I am interested in many things, perhaps too many things, and I feel guilty if I am not being productive. I blame it on my Catholic education. In grade school, the nuns made us feel guilty if we weren’t doing something. “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.” The guilt trip continued at the all-boys Catholic high school, where the priests made us feel that we always had to study hard and spend our time improving our minds. The curriculum was rigorous, and aimed at preparing us for college. The slackers took just two years of Latin. The “good” students took Latin for four years. I took two years of Latin and two years of French. I also took five years of math in the four years I was there. I managed to do that by taking algebra 2 in one semester instead of two, and taking extra math classes in the summer.  

I attended Gannon University, a Catholic university in Erie, Pennsylvania, my home town. I majored in social sciences, with a concentration in economics. They made us take a lot of social science and humanities courses, which I didn’t like at first (I wanted to study only economics at the time), but after a few semesters of being exposed to the literature, I started to really like it. I decided to minor in political science, philosophy and history. I almost had enough credits to have a minor in theology as well.  

After graduation I was too busy to continue my study of the social sciences and humanities because I had to work and support a family, but I did find time to earn a law degree and a master’s degree in taxation and pass the CPA exam and several other certification exams. A few decades later my schedule got a bit lighter (I started teaching accounting in college), so I decided to study the subjects I wanted to pursue part-time while continuing to work full-time. I managed to earn 23 academic degrees, which included 13 doctorates from universities in the United States and four European countries. I studied a number of disciplines at the doctoral level, including accounting, taxation, finance, public finance, several subfields of economics, law, philosophy, political science, and ethics.