I want to tell you something that requires me to eat a very large plate of humble pie. And I will do it without complaint because it is deserved and because the lesson inside it is worth more than my pride. I grew up in Jamaica believing, with complete confidence, that trade workers were at the bottom of the career ladder. That the real success was in the suit. The title. The office. The professions that came with the kind of names you could say at a family gathering and watch people nod approvingly. Doctor. Lawyer. Pilot. Police Commissioner. Those were the careers. Everything else was what you did when those did not work out.
Technical School and the Quiet Embarrassment
I attended a technical school in Jamaica. Which meant I studied Metal Work. Welding. The kinds of skills that make things, fix things, build things with your hands. And I want to be honest about how I felt about that at the time because I think a lot of people from similar backgrounds will recognize this feeling immediately.
I was quietly embarrassed. Not because the school was bad. It was not. Not because the teachers were not skilled. They were. But because the culture around me had told me very clearly where that path ranked in the hierarchy of respectable careers. And the message I received every day, in a hundred small ways, was that this was not the dream. This was the fallback.
Nobody came to our school to talk about how Metal Work and Welding could make a man extraordinarily wealthy. Nobody showed us the trajectory. Apprentice, Grade A, Grade B, Senior Tradesperson, Business Owner. Nobody laid out the path from learning to fix something to owning the company that fixes things. That conversation never happened. So we graduated with skills and no context for what those skills could actually be worth in the real world.
That absence of context is one of the most expensive things our education system ever cost us.
The Moment the Joke Landed
The shift happened when I started working at the industrial company. I was surrounded by mechanics. Real ones. Skilled ones. Men who could diagnose a problem in a piece of heavy equipment the way a doctor reads a scan. With precision, with confidence, with the authority of someone who has spent years learning something deeply.
And they were being paid accordingly. Not just adequately. Well. The progression was clear and real. As a mechanic moved up the grades, Apprentice to Grade A to Grade B to Senior. The income moved with them in a way that most office careers do not match. And more importantly, every single skill they acquired was fully portable. Their knowledge lived in their hands and their head, not in a company's system or a job title that disappears when the company restructures.
I sat with that realization for a long time. And the longer I sat with it the louder that old embarrassment became. Not because I was ashamed of what I had believed. But because I understood for the first time exactly what we had been taught to ignore and why.
What the School System Forgot to Mention
Here is what I wish every young person in a trade school was told on day one.
The fastest route to owning a business is through a trade. Not through a degree. Not through corporate climbing. Through mastering a skill that people will always need, building a reputation around that skill, and then building a structure around that reputation. That is the blueprint. It is not complicated. It is just not what gets promoted.
In New York City right now, a skilled HVAC technician is not struggling. A skilled electrician is not struggling. A skilled plumber, welder, carpenter, these are not people scraping by. These are people whose phones ring constantly because the skills they have are essential and the supply of people who have mastered them is genuinely running short. Meanwhile there are hundreds of thousands of people with degrees working in fields that have nothing to do with what they studied, wondering why their expensive education has not produced the life they expected.
I am not against education. I am against the lie that one path leads to success and everything else leads to settling. That lie has cost too many people too many years.
The trades gave me my life in New York. The trades gave me income, independence, the ability to solve problems with my hands and be paid well for it. And every day I walk into a client's building and fix something that was broken, I feel a kind of satisfaction that no title I ever held in sales ever gave me. Because the work is real, the results are immediate, and nobody can outsource what I know how to do.
For the Young Person Who Is Quietly Embarrassed
If you are reading this and you are in a trade school or considering one and you feel what I felt at your age, that quiet nagging sense that this is not the prestigious path, I want to speak directly to you.
You are learning something that the world will always need. You are building skills that will travel with you anywhere on the planet. You are on a path that leads to ownership faster than almost any other route if you have the vision to see it that way.
Do not let anyone else's hierarchy determine your worth. The people who look down on trade workers from the comfort of their offices are often the same people who cannot fix anything when it breaks. There is a particular kind of helplessness in that. And a particular kind of power in knowing you never have to be helpless in that way.
Master your craft. Build your grades. Own your business. And when you do, remember to go back to the school that taught you and tell the next generation what nobody told you. That conversation is the one that changes everything.
"Choose a job you love and you will never have to work a day in your life."
Confucius