My parents wanted college for me, even though I wasn’t sure about it.
They grew up very poor, the type of poor where you fight your way up to being working class, but they did it.
They gave me a great life, and wanted to see me go off to school, because no one in either of their families every had gone to college. This was sort of a heavy burden to put on me, but they had never really asked much of me so I went along with their wishes. I studied business, to try and help grow my dad’s HVAC company. My dad had never gone to college, he had taken an HVAC course through mail order, and parlayed that into a career. That was a long time ago, and it wasn’t possible to take that route any longer, the HVAC is very tightly regulated these days. He had Mom to run the office ,and he handled all the heating and cooling repairs, and they built a life on that business. Now that I had a college degree in business I wanted to apply that to the HVAC business to get some money out of it. Dad thought I wanted to take it over, as he was close to retiring and getting too old for heavy HVAC jobs. I told him I didn’t want to run it, I wanted to either sell it, or franchise it as a brand name for other HVAC stores. This way his name would live on, and by selling the HVAC company he would have a retirement nest egg.