If you went to college in America, odds are you don’t know what an autodidact is. And if you don’t, well, you probably paid good money to have somebody else teach you words you’ll never use. Autodidact simply means a self-taught soul—someone who learns not because a professor drew it on a chalkboard, but because they had the gumption to hunt it down themselves.
The word comes from the Greeks, who seemed to have a word for everything—autodidaktos, “self-taught.” History is littered with their kind: Leonardo da Vinci sketching flying machines, Benjamin Franklin toying with lightning, Abraham Lincoln reading law books by candlelight. In our own age, you might toss in Jobs or Musk—men who had the good sense to skip out of classrooms and get to work.
Now, let me bring it home. My maternal grandfather, born in 1896, was one of a dozen kids in a poor family. He never saw the inside of a schoolroom. He learned to read and write all on his own, armed with nothing but stubbornness and a library card. No YouTube tutorials. No “10 Easy Steps to Success” podcasts. Just shelves of books and a restless mind.
And what became of this “uneducated” man? He built himself a financial newspaper, owned a resort, rentals, big houses, even a radio station back in the 1950s when radios were as magical as rockets. He published books, was known and respected in his community, and sailed around on a wooden motor yacht—one of those Trumpy-style beauties you only see in old photographs. He even became a confidant to presidents. And this was back when sending a telegram was cutting-edge.
Because of him, my mother got what very few women did in the 1930s—a real education. She went off to Philadelphia, earned her master’s degree, drove her own car, and lived a life her father’s generation couldn’t have imagined. All because a man who never sat in a classroom decided he’d learn anyway.
The point is simple. He was an autodidact. And compared to him, most of us have been spoiled rotten. We had libraries on every corner, then computers, then the internet, and now YouTube. Honestly, YouTube University has probably taught me more than all the Harvards combined—scuba diving, welding, patching myself up, even dealing with a misbehaving cat.
So, am I an autodidact? I like to think so. Was Bill Gates when he dropped out? Was Musk? Maybe the truest measure of education isn’t the diploma on your wall, but the curiosity in your gut.
In the end, it doesn’t matter if you’ve got a degree. Plenty of fools do. What matters is whether you’ve got the fire to keep learning, with or without someone grading your papers.
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