Medical equipment salesman to E.F. Hutton training program to jail. Then:

> With no experience, no college education, virtually no connections, and with the same casual outfit he had been wearing on the day he was taken into custody, Gardner gained a position in Dean Witter Reynolds’ stock brokerage training program.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Gardner

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"Mr. Wall Street" Sideny Weinberg began as a janitor's assistant at Goldman Sachs and rose to CEO. He completed only Junior High school.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Weinberg

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There are countless other case studies I'm sure, which are all pleasing to read, but the only common threads you'll find are luck and meeting the right people at the right time. In spite of the two people's good intellect/skills, if the parameters were different in either of the above stories, things may have turned out very differently.

At the very least, its hard to become CEO of Goldman Sachs from being a janitor if Goldman Sachs doesn't exist.

Most self-made men, in short, have a lot of fortunate scaffolding when they get to the construction site where they are made.

Well, and then there's this funny word, "anomaly." We all might as well cite Ramanujan as the quintessential reason why no one needs to go to college; why does anyone even bother with Gates and Zuckerberg? There just seems to be some basic statistics at work that people have difficulty grasping.

In some states it is still possible to sit for the bar without attending law school. But who would hire you, when there's a glut of credentialed attorneys with no job?

You pose a reasonable question - and I would agree that the ordinary path of getting hired into a well paid first year associate job at a law firm would probably be off the table.

But I also suspect a lot of people would hire you. The US has a glut of lawyers, no doubt, but also a huge number of people who can't afford lawyers (and are pretty screwed without them). If you were willing to work for $50 an hour or less, I suspect you'd be booked up pretty quickly.

Another thing to keep in mind - I'm actually skeptical that law school is the only good path to become a lawyer. Keep in mind how talented people from non-CS fields can become at programming. A lot of people with degrees in math and physics, or no degree for that matter, who study intensely can become truly exceptional programmers.

Some people learn much faster than others, and some people are extremely good and disciplined at self-study. Abraham Lincoln is probably the most famous lawyer who never went to college or law school. Keep in mind, you still have to pass the bar, and there are often apprenticeship requirements or other educational requirements for the non-law school route. And (like the math or physics major who becomes a programmer), many of these non-law school lawyers might very well have impressive academic credentials in other fields.

Just because you passed the bar doesn't mean you need to practice law to make money. Having that feather in your cap could be worth a decent amount to any number of companies.