Though the legendary “Project Runway” mentor Tim Gunn needs little introduction, his story does. Gunn wasn’t always the celebrity we know him to be today; he was a career educator for 29 years. Gunn shared with Living Not So Fabulously hosts David & John Auten-Schneider that teaching is more of a calling than a job. He identified as a ‘pauper educator,’ with more of a focus on serving students than his own personal finances. Though that is surely noble, it left him living paycheck to paycheck. “I really did think if I lose my job, what am I going to do? Move in with my sister?” he said.Then came the ground-breaking “Project Runway,” where this ‘pauper educator’ mindset stayed with him. Gunn wasn’t paid for the show’s first two seasons; he loved mentoring the designers. Gunn didn’t even realize that wasn’t typical, with his first agent describing saying upon reviewing his TV contracts, “‘These are the worst contracts I have ever seen in my entire professional career. Wow. You just sign these things?’” to which Tim said, “what am I supposed to do? I don’t know. I assumed that they’re boilerplates, what people sign.”At the end of the day, it wasn’t about the money for Gunn. “It didn’t bother me not to be paid.” Learning from his financial faux pas, Gunn recommends to his students that they seek help, as Gunn received from his lawyer, “because there may be someone who says this whole thing is completely out of whack and just unsustainable.” You simply don’t know what you don’t know. Read Gunn’s story in his latest book, “Tim Gunn: The Natty Professor: A Master Class on Mentoring, Motivating, and Making It Work.“

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