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The nine-month method

I dropped out of college on purpose and designed my own curriculum of nine-month jobs, each aimed at a weakness.

I walked away from college deliberately, with a plan nobody near me would have called sensible. My belief was that working would teach me faster than a classroom. I also kept a precise list of what I was bad at: selling face to face, closing, managing money and managing people.

I lined up a series of jobs, nine months apiece, each chosen for the one skill I judged my weakest. Two stretches selling cars came first, then mortgages, then AAA insurance. A resume gap, to me, was a curriculum and not a failure.

The reasoning: when a skill is weak, the quickest repair is a room where that skill is the only way to get paid. Reading about it or waiting for a job to force it will not do the same. Nine months gave enough time to see real improvement, and not so much that a bad fit became a career.

Each stretch fed the next. By AAA, I set a California record for auto-policy sales within my first three months.

No one handed me this plan. It came out of my own reading of my own weaknesses, at an age when most people follow whatever path appears. I decided what I had to learn and went after it on my own schedule. A gap on a resume can be the most intentional stretch of a career, when you designed it.

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