It’s a familiar refrain: you need a college degree to reach the highest echelons of success. The worlds of business and profitable creativity are closed off to you without it. The ceiling is more or less set. Ryan Sprance thinks differently, though.

He has good reason to. Sprance didn’t graduate from college. In 2013 he was a manager at an Apple store, albeit the largest one in the world. Now, six years later, he is emerging as one of the most dynamic and talked about names in digital media and marketing.

His Kaihatsu Media, founded in 2016, has gone from around USD 1,000 in sales each month in the spring of 2018, to over USD 70,000 by the spring of 2019, and is on track to rake in over a million dollars in monthly sales by the end of the year. Also, in 2019, he was invited to join the Forbes Agency Council -a collective of invitation-only communities of exceptional business owners and leaders -run by Forbes magazine.

Given the speed with which he has achieved his success, it wouldn’t be wrong to assume that Sprance has an Ivy League degree attached to his name. But, as mentioned before, it was all done without a college degree. Which is not to say the journey from one end to the next has not been challenging, or that Sprance did not need to know what he was talking about. And he certainly sees nothing wrong with going to college. It would appear that Sprance’s training came primarily through his willingness to teach himself.

“I’ve worked hard to educate myself by studying every aspect of digital media,” says Sprance. “Working at an Apple store as a manager, I needed to know a lot about tech and the uses of the web. But with computers and the internet, things are changing so quickly. You always need to be learning new skills, discovering new ways of looking at business.”

Indeed, the rapid changes in how people learn and find information, brought on by the advent of the internet and social media, has revolutionized both business and education. Exactly how isn’t clear, partly because these changes happen so fast. Sprance’s story, however, provides something of an answer.”

I think if my story shows anything, it is that a lot of the old rules have been tossed out regarding one’s path to making it big. Personally, I think if you are willing to learn, then you don’t need an institution to give her permission regarding how to use your own knowledge.”