By Bizna Brand Analyst
Take a tour around the world. Ellen Degeneres, Brad Pitt, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison and Oprah Winfrey are all famous and wildly successful people who have one thing in common – they dropped out of college. In fact, a list of all the popular names that opted out of their degree courses but still turned out better than those who spent hours in class can fill a book.
The question then is; why are so many college dropouts successful in life? Here are some few reasons why many college dropouts win in business and in life
A dropout has no plan B
You don’t have a degree or a guaranteed job to fall back on. If you don’t do something, you will be a pauper, so you push yourself harder. Your aim is to work harder so as not to end up a failure in life. In the long run, this works in your favor.
A dropout starts earlier
A dropout will start his first business at 20 then maybe fail. Then he might start his second business months later. And maybe fail again. He might then start working for others. And by the time his peers graduate, do their masters, etc. and come into the real world, he has already worked for several years and they come in some 2 rungs behind him on the same corporate or business ladder.
A dropout has fewer fears, loans, expectations to live up to
When you drop out, your parents expect you’ll end up waiting tables at a restaurant or be a makanga. Parents can be pessimistic, especially African parents. It’s thus not difficult to surpass this expectations. People who go through the Engineering + Masters route have higher expectations to live up to. They work under more pressure and most of them don’t end up achieving much in life. But when you have no pressure, you work to the best of your abilities and end up on top.
Depends on why they dropped out
A book I recently read “The Millionaire Mind” covered this topic in great detail. In short, (from the book) dropouts CAN (but not always) be more successful because they develop a thick skin to failure and are able to pick themselves up faster than the straight A honor student. Ever seen how life smacks a straight A student in the face whenever they get a C for the first time? Straight A students are not used to failure. They don’t know how to handle failure yet the business world is full of intense failures that must be accepted and rectified in order to move forward.
College doesn’t necessarily make you successful
Neither does it teach you things you cannot learn elsewhere. It is simply a stamp of certification and if you graduate it shows that you can commit to something and complete assigned requirements.
Most people should go that route if you’re looking for a “white-collar” job. However, there are and always will be people with different skill-sets, mentalities and preferences. You don’t have to change the world to be considered successful, nor do you have to complete college.
Time availability
We all know how much time studying consumes. It’s true that in college, we end up taking too much time to cram things that might not necessarily help us in future, College dropouts on the other hand tend to get much free time that they can use to advance themselves
So is college an obstacle to success? Not really? College provides young adults with the intellectual capital to succeed and the social capital to help them make connections, build networks, and establish life-long relationships. It provides them with skills in analysis and reasoning combined with confidence that will lead them boldly to articulate and embrace new ideas. It transforms their perspectives, opening them up to different cultures, different world views, and different ways of seeing — and solving — some life’s most complex problems.
What the stories of the successful dropouts simply tell us is that school weather you become successful or not depends entirely on you, not on a school or another person.