I like to call it the Lamborghini theory. You can have a Lamborghini parked in your driveway, but if you don't know how to start it, shift its gears, or maintain it, you might as well throw $208,571 dollars into your fireplace. Then there's the people that THINK they can drive it, but drive with two feet, overheat the brakes, and end up crashing into the side of a Mountain.
And yes, I realize the other adage - "If you think a professional is expensive, wait until you see what an amateur will cost you" applies in most circumstances, it still doesn't mean that a person's education is the end all, be all to their ability to perform the jobs they were hired to do. Or even, ELECTED to do! So for fun, let's take a look at some well known "Drop-Outs" and people that didn't finish pursuing their education. But as you will see, education does not always make the person nor does it make the person necessarily qualified to do the job.
1.) Bill Gates - Dropped out of Harvard University to start a little software company out of the garage of Paul Allen, bought portions of CP/M and wrote Microsoft DOS Or Disk Operating System. His $92.5 BILLION DOLLAR net worth still comes from Microsoft.
2.) Mark Zuckerberg - Dropped out of Harvard University to ultimately write the Blog front end which became Facebook. I mean, he's no Bill Gates, but a $74.4 BILLION DOLLAR net worth isn't anything to sneeze at.
3.) Larry Ellison - Dropped out of University of Chicago and University of Illinois to start the database giant Oracle. At $54.2 BILLION DOLLARS of net worth, he also owns one of the world's largest yachts.
4.) Sheldon Adelson - Las Vegas Sands Casinos. Adelson dropped out of City College of New York to start this Casino Chain. Today, he's worth $42.3 BILLION DOLLARS.
5.) Francois Pinault - Dropped out of High School to work in his family's portion of the Kering line of luxury goods. Net worth $32.8 BILLION DOLLARS.
6.) Li Ka Shing - Dropped out of High School to start CK Hutchinson Holdings. The port investor / operator / developer with a presence in 5 of the world's largest and busiest 10 container shipping ports of call. Net worth is $32.4 BILLION DOLLARS.
7.) Michael Dell - DUDE! YOU BOUGHT A DELL! And Michael Dell Thanks you! After all, Dell dropped out of the University of Texas at Austin to start the Dell Computer Company. And some speculated he was the stoner in the commercials he's not doing too bad with a net worth of $23.6 BILLION DOLLARS.
Well MOST of these guys went to HIGH SCHOOL at least, right? Well what about the high school drop-outs. The ones without so much as even a high school diploma. I mean, they couldn't have gone too far, right? WRONG!
Richard Branson - Virgin Air, Virgin Mobile, and about 498 other companies he's overseen, with his brand on about 200-300 of them. Branson dropped out of high school at age 15 and his current net worth is $4.9 BILLION DOLLARS.
David Karp - Another 15 year old that dropped out of an elite Bronx High School of Science and developed Tumblr, the blog-hosting and social network company, in 2007 in the "back bedroom of his mother's modest Manhattan apartment." Karp sold Tumblr to Yahoo for $1.1 BILLION DOLLARS and his net worth is about $200 Million. Karp is still the company CEO.
Nicole Kidman dropped out of high school at 17 to be a massage therapist.
Aretha Franklin - Dropped out of high school at 15 to care for her first born child.
Joe Lewis - Dropped out of high school at age 15 to run his father's catering business. Joe's net worth is $5.2 BILLION DOLLARS due to the success of his father's start-up Tavistock Banqueting. He mostly works from his Yacht, holds interests in numerous sports teams and restaurants, and has an impressive art collection with Picasso, Matisse, Lucian Freud, and Francis Bacon pieces in his collection.
Philip Emeagwali - Called an "unsung hero of the internet," the supercomputer scientist dropped out of high-school in Nigeria due to war conditions and lack of tuition money. According to Time, he was considered a math prodigy and continued to study on his own, earning an equivalency diploma and later a scholarship to Oregon College of Education in the US. He earned the IEEE Gordon Bell prize in 1989 and is considered one of the "Founding Fathers" of the Internet.
Some Hollywood and music elite even dropped out of high school. Some eventually went on to get a GED, but not all. Those famous Hollywood personas include;
Quentin Tarentino
Seth Rogan
Hillary Swank
George Foreman
Eminem
Drake
Whoopi Goldberg
Damon Wayans
Rihanna
Chris Rock
Jay-Z
Tracy Morgan
50 Cent
NAS.
So remember. Just because someone has a degree, it doesn't mean that they know what they're doing at their chosen job or profession. Inasmuch as someone without a degree or even a high school diploma can and do many times excel in their jobs really well.
