Congratulations to Mark Wahlberg! He earned his high school diploma this summer after heading back to school at the age of 41.

The actor and producer had a troubled childhood which included drug use and multiple run-ins with the police, dropped out of school in the ninth grade. The 42-year-old received his diploma in June and tells People that his four children motivated him.

He said: “I didn’t want the kids saying, ‘You didn’t do it, so why do I need it?’ They are all wanting to do things in their future that require an education.” Mark calls getting his diploma “a huge accomplishment.”

“For almost a year, I’ve been taking classes and studying any chance I could get—on the set, traveling for work and at home. It has been both humbling and challenging, but I’m happy to report that I am officially a high school graduate,” he wrote in an op-ed on Huffington Post.

Wahlberg hired a tutor and studied between takes on the set of Two Guns, but kept it a secret from his costar Denzel Washington. “Denzel was always asking me what I was doing but I didn’t want to share that information with him,” he says. “Nobody knew, because I felt like I don’t like to count my chickens before they hatch, so I didn’t want to say that I was doing it until I actually finished it.”

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