When you go through the stages of education you are always told about the next stage. As the end of high school approaches everyone is talking about college applications. When you finish college everyone is talking about whether to do a masters. When you finish your masters everyone is talking about a PhD. It never ends and for some people, it is just a rat race. It can often appear that there are no other paths available and that college is a must-do to be successful in life. The truth is often the opposite. To be more successful than everyone else you can’t act the same as everyone else. Here are five successful people who chose not to pursue college and went on to be big successes.
Bill Gates
Have you heard of this college dropout? Of course, you have. It is true that Bill Gates was enrolled and completed a year at Havard. In that year he designed the programming language BASIC and never looked back. He left university and started his company, Microsoft. Take this as a lesson. College isn’t for everyone but you must have a plan without it. Bill did and it worked.
Richard Branson
Richard Branson dropped out of school at the age of 16, he never came close to college. He then set up the Virgin Group when he was 20 years old. Richard was not a waster he was an ambitious dreamer and knew that waiting for university to end was just going to slow him down.
Mark Zuckerburg
Similar to Bill Gates, Mark dropped out of Harvard to pursue his business Facebook. If you have seen the movie ‘The Social Network’ then you already know his story, although, in reality, it is a little less dramatic. Mark is now worth over $70 billion dollars, it looked like it worked out.
Steve Jobs
Jobs is famously a college dropout who started working on his computer business in his garage. It was Jobs’s unconventional nature that allowed him to push the boundaries of design and technology. Daring to be different can result in creating differences in people’s lives.
Michael Dell
Sticking with the theme of technology let’s finish by discussing the founder of Dell. Michael Dell was a pre-med student when he founded the company. By the time he was 27 years old, he was the youngest CEO on the Fortune 500 list. Youth has its advantages as Dell is still at the helm of his company today.
Clearly dropping out of college or never attending has worked out for many of the greatest businesspeople in the world. Despite that, it must be noted that the majority of those on the rich list did attend university and actually 39 of the CEOs on the top 100 list have MBAs. This shows that university is still a solid plan and path to success but it is not everyone. Make your own choice and be bold in following it.
