The last year of high school was agony. Beach, girls, pro gaming, zero desire to study, and one fixed idea: start a business, right away, without going through university. I started working as soon as school ended, the first few years as an employee to break myself in, then I started building companies, some sold, others closed. Right after my final exams I promised myself I would do university at 40.
In 2024 I sat the admission test for Economics and Management, as a non-attending student, with my consulting firm, other companies I was growing (one American, with its time zones) and three small children. In July 2026 I graduated, and I wrote about it while it was still fresh. Every exam of the three years in two, with no credits recognised for work experience and no shortened track. This article is not about speed, which is the least interesting part. It is about what I understood about learning as an adult, because it is not the same trade as at twenty.
Why enrol at university at 40?
Not for the piece of paper. I enrolled because I had realised I did not know enough, and I had realised it in the most expensive way possible.
My first encounter with mathematics came at 24, with a variable-rate mortgage worth more than the house and an instalment my salary at the time did not cover. The APR was a number I had signed without understanding its relationship with the ECB’s interest rates. The second encounter came at the exit of the company I am proudest of: I valued it on a revenue multiple, because the business plan was built on revenue, while the buyer valued it on future cash flows. I understood later that the difference had a name, a chapter in a corporate finance textbook and a cost I had already paid.
For twenty years I learned like that: one mistake at a time, each with the invoice attached. At some point I figured that studying the basics in order, with someone explaining them, would cost less.
What changes when you study as an adult?
The first month was a shock. More than twenty years without opening a maths book, and I felt out of place, disoriented, a 41-year-old with a head full of deadlines among kids with fresh memories. Memory is the first disadvantage, time the second: my study hours were short, broken blocks squeezed between one call and the next, never a whole day.
Then I understood something I could not have understood at twenty. Every formula had a face. Working capital was not a definition, it was the stock of a car dealership I had seen with my own eyes. EBITDA I had met in a negotiation, years before knowing how it is calculated. FCF, in a slide of a business plan. The negative second derivative was my company’s 2016, when revenue was still growing but ever more slowly, and I had waited three years before pivoting. Whoever studies as an adult has an advantage no method can give: context. For me that advantage held on every subject close to business, and I say it plainly because otherwise “three years in two” sounds like a promise, and it is not.
On mathematics context was not enough, and that is where I learned to use artificial intelligence well. I gave my AI the personality of my maths professor, a very good one, starting from the easy example before the formula, and had everything explained to me that way. It worked better than any handout, not because the AI knew more maths than the book, but because it told it to me the way I am able to learn.
How do you study while working?
Three things, and none of them is a shortcut.
The first is rhythm. Studying every day, even a little, works like compound interest: today’s session yields more because yesterday’s happened, and after a few weeks the habit accelerates on its own. One hour a day for seven days beats seven hours on Sunday, and it is not me saying it: research on spaced repetition has been measuring it for decades (Dunlosky and colleagues, 2013). I found the time in the gaps: between 2024 and 2025 I travelled a great deal for work and for holidays, and the hours in the air were study hours with the laptop, while in the car I revised out loud with the AI. In 2025 I trained for and ran the New York marathon, and that went into the gaps too. The craziest session, ten exams in ten days, I tell separately.
The second is to stop rereading. What little I studied at school I studied by reading and underlining, and at 41 I discovered that the method gives a feeling of mastery that vanishes at the exam. I moved the time from reading to being questioned: my AI asked me questions, drills with traps, timed simulations, and I kept a log of my mistakes. I cover it in a separate article, because it is the piece worth the most.
The third is the plan. The day I put every exam on a sheet, with credits and sessions, and assigned them to exam dates starting from the graduation date, is the day I stopped studying at random. That has an article of its own too.
I am not the only one
I thought I was an odd case. I am not. In the 2024/25 academic year Italy’s online universities passed 300,000 enrolled students, and about a third are over 34 (2025 National Observatory on Online Universities by AteneiOnline, on USTAT-MUR and ANVUR data). Add the working students of traditional universities, as I was. How many of them still study with the high-school method, nobody knows. It took me a month to understand that mine no longer worked.
Was it worth it?
Yes, and for different reasons from the ones I imagined. I wrote a thesis on an index to predict the trajectory of car dealerships from their financial statements, and I am still developing that index. I distilled the three years into a vademecum for entrepreneurs, with the things I wish I had known at 25. I stayed in touch with some professors.
But the most useful thing was discovering that learning, at 41, can still be learned. With a different method, with less memory and more context, with AI as a tutor and not as a shortcut. I did not do anything exceptional: I did a normal thing at a moment when nobody expected it, me included.
If you have an exam, a course or a book you have been putting off for years because “there is no time”, here is how I see it: there is never time, you take it from something else, and it is worth it only if the thing you want to learn has a face in your life. If it does, it has never been this easy to try.
Sources: Dunlosky, Rawson, Marsh, Nathan, Willingham, “Improving Students’ Learning With Effective Learning Techniques”, Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 2013; 2025 National Observatory on Online Universities, AteneiOnline, on USTAT-MUR and ANVUR data (in Italian), reported by Orizzonte Scuola, 8 December 2025 (in Italian). The rest is direct experience: my pace is one case, not an average.
