A promise made at 19, settled at 41 with the last available place and an AI stack used to understand, never to copy. Plus an uncomfortable opinion about half of what I studied.
At 19 I wanted to go to university, and I didn’t: I didn’t have the appetite, and I didn’t have the means. I made myself a promise: “You’ll do it as soon as you can.”
It took me twenty-two years to settle it.
For my birthday in 2024 I gave myself an entrance exam: Economics and Management in Forlì, on 29 August, the exact day I turned another year older. I didn’t study for it. I turned up with what I knew after 25 years of building companies. I came thirteenth out of a few hundred candidates, and the places left in the final admissions window happened to be exactly thirteen. In, with the last available seat.
I almost never believe in signs from fate. That time I made an exception.
Nearly two years later, on 22 July 2026, I graduate: one year and ten months, as a non-attending student, an average close to 26 out of 30, and a final mark that with the bonus points will take me past 100 out of 110. And an uncomfortable opinion I’m carrying away along with the certificate: a good half of what I studied was useless. And I’d do it again tomorrow morning.
Why enrol at university at 41?
Not for the piece of paper. At 41, with the companies up and running, a degree opened no door that wasn’t already open.
The first reason was that promise, sitting there for twenty years reminding me the account was still unsettled. The second I understood along the way: 25 years of practice were resting on foundations I’d never formalised. I’d been doing cash flow, valuations and financial statements for a lifetime, but the theory underneath those hands had been picked up in pieces, wherever it happened to turn up.
And then there was the less admissible part: the challenge with myself. Nobody was making me do it, no pressure, no grades to justify at home. I wanted to see whether I could. It’s a luxury you don’t have at 20: studying out of pure hunger, without fear.
Can you do a three-year degree in under two while working?
Yes. But the bill is paid in discipline and in the gaps between everything else, and nobody gives you a discount.
During the university period I was launching MenthorQ (a US quantitative-data startup that is doing very well), I had just started my consulting firm, I was doing my first assignments for Roland Berger, and I had an e-bike import business from Cambodia with some partners. I was often travelling: China, Cambodia twice, New York, Frankfurt. In between, training for my first marathon (New York, with the goal of going under 4 hours). University got added on top of all this as a “nice to have” whose complexity I had completely underestimated.
On top of that I started late: the test results came around 20 September, with lectures already under way, and between commitments I first walked into a lecture hall in early October, when people were talking about November mid-terms I didn’t even know existed. Mathematics (the academic kind, not the balance-sheet kind) I hadn’t touched since my first years of secondary school: I had addition, subtraction and proportions, and not much else. I was a long way behind the room’s average, and the room was half my age.
In the dark, but excited. I picked up studying again starting precisely with mathematics, one of the first exams, in the gaps between everything else, going into the lecture hall only for the toughest subjects.
How do you use AI to study without cheating?
By using it to understand, never to answer in your place. That’s the whole difference, and it’s enormous.
I built myself a stack and a routine: GPT at the start, then a great deal of NotebookLM, and by the end almost only Claude Code. The step change isn’t “AI that writes summaries”: it’s having every subject explained in your own vocabulary, your own examples, your own experience. Every concept hooked onto my companies and onto situations I had actually lived through, instead of the invented examples in the textbook. Every subject tailored to my brain, to learn it in the least time and in the deepest way.
I never copied on an exam, never used AI to cheat. At the exams it was me, on my own, like everyone else. What AI gave me was time: the same concepts understood in a fraction of the hours it would have taken me alone. A learning superpower, not a shortcut.
And let me say this plainly, because the subject divides people: anyone using AI to cheat at university is only cheating themselves. The market unmasks them at the first real problem, with no appeal.
What does an exam feel like at 41?
Different from how I remembered it, and better. At 20 an exam is a threat; at 41, if nobody is forcing you, it becomes a test you go looking for.
I was in a challenge with myself: I couldn’t wait to finish a subject so I could sit the exam, check what I’d actually learned and prove to myself what I was worth. I studied with enthusiasm and without pressure, and that combination, which I never had as a young man, changes your whole relationship with studying.
It didn’t all go smoothly, and that should be said. The real slog was the memory-based subjects: the law papers, economic history. There, experience doesn’t save you and neither does AI. You memorise, full stop, the old-fashioned way, at any age.
Is university still worth it? My uncomfortable answer
It is, but with a caveat not everyone will like: a good half of what it teaches, for an entrepreneur, is dead weight. Obsolete subjects, content never connected to practice, academic liturgy. That’s my opinion, not a statistic, and I’ll put my name to it.
The other half, though, is worth the price of admission on its own. It’s the theory that was missing underneath my practice: now I know why certain things I did on instinct worked, and why certain others could never have worked. I feel more competent than I did before, and I wasn’t expecting that.
The point is that at 20 you can’t do this sorting: you take everything at the same weight, the useful and the liturgy alike. At 41, with the experience on you, you tell gold from filler in an instant. Which is why I’ll say something that sounds backwards: university after 40 pays off more. You study with enthusiasm and without pressure, you hook every concept onto something you’ve lived, and you discard the surplus without guilt.
The number that actually counts
The honest numbers, for anyone who wants them: an average close to 26 out of 30 (which on its own would be worth roughly 95 out of 110), three results of 30 with distinction, several 30s, and a final mark that will pass 100 thanks to the bonuses for the thesis, the distinctions and finishing early. No magic: just pieces earned one at a time.
But the number that counts for me is a different one. I walked into that lecture hall convinced I’d be chasing kids half my age, and I discovered the opposite: you don’t get worse with age, you get better, provided you keep training. For someone approaching 45, that’s a message about self-belief worth more than the certificate.
And the promise made by the 19-year-old? Settled, with interest.
There’s something bigger I’m taking away: AI-personalised learning radically changes who can afford to learn, at any age and from any starting point. I tested it on myself, and it works. If you also have an unfinished promise shut in a drawer with “it’s too late now” written on it, my honest advice is to open that drawer: this is probably the best moment in twenty years to take it out.
