I never went to college, for many more reasons than I'd care to discuss here, and have lived entirely independently since graduating high school.
My first several years of independence were ones of genuine struggle and privation, and I took various jobs that paid my rent and kept me fed, if not always well.
I worked as a security guard but the hours were intense (averaging 70-90 hours per week) and got mono; I worked in a nightclub as a barback. I worked as a dishwasher, then graduated to prep work and eventually worked as a short-order cook before realizing that food service was not my ideal field. I worked briefly in different clerical positions, long enough to know that I would never be comfortable in an office either.
I decided that the best environment for my personality and skills was a retail store, and eventually got a job at a large department store. That experience allowed me to move into menswear, first in sales and then store management.
A chance encounter with someone I knew from High School persuaded me that I might try furniture, so I made that move when I was 23 and stayed there for over 25 years. I learned the ropes of professional, large-ticket sales and spent six months at my company's Executive Candidate program to learn the finer details of operations and personnel management after several years on various sales floors. By the time I was 28, I was managing their Madison Ave location in New York and was making some of the best money of my career.
When that company went bankrupt, I tried to find a similar job in NYC (with no luck) and went back to where I's started in Boston working as a showroom manager for a small, upscale manufacturer where I learned all about the design industry. I moonlighted helping a casual acquaintance open a furniture gallery and worked part-time in a cafe, too.
After a three-year interlude that involved living in France, I started working in the area of custom furniture and was eventually working as a furniture designer/interior decorator for a variety of small, independent concerns in various places around New England.
One of the things I've learned is that, without a degree, you can never afford the luxury of presuming that your experience counts for much unless a potential employer has intimate knowledge of you, your personality, your temperament and your skill set. My career was one long slog up a slippery slope, with as many back-slides and start-overs as any real advancements. And my own path made it clear to me that I could measure success either by job satisfaction or income, but only very rarely both and then never for long.
Moving to South Florida proved to be a death blow to my career, as the market is very different down here, and I was totally unenthusiastic about starting from scratch in the middle of my life: I'm now doing something completely, totally different.