I can attest to the value in these items. I entered college 20 years ago at the age of 17 to study electrical engineering, but I ended up dropping out after one semester. Today I’m enjoying success as a technical writer, doing R&D on the latest technologies and teaching others how to use them. Nothing has opened more doors in my 15-year run in IT than technical writing about open-source technologies, and this is after years of producing high-value applications and systems for entrepreneurs, startups, and corporations. Going back into my numerous social media accounts and leveraging them to promote my training materials and open-source projects is something that I’ve been doing recently in my newfound writing career, and it’s working.

On top of that I’ve been speaking with admissions at MIT’s Sloan School of Management about their one-year MBA program which they say I would be a good fit for. So, I’ve come full circle, having dropped out of college twenty years ago and found myself looking at going back, but on an entirely new level from where I was at 17, thanks mostly to years of self-study and training in open-source technologies. These things really do work, or I would still be looking for a job somewhere instead of doing what I was meant to do.

Thanks for the excellent article!