Scott Galloway is living proof you don’t have to be a straight-A student and have sky-high test scores to be successful in life.
The New York University Stern School of Business professor, entrepreneur, bestselling author (he just recently published his latest book, Notes on Being a Man), and podcaster said he was a gifted student in third grade—sent to take math and English with fifth-graders.
“[I was] supposedly smarter than everyone else at our level,” Galloway wrote in a memoir excerpt published by the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday. “I also was an all-star pitcher. There was promise.”
But following his parents’ divorce, his grades started slipping, and he gave up on sports. In high school, he earned mostly B’s and C’s and didn’t study for the SAT, he wrote, although he still applied to UCLA. He got an 1130 on the SAT, far below the range for top-tier universities, and was denied admission from UCLA (part of only 24% of applicants at the time who didn’t get in). After that, he took a job installing shelving, making $18 an hour.
“I came home one day, and I was just so upset,” he said during a talk at the University of Chicago. “My whole life people had told me I was creative and I was smart and I was funny and the rest of it.”
