Zak Slayback dropped out of an Ivy League school

Now he helps young people develops skills they need to enter the workforce

Zak Slayback is from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Like most young Americans striving to get ahead, he earned good grades and applied to go to college. He was accepted into one of the best, The University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League school located in the city that our Declaration of Independence was signed, Philadelphia.

But after attending college for about a year or so, Zak decided it wasn’t for him. He dropped out. While America is filled with many opportunities, most parents would probably scratch their heads if their kid worked hard to get into college — an Ivy League university at that — and then just suddenly dropped out. Not transfer somewhere else. Drop out.

This is why Zak is highlighted today as having taken a Fearless Journey. While some drop out of college for all sorts of reasons, Zak didn’t leave college because he couldn’t keep up. In fact, it may have been the opposite effect. He just wasn’t that into it.

He later wrote a book, The End of School: Reclaiming Education from the Classroom, which was an Amazon best-seller in the non-formal education category. 

Zak also joined the team at Praxis, which was founded by our mutual friend Isaac Morehouse. Praxis is essentially an entrepreneurial apprenticeship program for young people who choose not to go to college. Zak wasn’t one of the Praxis “students,” but rather joined their team as their Business Development Director.

While I first met Zak when he was part of the founding team of Praxis, I later interviewed him on Episode 36 of the Agents of Innovation podcast after he had left Praxis. 

Zak continues to speak to various groups across the country on education issues and writes prolifically at zakslayback.com as well as at Slayback to the Future. He also is a Principal at the 1517 Fund, which helps identify young talent. They invest in companies by young people who opted not to go to college.

And, as a college dropout himself, Zak has a lot to say about education, and not only higher education. “A lot of teachers know that schools are not preparing students for the real world … for a lot of them, the teachers don’t make the curriculum,” he told me.

Zak constantly meets ambitious, entrepreneurial young people and thus has concentrated much of his communication in reaching them with some simple messages about how to succeed. But while these young people are very ambitious, he says that, “I meet many young people who either just totally lack [a] sense of efficacy in themselves or they have no idea what they want to do.”

“On an abstract level people need to develop that sense of efficacy and they need to figure out what they want to go after and how to get there.” 

Zak would tell you that college can work for some people, but it’s not for everyone — and most entrepreneurs don’t need to go to college. He discovered he didn’t. But if you don’t go to college, how do you learn the skills needed to enter the workforce? That’s what he spends a lot of time talking about and writing about. From writing to speaking to developing one’s physical and mental health, Zak believes all are important for each of our journeys.

Zak’s biggest advice to aspiring entrepreneurs is to work. “Go out and get some kind of work experience,” he said. “Whether you do that in lieu of school or while you are in school, I really don’t care. You actually need to go out into the world and meet people and work.”

About a year after I interviewed him, he released another book, How to Get Ahead: A Proven 6-Step System to Unleash Your Personal Brand. This book focuses on teaching young people how to make themselves more valuable even when they have nothing to offer.

Ever since we met about seven or eight years ago, Zak has been someone I always look up to, consult, talk to, bounced ideas off of. He’s full of so much useful, applicable information. And I was thrilled when he also joined the Fearless Journeys community as a Featured Innovator.

If you would like to connect with Zak and over 45 other Featured Innovators in the Fearless Journeys community, be sure to sign up for one of our membership levels here. You can also now support the community through our Patreon account.

For those who already are a member, you can join the conversation today on the Fearless Journeys private Facebook page. See you there!