Spotlight: Keith Cameron Smith
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Did you attend college?

I went to college for two weeks and said that's not for me. I'm on the list of millionaires that just did it in the real world and didn't go to school. School is phenomenal for some people. Some people absolutely need to go to school as part of their purpose. But some people don't need to go to school. They don't need to get a good job so the government or your corporation can take care of you, because as we know, that formula doesn't work anymore.

When you go through failures like I have and like other millionaires have, you learn something on an emotional level that you cannot learn when you go to college. When you get intellectual knowledge from a book or a lecture, it's not the same as investing money in something and then seeing all that money disappear. When you learn something on an emotional level, that is what really starts making you stronger.

Your original goal was to be a golf pro, right? What happened?

I had an apprentice position at the LPGA International in Daytona Beach when they first got started. I helped them get their pro shop up and running, and I had my handicap down to about a 4 and I thought for sure I was going to pursue golf as a career. I took the PAT, the player's ability test, a couple of times -- that's where you have to play a couple of rounds and shoot like 150 between two rounds of golf. And I could never do it; my nerves just couldn't handle it. But that was one of the turning points in my life. I sat down with the pro there at the time and asked how long it was going to be before I could really start making good money. I was making $20,000 a year as an apprentice. He said, "I'm going to be honest with you. It's going to be at least five or six years before you can move up." And I said no way, I'm not going to sit here and make $20,000 a year for five or six years.

How did you lift yourself out of the middle class?

Education. I started learning, but it wasn't education in the school system. It was education from my real-world experience as an entrepreneur and taking risks and having some good successes and some failures, too. Those are always tough when you go through them, but I honestly can say, thank God for those, too. Because those are the situations I really learned the most from, so I had some new knowledge to apply on the next endeavor.