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That’s a long list:Barbara Corcoran (straight D-student; founder of Corcoran Group)Mark Zuckerberg (college dropout; founder of Facebook)Bill Gates (he was a really good student, but still a college dropout; founder of Microsoft)Paul Orfalea (straight C/D/F student; founder of Kinkos)Steve Jobs (college dropout, traveled to India to figure out what his life’s purpose was according to him; founder of Apple)George W. Bush (graduated from college with a C; former president of the US and millionaire landowner)Evan Spiegel (received a C on a business plan assignment when he submitted his business plan, which later became SnapChat; founder of SnapChat)Fred Smith (received a C on a business plan assignment when he submitted his business plan, which later became FedEx; founder of FedEx)Yo-yo Ma (straight C-student; successful musician)Floyd Mayweather Jr. (high school dropout; one of the highest paid boxers in the world)Manny Pacquaio (high school dropout. Eventually received a GED and went to college; one of the highest paid boxers in the world)Richard Branson (straight D/F student in high school, didn’t go to college; founder of Virgin Airlines)Travis Kalanick (dropped out of law school; founder of Uber)Albert Einstein (terrible student, but later recognized as a genius for his contributions to math, physics, and the sciences in general; net worth of $1 million)However, there’s another side to this. These folks had a plan for making it big. They saw an aspect of society where they could make a serious difference in their own lives and someone else’s. Those plans didn’t require strong academic performance. Maybe those plans didn’t materialize right when they were born. Maybe they had to fail and flounder around a bit. Maybe friends and family didn’t believe in their goals or share their vision. But, they arose over time and eventually these people succeeded. You don’t need to read Shakespeare or know calculus to become a successful real estate mogul or a professional boxer. You just need to start executing those plans you’ve got and figuring out the best way to execute them along the way.These folks also found their passions and figured out how to monetize them at a relatively young age, whether through public speaking engagements or a series of successful businesses. At a relatively young age such as your 20s or 30s, you usually don’t have responsibilities such as a mortgage or dependents. You can dedicate more time and money to meeting your goals instead of having to put those dreams on hold for a while. While their peers went to work for someone or attended college/grad school, they envisioned a different life for themselves. They didn’t “follow the herd”, so to speak.The important difference is planning what you aim to do with your life, figuring how to get to that goal, and NEVER, EVER straying from that plan. These people stayed focused, even when it got tough to continue or they faced major setbacks.The mistake that a lot of people make is that they look at these stories on face value. They don’t see the struggles that they went through. They don’t see the plans that they made. They think,“that guy dropped out of college/high school. Now, he’s a billionaire. I’ll do the same!”. It’s as if they succeeded because just they dropped out of school or were terrible students. Not necessarily.Problem is, they haven’t set a goal as an alternative to attending school. They have no plan for how they’re going to earn an income or make a positive difference in their lives. Or, maybe they have a goal, but they fail to stick to it. So, they drop out and flounder around from dead-end job to dead-end job because no one will hire someone with minimal job experience and no college degree. It usually isn’t long before they go back to school.There are lot of people who do poorly academically and fail or succeed in life in general. Same thing goes for academically successful people.Point is, unless you have a plan for how you’ll achieve you goals, those plans don’t require a strong academic record, and you’re absolutely committed to staying on that path no matter what, you’re better off finishing school and trying to do the best you can in school.

2016: I was working two jobs making over 6 figures a year. My spouse worked FT for a large health group. We both had excellent health and dental insurance, 401K’s, and a significant amount of reserves in the bank.My FT job took me to NYC and Italy once a month, where we ate great food and saw amazing Broadway shows. On the weekends I ran events for the Beverly Wilshire, watching artists like Sting and Cheryl Crow warm up and then perform at annual awards ceremonies.We were 4 years away from paying off our brand new 2 bedroom, 3 bath brand new condo with a view and attached garage in Chino Hills CA. We bought a new car. My spouse was able to pay for braces in full. We both had a Signature Plus Disney pass paid in full and went 2–3 times a week. Every few months we would treat ourselves to vanity services like Botox, massages, or facials.We went to dinner in Huntington Beach or San Clemente on Friday nights, attended events like ComiCon and D23, and took weekend trips to San Diego to see a play or drink dirty martinis at the Del Coronado when I didn’t have an event.2020 - We lost all 3 jobs because of Trump’s inaction. We lost our healthcare. We had to sell the house. A big chunk of our savings went to bills and the mortgage waiting on severance and unemployment for months. The stimulus came way too late to make a difference.We live in a small 1 bedroom apartment in Las Vegas now. We can (hopefully) pay rent through March - after that, unemployment is exhausted. We’re bordering on broke. I have an EBT card for the first time in my life. We qualified for state assistance including healthcare BUT ONLY because my spouse turned 65 this year and has a disability.We haven’t left except to grocery shop or to go to doc appts. I had to sell my car. We’re not sure we will keep the new car. No more dinners out, no more Disneyland, no more weekends in San Diego. NOTHING.Our final hope was the beach…but we don’t feel safe going to the beach anymore. That’s where the MAGATS gather and spend their time coughing and spitting at the the locals. They terrorize fragile local businesses without masks, never making a purchase to support the community. They shoot paint guns at people and dispense mace from the back of giant pick up trucks. It’s too dangerous…and now it’s 4 hours from Vegas anyway.Had Trump acted sooner, and put a national coronavirus plan in place including providing simple access to PPE and sanitizer / bleach, it would have meant keeping our jobs and staying in our home and getting back to some kind of normal faster.I don't care what MAGATS say - I won’t hear it - it’s all his fault - and it continues to be his fault. We’ve lost almost everything - I refuse to give him anymore. VOTE NOV. 3rd!!!As for us, we’re out of the US - new passports came this week, visa’s are being readied, and we are planning our escape route as I type. The US will never be the same. Viva Expats!!!

