UNEDUCATED

A memoir that demonstrates how to succeed in business without a pedigree.

A journalist and senior news editor at Fast Company, Zara never graduated from an elite college. In fact, unlike most of his colleagues in journalism, he never went to college at all. A high school dropout, his only educational credential is a GED diploma. In a brisk, entertaining narrative, Zara recounts his bumpy path from a checkered school career that included many detentions, suspensions, and, finally, expulsion to an impressive position at a major media venue. Serious behavioral problems landed him in a psychiatric hospital when he was 16. In his teens, he was a punk rocker; by 22, he was a heroin addict working menial jobs to support a habit that he repeatedly tried to quit. Finally, after nine years living in Orlando and Seattle, he kicked drugs. In 2005, at the age of 35, he arrived in New York City. Searching for work, he found that the lack of a college degree loomed as a major impediment to his future no matter what job he applied for: “The educated, as a category, have a stranglehold on power and influence that is impossible to escape.” Zara deliberately omitted listing his education on his resume, and even on dating apps, and he was consumed by worry that an interviewer would probe his background. One who didn’t offered an unpaid internship at Show Business Weekly. Zara soon became the dying magazine’s overworked editor. As he pursued his career as a writer (he got an agent and a book contract) and editor, he felt recurring anxiety at being “on the wrong side of the diploma divide,” yet skepticism, too, about the value of higher education. “In a meritocracy,” he writes, “there is no higher reward than to cast a smug eye on an ultra-successful career and say, I did it my way.”

A savvy account of an interesting life path.