Your Results Don't Define You: A Letter to My Younger Self | Episode Thirty
GCSE and A-level results season. Rob has a message for anyone who opened an envelope this week and felt their stomach drop — and for anyone who's ever let a set of grades convince them their best days were already decided. Spoiler: they weren't.
The SATs Test
Cast your mind back to Year 6. Remember how enormous SATs felt? The revision, the panic, the weight of it all? Do you actually remember what you got? Rob's point: those results determined which set you went into at secondary school, and that's about it. He argues the same logic applies to GCSEs, A-levels, and — more controversially — degrees.
Rob's Own Story
He did well at GCSEs. Nine of them, four A's, three B's, two C's (the D in Design Technology was the teacher's fault, he maintains). When it came to A-levels, things unravelled. He missed his first week with tonsillitis — looking back, probably nerves — fell behind immediately, struggled to catch up, and then the real pressures kicked in. No money at home. His father was unemployed and dealing with significant depression. The family was genuinely struggling. When a full-time job came up, it made more sense than studying for qualifications he wasn't sure he even wanted.
He walked away. No A-levels, no university. For years he felt like a failure — watching friends go off to study while he swept up at a garden centre, embarrassed and quietly devastated.
The University Question
Rob has never wanted to go to university, and he's blunt about why. Three years, much of which is wasted. Enormous debt. A degree in a subject the market may not want. He knows people with first-class degrees in business who have a shocking grasp of how business actually works. That's not an argument against higher education — it's an argument for being honest about what it delivers versus what it costs.
What He's Built Without It
Multiple businesses. A strong reputation in his industry. Skills built through experience, self-study, books, and doing the work. His qualifications don't appear on his sales deck, and no one has ever asked. What got him here was graft, curiosity, and showing up.
The Actual Message
If you got the results you wanted — brilliant. Keep going. If you didn't — please don't panic. You have forty to fifty years of working life ahead of you. Careers change, people reinvent themselves, and the internet has made self-education more accessible than it has ever been. YouTube, books, the Open University, podcasts — the tools are there. What matters is finding your passion and being willing to put in the work when you do.
Your GCSEs, your A-levels, your degree — they are one small chapter in a very long book. Don't let a set of results at seventeen tell you what the rest of it looks like.
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