Martin Wolf, the Financial Times columnist says, “Across-the-board rivalry with China is becoming an organising principle of US economic, foreign and security policies.”It is too late. America Cannot Challenge or Compete with China.China is ten times older, has ten times more smart people and its economy is one-third bigger and growing three times faster than America’s.People: Americans no longer feel the need for extra effort, while Chinese students have clear plans for their professional future and, as employees, willingly make the extra effort for their firms. American unions are adversarial and distrustful while China has the highest union participation on earth yet employees fully understand that businesses must make money to pay their salaries.Social harmony: Confucius, the great political scientist observed, “Rulers who led their people to the Realm of Lesser Prosperity, a xiaokang[1] lifestyle, were themselves pillars of courtesy, sincerity, justice and virtue while those who did not lost power and everyone regarded them as pests”. Low crime, no religious nonsense or Islamic violence. Companies can invest safely without fear of religious unrest, violence or robbery.Education: Chinese high school students graduate three years ahead of America’s. One-fourth of the world’s STEM workers are Chinese, an intellectual workforce eight times larger and growing six times faster than America’s. By 2025, China will have more technologically skilled workers than the entire OECD (USA, EU, Canada, Mexico, Australia, Israel, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, and Turkey) combined. Two percent of Chinese–twenty-eight million people–have an IQ of 140 (‘gifted’), sufficient for membership in Mensa. The Chinese overall five point IQ advantage over Americans means that they have 300,000 people with 160 IQ, compared to 10,000 in the US. [Thanks to Frans Vandenbossche, Zakelijk China, scherp in beeld gebracht]. No country has so many smart, fast thinking people as China. Not just students or professionals, but ordinary people. To quote a friend who hires workers for factories in the US and China,“Manufacturing in the US is a nightmare. At our facility our only requirement for a assembler was a high school degree, US citizenship, passing a drug and criminal background check and then passing a simple assembly test: looking at an assembly engineering drawing and then putting the components together. While the vast majority of Americans were unable to complete the assembly test, in China they completed it in half the time and 100% of applicants passed. An assembler position in the US would average 30 interviews a day and get 29 rejections, not to mention all the HR hassles of assemblers walking off shift, excessive lateness, stealing from work, slow work speed and poor attitudes. The position starts at $12 an hour in flyover country which is pretty reasonable compared to other jobs that only require a GED and no prior work experience and offers medical, dental and annual raises with plenty of opportunity to move up in the company and earn the average salary for a Production Assembler, $33,029 in US, if they stayed for 5+ years.“Identical positions in China pays the same wages as other positions there with only a high school degree and no work experience. Yet the applicant quality is much higher, and this also applies to the white collar support professionals: schedulers, quality inspectors, equipment testers and calibrators, engineers, supply chain managers, account managers, sales. Their labor quality is simply higher. At the end of the day, high-end and middling manufacturing is not moving to either the US or Mexico because average people in flyover country are dumb as rocks.”Social Indicators: By 2021 every Chinese will have a home, a job, plenty of food, education, safe streets, health- and old age care. 500,000,000 urban Chinese will have more net worth and disposable income than the average American, their mothers and infants will be less likely to die in childbirth, their children will graduate from high school three years ahead of American kids and live longer, healthier lives and there will be more drug addicts, suicides and executions, more homeless, poor, hungry and imprisoned people in America than in China.Leadership: China has professional, non-factional government. President Trump observed, “Their leaders are much smarter than ours. It’s like taking the New England Patriots and Tom Brady and having them play your high school football team.” China’s government is forward-looking, decentralized, efficient and thrifty. The Government Entrance Examination selects the top 2% of graduates each year and success is the only avenue to power, responsibility (and even deification, since China’s Gods are democratically chosen and millions of pilgrims visit deified officials’ shrines each year). The 200 members of the State Council–all promoted on their ability to work cooperatively–have governed billions of people for a combined 5,000 years and their publicly available stats are jaw-dropping. Most have a PhD and an IQ over 140. Americans have little trust in their government and Gallup says 20 percent of them rank government as their most pressing problem and only 54 percent ‘consistently express a pro-democratic position’. The Chinese government, by contrast, is the most trusted on earth:Innovation: In 1999, Samuel Huntington warned,Civilizations grow because they have an instrument of expansion, a military, religious, political, or economic organization that accumulates surplus and invests it in productive innovations and they decline when they stop the application of surplus to new ways of doing things. In modern terms we say that the rate of investment decreases. This happens because the social groups controlling the surplus have a vested interest in using it for non-productive but ego-satisfying purposes which distribute the surpluses to consumption but do not provide more effective methods of production. Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order.The social groups controlling America’s surplus used it for non-productive, ego-satisfying purposes like wars, which distributed the surpluses to consumption but did not provide more effective methods of production. The the social group controlling China, the CCP, did the opposite:America failed to invest its surplus in productive innovations and China did. That’s why China is the world leader in 5G and most new technologies.China leads the world in basic research and in most technologies, especially hot areas. China has overtaken the US to become the world’s largest producer of scientific research papers, making up almost a fifth of the total global output, according to a major new report.China dominates a global ranking of the most-cited research papers published in the 30 hottest technology fields. Though the U.S. accounted for 3.9 million research papers overall compared with 2.9 million from China, the Asian country produced the largest share in 23 of the 30 fields that drew the most interest.According to the Japan Science and Technology Agency, China now ranks as the most influential country in four of eight core scientific fields and is overtaking America in the other four.The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Ai2) examined not just the number of AI research papers coming from China but the quality of those papers—as judged by the number of citations they receive in other work. China will overtake the US in the most-cited 50% of research papers this year, the top 10% of research papers in 2020, and the top 1% by 2025. China is already ahead in the number of AI patents filed, AI venture capital invested, and research papers cited worldwide. The number of Chinese students studying AI and graduating from universities worldwide exceed the total number of other countries’ AI students combinedTAn Overview of Scientific and Scholarly Publishing says China has overtaken the US to become the world’s largest producer of scientific research papers, making up a fifth of the total global output,The World Intellectual Property Organization, WIPO, ranked 167 universities and public research universities for the top 500 patent applications. 110 of the patents were from China, 20 from the United States and 19 from South Korea. China also dominates a global ranking of the most-cited research papers published in the 30 hottest technology fields.Finances: Since its economy is growing three times faster and all its debt is domestic, China’s debt burden is one-third of America’s, while the Financial Times says, “America will need to sell $12 Trillion of bonds in the coming decade..Who on earth–or in global finance–will buy this looming mountain of Treasuries, the US borrowing requirement even before Trump’s major upgrade of America’s weapons systems? ..These borrowing needs will all have to be financed in the context of already high global dollar debt exposure. One of America’s biggest hedge funds privately concluded that in five years’ time the Treasury will need to sell bonds equivalent to 25 per cent of gross domestic product, up from 15 per cent now. This level of debt has occurred just twice in the past 120 years, first during the second world war and then again during the 2008 financial crisis.”Infrastructure: New, automated highways, railways, airports, subways and ports and, next year, the world’s fastest, most advanced Internet and an entire city built around 5G.Inequality: Much of China’s GINI (inequality) gap is structural: their inland, rural populations have always been poorer than their urban, coastal cousins and, because the country couldn’t afford to build homes or cities fast enough, inlanders were held in place by residential hukous. But this aspect of inequality has been exaggerated because the cost of living in wealthy areas like Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen is much greater because urban land prices–though not housing quality–are vastly higher. If we include the full range of goods and services whose price differ across areas (in rural areas basic foods cost half of Beijing’s), incomes from most rural areas should be increased by fifty percent to make them comparable.If we adjust for where people actually live, the difference shrinks even further. Until recently, demographers counted people’s hukous–where they were registered to live rather than where they actually lived–but migrant workers’ numbers rose to three hundred million in 2018, distorting the comparisons. In real life, the coastal provinces have millions more residents than their registered populations and the reverse holds for migrant-sending inland provinces so, as each person moved from China’s interior to the coast, measures of inequality rose because the migrant contributed to income in the coastal destination but was still counted as living in the origin, interior, area. Once this counting error was corrected, regional inequality in China was found to have declined at an average trend rate of 1.1 percent per year from 1978 to 2016. [Spatial Price Differences and Inequality in the People's Republic