is telling you what to optimize for.

Here are 8 example categories that you might prioritize (shoutout Andrew Yeung for curating this list):

1. Wave Riding – Is this company at the epicenter of the most important market shift happening right now?

2. Talent Density – Will your coworkers be the best people you’ve ever worked with, and will this alumni network compound for decades?

3. Stage & Optionality – Is the company small enough (20-200 people) that you’ll wear many hats, with equity that can still appreciate 20-100x?

4. Compounding Learning – Will your rate of learning stay high year after year, and can you become a “barrel” who takes ideas from zero to shipped?

5. Specific Knowledge & Leverage – Will you build skills that feel like play to you but look like work to others, with access to code, media, or capital leverage?

6. Curiosity & Mission – Does the work excite genuine intellectual curiosity, and is the company’s mission real – not just a recruiting pitch?

7. Equity & Ownership – Do you own a meaningful piece of the outcome, or are you just renting your time for a salary?

8. Brand Signal – Will this name on your resume open every door afterward, and are you building a public reputation through accountability?

The categories also don’t have to count equally. When you’re early in your career, learning and networking probably deserve more weight than earning, because the skills and relationships you build now are what drive your earning later.

Does that mean you should completely ignore your emotions and intuitive sense? Of course not. Making a decision that looks good on paper but feels bad in your body often leads to regret. But if you don’t know how you feel (or feel too many emotions), this is a great starting point.

Note: When evaluating a new opportunity, don’t forget to evaluate your current path.

We humans have a tendency to get Shiny Object Syndrome: a tendency to chase new ideas while abandoning current, worthwhile, but less “shiny” endeavors.

We believe “the grass is greener elsewhere” because going from 0-1 on a new path feels easier than going from 1-10. But as the essayist David Perell once wrote, “A life without commitment is a life spent hugging the X-Axis.”

If you commit to nothing, you’ll be distracted by everything.

Harsh truth: Your inability to focus on one thing for an extended amount of time will hurt you far greater than your lack of intellect.

Pro Tip: If you’re struggling to make a decision, write an objective memo of the pros and cons of an opportunity as if you were updating the board members in your life.

Kidlan’s Law states that a problem written down is half solved. Before dropping out of college to work at Acquisition.com, I wrote a 5-page memo to my parents explaining why I thought it was a good decision.

Side tangent: If you want to “convince” your parents that they should let you drop out, focus less on rhetoric (stories and emotion) or even logic (reasoning and frameworks) and more on evidence (past results).

When people have emotional investments in their beliefs (like your parents wanting you to take the “safe” path), logical arguments often backfire because it’s all theoretical. Evidence, however, bypasses these issues and offers concrete proof that it’s a viable path.

For me, rather than arguing with my parents about why entrepreneurship was viable, I made $100,000 in personal profit before I graduated high school. That showed them the default path wasn’t the only one.

Your loved ones don’t want to control you. They want to protect you. If you can show them your “risky” path is viable by demonstrating competence over time, you remove the perceived risk of dropping out.

Again, do the work upfront so you can show instead of tell.

Rooting for you,
Jay

Ps. This was an excerpt of my new book. I think it’s great (obv lol). In one sentence, it’s my cookbook for creating career opportunities. Learn more here.