Editor’s Note: Uni student Jad is the type of person who forges his own path because that’s the way he learns best. At school he reads, he studies, he remembers. But he doesn’t always learn.

This story is about relying on yourself to get the education and career you deserve – something most people doesn’t have the courage to do.

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“Hustlers, we don’t sleep, we rest one eye up” – Jay-Z

I could fill this page, and probably the next 20 pages, with quotes similar to the above. But that wouldn’t be very original. It would, however, paint a picture of my thirst for success and what drives me every morning when I wake up.

You see, my young ductile mind was bent and twisted by this rap game and the unashamed egos that went with it. To me, people who ever said you should be “humble” and “down to earth” were suckers. They were afraid to make waves; they never knew what it was like to come from the darkest corners and into the light, or knew the emotions that came with that transformation.

My parents often re-tell stories of my escapades as a three-year-old toddler, mostly when we have company over. When my family and I lived in Adelaide, I decided one crisp autumn morning to unlock the back sliding door and travel the 100 or so meters from our house to the park nearby, with its ever-tantalising swing set.

If a family friend hadn’t seen me when out on his morning walk and returned me home, mum says, I may have wandered to the highway some 20 meters beyond the playground. She says this with no real conviction, though, because we both know that’s not true. Put simply, I wouldn’t have gone to the highway because I didn’t WANT to go to the highway. I wanted the playground with the swing set and the steel spring-chair shaped like a duck.

I think that’s what hustling is partly (if not mostly) about. At the risk of sounding cliché, it’s about going out and getting what you want. It’s about understanding that this world is nowhere near black and white, that nobody is going to make you rich or successful or intelligent. Why? Because most likely, they want those things, and they’re still waiting on their bosses to hand it to them.

So nine years past my little escapade in Adelaide, I’m in Canberra on a morning in 2001 that felt like my first winter in Antarctica. Walking around the apartment building, which held our one-room apartment where my mum, dad and two older brothers were staying while searching for a house. I remember dad walking so fast that I had to run a little to catch up- one of his steps for every 3 of mine.

And then I saw it – a flash of yellow-gold buried in muck and semi-frozen water! I scrambled down into the gutter and yanked out an extremely stiff 50-dollar-note. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, and it happened to be our first morning in Canberra.

To us, it felt like a good omen, and to me it was a catalyst: I knew we’d gotten lucky, and that was the last time I ever expected to come across money or wealth of any kind by doing nothing. Because in my mind, we worked for that.

We had found a home.

Later, I’m sitting behind an esky with a cloth over it, pouring out cups of lemonade hopefully as joggers go by around the lake. Traffic is slow, but I’m determined. I stay in that same spot for four hours, and sold zero cups of lemonade. One man asked if it was poisoned, and I told him the only way to find out was to buy a cup. He did not.

Before that, I’d done a door-to-door gardening service for people in my suburb. I never knew how much to charge, so I ended up weeding a man’s garden for 6 dollars, which worked out to be about 3 dollars an hour. The woman next door paid me 10 dollars for half the time, and I was ecstatic about that. She was the first employer I ever loved, and not the last.

Not because of what she paid me, but because of what she taught me: to settle for no less than what I deserve. Believing in and enabling people is just as much a part of hustling as the profits that come with it, and usually goes hand in hand.

That’s what Richard Branson knew, and now so do I.

Next are my high-school years. Grade 11 and 12 are dominated by memories of getting to school at 7:20am (if Dad decided to go to work late), and sitting in an empty classroom going through problems in the maths textbook. That never seemed to translate to great grades, but I did all right.

I didn’t know how to learn back then; I read and read and remembered but never learned.

And now I’m here. Sitting in the Engineering building at the Australian National University at 11:15pm on a Thursday night, typing so fast that I’m afraid I may break the keys. I’m typing fast because it’s unscripted and therefore flows easily. This year is looking bright: I’ll be graduating in December, and the business a partner and I have been working on for the last 6 months is fully trading. I hope I haven’t bored you so far, and if so, humour me by allowing me to tell you a little more.

The business is called Stass. We are aiming to be the number one seller of designer hair combs in Canberra and beyond by 2017. Why hair combs? Because I love to comb my hair, as do many other people, but nobody has a comb they can be proud to call their own. It’s just a low quality piece of plastic that gets used and abused, and more often than not, it’s unbranded.

Thanks for this opportunity; I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

“I dropped out of school because I wasn’t learning fast enough. I learned from real life better.” – Kanye West