of China: Housing Market Evidence,” Asian Development Review, MIT Press].In 2018 President Xi announced that the country will spend 2021-2035 bringing both income and wealth levels closer to Finland’s, the world’s most equitable country.Hunger: There are more hungry people in America than in China:Influence: Gallup says that, despite America’s domination of world media, 34% of the world approves of China’s leadership compared to America’s 31% adding, “As the global balance of soft power continues to shift, it may prove even more difficult for the US to counter this influence”. China generates 20% of global GDP vs. America’s 15%, its imports and exports are in balance, its trading relationships are excellent, its currency fairly valued, its economy one third larger and growing three times faster, its manufacturing wages have reached parity with the US.Trade: China’s most significant trade relationships are Asia and Europe, with the US third. As Parag Khanna says, “Asia’s decoupling reflects the fact that America does not need the rest of the world for its survival. In geopolitics, that is a blessed condition but in geoeconomics it means the US is actually much more dispensible than it thinks. Indeed, China’s most significant trade relationships are first and foremost other Asians, followed by Europe, with the US third most important. From China’s standpoint, number three just launched a trade war against number one. It has taken one short generation for Asia to launch its decoupling from the US—and the coming generation will witness even more couplings among Asians themselves. “America first” sounds like a great idea, except when it actually means, “America alone.”Science and Technology. According to the Japan Science and Technology Agency, China is the most influential country in four of eight core scientific fields, tying with the U.S. The agency took the top 10% of the most referenced studies in each field, and determined the number of authors who were affiliated with the U.S., the U.K., Germany, France, China or Japan. China ranked first in computer science, mathematics, materials science and engineering and is rapidly catching up in physics. The U.S. led in physics, environmental and earth sciences, basic life science and clinical medicine.China leads the world in most of the top 10 fields (and in each of the five areas in the top 10 tied to battery research). It accounted for more than 70% of all papers on photocatalysts and nucleic-acid-targeted cancer treatment, which ranked 12th and 14th. The U.S. led in three biotechnology fields, including No. 7 genome editing and No. 10 immunotherapy.China leads in all fields of civil engineering and of sustainable and renewable energy, in manufacturing, supercomputing, speech recognition, graphenics, thorium power, pebble bed reactors, genomics, thermal power, ASW missiles, drones, in-orbit satellite refueling, passive array radar, metamaterials, hyperspectral imaging, nanotechnology, UHV electricity transmission, HSR, speech recognition, radiotelescopy, hypersonic weapons, satellite quantum communications, quantum secure direct communications and quantum controls. “Approximately 72% of the academic patent families published in QIT since 2012 have been from Chinese universities. US universities are a distant second with 12%.” Patintformatics.: No country has so many intelligent, well trained, devoted engineers. China leads the world inquantum encrypted communications,5G telecommunications,CCTV and face recognition–which the NYPD usesSpace: China launched more space missions in 2018 than Russia.China is the world’s leading provider of UAVs and the largest manufacturer and exporter of light combat aircraft. Once it gets is WS-15 engine right it will be America’s equal in fighter technology.Ocean engineering equipment and hi-tech ships. China is the go-to builder for ships like LNG transporters and naval vessels that require technical expertise (the USN even approached it about building a floating dock) It designs, builds and operates the most powerful surface combatants afloat, the Type 55 cruiser.China leads in all aspects of railway engineering and wins the bulk of global rail contracts. The first of five low speed maglev lines has completed testing and two more will open this year.Energy-saving and new energy vehicles: China leads the world in batteries and electric cars and has more than 20 manufacturers innovating to survive.Power equipment: China leads the world in basic research and manufacturing of all renewable energy sources and nuclear energy and it installed more renewable and nuclear power last year than the rest of the world combined. It dominates the market for long distance UHV transmission.New materials like graphene and nanomaterials. China's share of the most cited nanoscience papers grows 22% annually and overtook the US in 2014. Its contribution–in quantity and quality–is now greater than the rest of the world’s combined. Most of the world’s graphene is manufactured, and most graphene startups are in China and the country is even with the US in nanomaterial development.Market Size: There are twice as many people in China than in the US and Europe combined and domestic consumption of China is growing 7% annually as 200 million rural people move into new cities. China will have abundant low salary workers in its western provinces for the next 15 years.Business flexibility: Chinese companies are flexible beyond imagination. They can change products, management, focus, or whatever, literally overnight. The Chinese are incredibly