30 Of The Most Successful College Dropouts In History

Highschool or College Dropouts who made BIG business

I found this article on Retire at 21.com and thought I’d share it with you. It proves that being successful in business isn’t something you can learn at school, it isn’t dependent on having a degree, or a masters in business. It has absolutely nothing to do with having a private education or going to a top university.

Making it big in business and becoming successful is all about passion, drive, motivation and being remarkable.You must have the patience to make it through hard times because it takes time and hard work, commitment and passion, determination and a certain element of luck to turn your dreams into reality.

You’ll find that most successful businessmen and businesswomen have a vision when they set out. Not necessarily a vision for their Company, but a vision of where they they are going, where they want to be and what they want to achieve. Do you have this vision? Do your kids have this vision?

While getting an education and developing your skills through learning is very important, there is a huge gap between study and success for Entrepreneurs. I’m not recommending dropping out for everyone. My kids will go to college and at the point in their life when they know where they want to be and what they want to achieve in life, we’ll discuss whether that choice involves continuing into higher education or not. Some kids will choose a career in which success depends entirely on completing further education. It just depends on where they want to go in life. Further education can be taken at anytime in life. If you have a young driven teenager on your hands, it may be a good idea to let them explore their vision, start a business and, if it doesn’t work out, they can continue where they left off and take a degree later!

What I am recommending though is that we all think hard about stamping out our kids visions and dreams and try to think outside the box when it comes to the traditional ‘go to school, do well, get good grades, study further, get a job, work hard, make some money’ scenario. I am a strong believer in educating yourself, but in saying that, it doesn’t always mean University.

The image below lists some of the most successful businessmen of whom most were completely dropped out of college when they were yet teenagers.But one of the most common thing in their lives is : their motivation and drive. They knew that they wanted to achieve something ; something that meant so much to them that nothing was going to stop them.

1	Henry Ford	Ford Motor Company	16	Dead	$188 Billion (in 2009 dollars)
2	Bill Gates	Microsoft	19	53	$59 Billion
3	Larry Ellison	Oracle	20	64	$27 Billion
4	Sheldon Adelson	Las Vegas Sands Corp.	19	77	$26 Billion
5	Larry Page	Google	Graduated University of Michigan	35	$18.5 Billion
6	Kirk Kerkorian	Tracinda	12	91	$18 Billion
7	Michael Dell	Dell	19	43	$17.3 Billion
8	Paul Allen	Microsoft	20	56	$16.0 Billion
9	David Geffen	Geffen Records	21	65	$6.5 Billion
10	Steve Jobs	Apple	18	53	$5.4 Billion
11	Richard Branson	Virgin	16	58	$4.4 Billion
12	Takafumi Horie	Livedoor	22	35	$3.6 Billion
13	Ralph Lauren	Ralph Lauren	20	69	$3.6 Billion
14	Subhash Chandra Goel	Zee TV	12	58	$2.3 Billion
15	Jerry Yang	Yahoo	Graduated Stanford	40	$1.9 Billion
16	Mark Zuckerberg	Facebook	19	23	$700 Million
17	Russell Simmons	DefJam	19	52	$340 Million
18	Matt Mullenweg	WordPress	18	25	$200 Million
19	Mahesh Murthy	Pinstorm & SeedFund	19	43	$200 Million
20	Jawed Karim	YouTube	21	30	$64 Million
21	Kevin Rose	Digg	21	31	$60 Million
22	Jared Isaacman	United Bank Card	17	26	$50 Million
23	Kevin Sproles	Volusion	18	26	$17 Million
24	Shawn Fanning	Napster	19	28	$7.5 Million
25	Scott Wainner	ResellerRatings	20	26	$7 Million
26	Rob Benwell	Blogging To The Bank	18	23	$5 Million
27	Graham Langdon	Entrecard	19	21	$3.2 Million
28	Kristopher Tate	Zooomr	17	20	$3 Million
29	Aaron Levie	Box.Net	20	23	$3 Million
30	Reed Caldwell	ServInt	19	32	$2.5 Million