The "you aren't the boss of me" response? Really? Of course I can't tell you what to do. Nobody can. That doesn't mean that people can't make suggestions. It's your prerogative as to whether you take any of it to heart. That's the difference between reading and comprehending.
Plenty. Depending on your definition of successful. And if by successful you simply mean managing to make enough of an income to support a family, then I guarantee the percentage of successful individuals with at least a college degree is FAR higher than those who did not finish high school.
Absolutely not. Maybe if you get a useless degree or a degree in a field where you are incapable of standing out amongst others in a saturated field.
I have a friend who has a history degree from Harvard. He took out loans to go there. He's been out of undergrad for almost ten years and has barely touched his debt. Because he has a four-year history degree from one of the most expensive schools in the world. He's a high school teacher making $30k a year. For him, yes, graduating and getting into debt was a bad idea.
I have another friend who went to medical school and graduated near the bottom of his class. But guess what you call the lowest-ranking graduate at med school? You call them a doctor. He has his MD, but since he spent those four years fucking around, he ended up getting "scrambled", meaning he didn't match into any residency programs. He is now doing research work for some lab in rural Georgia. Between undergrad at UNC Chapel Hill and med school at Duke, he is almost $400,000 in student loan debt, and is now making $80,000 a year. For him, yes, graduating and getting into debt was a bad idea.
I have a third friend, though, who also went to medical school. He went almost a half million in debt to get an incredible education. He went into gastroenterology, did a residency in internal medicine and made $55k a year for five years, specialized in gastro and made $110k a year for two more years, did well, stood out from his competition, and got into a private practice firm in a medium-sized city. He made $1.2 million last year at age 34, and has already paid off all of his student loans. For him, graduating and getting into debt worked out extremely well.
Patrick Bet-David is a hype man, and definitely NOT a billionaire. If anything, he's a more visible life insurance agent.
Look at his blog:
http://www.patrickbetdavid.com/patricks-blog/. Does that look like a blog of a billionaire, or a blog of someone who is trying to hard for brand recognition? Post after post with little to no responses and barely any content of value. Look at his Wikipedia page. Sure reads like someone who either wrote it themselves or hired someone to make them a wiki page. All his book reviews on Amazon read like people who were paid to give a positive review of the book.
Look at this shit:
http://www.thephpagency.com/
"Bringing Back Life to the Insurance Industry". Really?
http://www.phpagencystore.com/ Really?
Everything about this guy is hyperinflated. He makes money telling other people to make money, period. Typical guru wannabe. And it sounds like you fell right into the web.
I am successful, educated, and grown up. You are 18, naive, and a high school dropout with what appears to be little life experience. Hey, maybe I'm wrong, though. Sure doesn't seem like it on my end.