flexible and their culture has already outlived the Egyptians, the Greeks and the Romans. Western companies are hierarchically organised whereas in Chinese companies decisions are made fast, often on the phone.Thrift: Chinese companies and families have three trillion dollars in their savings accounts and 80% of homes have no mortgages. The country has no external debt and investment money is easy to find.Democracy. China is the world’s leading democracy. Electively, popularly, procedurally, operationally, substantively, financially, technologically, China is a democracy and America is not.Geography. China and its partner, Russia, dominate Eurasia morally, economically, geographically, technologically and militarily. Between them China and Russia have the world’s largest reserves of natural resources. China remains self-sufficient in food and Russia literally has more arable land than it knows what to do with. As Zbigniew Brzezinski warned, “A power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world’s three most advanced and economically productive regions… control over Eurasia would almost automatically entail Africa’s subordination, rendering the Western Hemisphere and Oceania (Australia) geopolitically peripheral to the world’s central continent. 75 percent of the world’s people live in Eurasia and most of the world’s physical wealth is there too, both in its enterprises and underneath its soil. Eurasia accounts for about three-fourths of the world’s known energy resources.” [The Grand Chessboard].Economic Development and Industrial Capacity. China has twice America’s industrial capacity and its factories are half the age of American factories.Home Ownership: One of the most important social stabilizers is home ownership and China is the world leader in this area:Military Preparedness. Chinese missiles outrange American missiles–usually by 100%–in every category, from A2A to ICBMs. Tough its military spending consumes half America’s discretionary budget, it is losing five wars, has lost the Black Sea and the Middle East and is close to losing the entire Eurasian continent. The bills for those wars are coming due. And, as Winston Churchill put it, “Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong—these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history.” The PLA on the verge of fielding some of the most modern weapon systems in the world. In some areas, it already leads the world–at half the cost of America’s defense budget. By 2025, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) will have 4 aircraft carriers, 3 Type 075 landing helicopter docks, each carrying 30 attack helicopters, and 10 Type 071 amphibious transport docks, 16 Type 055 guided missile cruisers, 18 Type 052D guided missile destroyers, 6 Type 052C air defence destroyers, 4 Type 052B multirole missile destroyers, 32 Type 054A multi-role frigates, 6 Type 054B multi-role frigates and 80 Type 056/56A corvettes as well as 6 Type 901 fast combat support ships and 12 Type 903 replenishment ships. The underwater fleet will include 11 Type 039 diesel-electric attack submarines, 12 Type 039 AIP diesel-electric attack submarines, 21 Type 093 nuclear-powered attack submarines, 8 Type 094 nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines, 10 Type 095 nuclear-powered attack submarines and 6 Type 096 nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines.Ideology. The US has no coherent ideology while China’s Confucian ideology is 2,500 years old. China’s elite, the ninety-million members of the Communist Party, have sworn to ‘bear the people’s hardships first and enjoy its fruits last’.Diplomacy. Without threats or coercion, China has created the SCO, the largest security alliance on earth; the AIIB, the largest international finance agency; the BRI, an ambitious trading program with 130 member nations; and the upcoming RCEP will dwarf all trading alliances. The majority of Germans want to distance themselves from the United States and nearly half of then consider China to be a more reliable partner for Germany than the US. Our media’s efforts to diminish China’s soft power are failing, as Europe’s decision to retain Huawei indicates.The Future. The Chinese have a strong belief in the future and willingly sacrifice time and effort for the next generation. The Chinese are feeling as America did in the 60s, and their wages and wealth have doubled every decade for seventy years. By 2025, nine Chinese provinces will enjoy higher average incomes than average Americans.By 2035 China’s manufacturing will reach ‘an intermediate level among world manufacturing powers,’ with greatly improved ability to make key breakthroughs and ‘significantly increase overall competitiveness.’ By 2049 China expects to ‘lead the world’s manufacturing powers, with the capability to lead innovation and possess competitive advantages in major manufacturing areas, and will develop advanced technology and industrial systems.”Kishore Mahbubani, former President of the UN Security Council, says, “The key question the West must ask is: how was the relative over-performance of Western societies in the second half of the 20th century replaced by underperformance in the 21st century? The answer will not come from looking at China. It will come from looking in the mirror."The size of China’s displacement of the world balance is such that the world must find a new balance. It is not possible to pretend that this is just another big player. This is the biggest player in the history of the world. –Lee Kwan Yew.[1] Lesser Prosperity.