The goal of any real education is to build intangible wealth: a valuable skillset that creates opportunities, sustainability, and personal growth. Developing this kind of wealth is the single most important step toward true independence.

I’ve met plenty of highly educated middle-class people, but I’ve never met a self-made wealthy person who didn’t first develop their own version of this.

Content creation (writing, videography, photography, and more) is one of the easiest skills to learn on YouTube today. There are millions of tutorials that can take you from zero to one — clear step-by-step guides that show you exactly what to do.

What those videos can’t show you is the tens of thousands of hours it actually takes to become great. I learned that lesson young, as a child stand-up comedian, watching elite performers at the top of their game. The precision of their jokes, the invisible craft behind every laugh — it was clear this wasn’t talent alone. It was years of deliberate, grinding work.

That same understanding carried into my late teens. Every morning I’d go to college from 6am to 10am, then sprint across town to the New Yorker Hotel near Penn Station, where I worked as a writing intern on the TV show Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell (executive produced by Chris Rock). The writing staff was stacked with incredible talent — Ethan Berlin, Aparna Nancherla, Kevin Avery, and others. Everyone brought different backgrounds, but they all had real, hard-earned skill.

When I committed to building my own intangible wealth, I chose coding as the skill I wanted to put my 10,000 hours into. You first reach a baseline level that can generate income. After that, you get to spend the rest of your life sharpening that skill — and ideally getting paid to do it.

I spent my entire 20s with my head down, working as a web developer freelancer, bouncing between companies across New York City. I barely went out. Being broke in NYC actually helped — it made it easy to stay focused. By the time I turned 30, I realized those years had been a worthy sacrifice. I had built real intangible wealth.

More importantly, coding didn’t just give me one skill. It taught me how to learn, how to sell, how to clearly identify what I know and what I don’t (and how to figure it out fast). I still use those meta-skills every single day to build my livelihood.

While coding was the right path for me, the combination of AI and the internet has unlocked countless remote opportunities for all of us. It’s hard to even fathom the scale. Even better, it’s empowered us to solve far more problems simply by applying imagination to the tools now at our fingertips.

If you’re feeling lost after college, here’s the simplest advice I can give: Pick one valuable skillset and practice it every single day. Thanks to everything already available online, it probably won’t take 10 years anymore. With focused effort, 2–5 years of deliberate practice can get you remarkably far. If you walk in a direction long enough, you will get somewhere.