You don't have to be an expert to start a business. Here's why.

The opinions expressed by entrepreneurs contributors are their own.

"But I'm not an expert. I don't have a degree or diploma. How can I start a business? No one will take me seriously, let alone pay me."

I hear this all the time from my students. I patiently remind them that I'm a high school dropout, and on paper my only qualification to handle ads is the fact that I run a seven-figure agency that handles Facebook and Google ads.

That doesn't usually come to mind, so I refer them to a recent Wall Street Journal article that tells the all-too-familiar story of a group of grads who can't get a high -paying job. This particular story, however, shares the struggles of students enrolled in the MFA film program at , the prestigious Ivy League school in New York. These students took on six-figure debt to earn an MFA degree, only to find that not every student could be Scorsese from the start. An Ivy League couldn't save them from the same low-paying, entry-level movie jobs as someone who didn't take out a condo-sized loan.

We face an epidemic of overqualified and underpaid salary hunters in this country because we have the success equation completely upside down.

What I'm about to share with you applies not only to people, but also to people who just want a lucrative and fulfilling job. I'll describe how most people approach skill acquisition, and then I'll tell you how successful people approach skill acquisition.

If I do my job well, you'll be convinced that you don't need to be an expert to start a business. In fact, if you're not an expert right now, you better be.

Related: 8 Keys to Becoming the Expert on Everything You Sell

How Most People Acquire Skills

"Go to college! Get a higher degree! That's how you succeed."

It's amazing how people refuse to believe what's right in front of their eyes. Columbia filmmakers are not unique. According to a PayScale survey, 46% of American workers said they were “underemployed”. Meanwhile, 76% of those surveyed said it was because they weren't using their degrees in their careers.

But people still blindly follow the same old routine, which looks like this:

Dedicate time and education to building skills. Go to market with newly learned skills. ??? Profit?

Let's discuss two things about this approach. First of all, it takes away all the risk. You invest tons of time and money in learning skills that you hope the market will reward you for. In reality, so many graduates enter the market only to find that the market does not need their skills. Worse still, many find that their advanced education makes them overqualified. They walked away from the market.

Related: 5 Steps to Establishing Yourself as an Industry Expert

How entrepreneurs acquire skills

Entrepreneurs, and other savvy people, take a retrograde approach to what I've described above. Here's what it looks like:

Go to the market and ask them what problems they have. Find out how much they would be willing to pay to fix this problem. When you find a problem that the market will pay handsomely to solve, get out there and learn the skills you need to solve that problem. Acquire your first customers. Refine your offering by using your first customers as hands-on training. Present your offer to the market.

An entrepreneur starts with the market: he listens to what he wants, and only then does he acquire the necessary skills.

There are also a lot less risks at the start. Yes, it can take time and money to learn the skills you need...