[neilc]

I'm really skeptical that there's a causal relationship between dropping out and subsequently becoming a billionaire, or otherwise very wealthy. There may be a correlation (both require independent thinking, etc.), but I think most of those billionaires would have been as successful or even more so if they'd have spent the time to finish school.

And looking at a handful of examples of billionaire dropouts and then generalizing more broadly is pretty silly: that is pure selection bias. You could also look at the set of billionaires who are, say, born in June and draw similar conclusions. Either way, you're ignoring the vast number of common cases in favor of a few spectacular exceptions.

[hacklite]

Sure, if you throw yourself in the deep end, you may sink to the bottom. However, those who make it out will be better swimmers than those who stay in the kiddie pool, that's all.

> but I think most of those billionaires would have been as successful or even more so if they'd have spent the time to finish school.

Dropping out can be a necessary condition due to timing reasons alone. Gates dropped out of Harvard because he was worried about missing his chance to make it big in the computer industry. There's also the non-trivial issue of losing your most energetic years as a young adult (18-22) by spending them on something other than your life ambition. Not to mention, if you aren't interested in college and force yourself to do it, that may well have such a spirit-crushing/soul-numbing effect that you kill off your own motivation to the point where you lose your drive to DO your own company. It depends on your personality.

I think for the most part, ambition to take over the world as an entrepreneur is incompatible with jumping through anyone else's hoops, including sitting in class and doing what someone else tells you.

So it's not that dropping out makes you a world-changer, but staying in is frustrating to the ambitions of world-changers.

If you look at the Forbes 2007 list of richest Americans who didn't inherit their wealth, you get 1. Gates (college dropout), 3. Adelson (college dropout), 4. Ellison (college dropout), 5 and 6. Brin and Page (grad school dropouts), 7. Kerkorian (8th grade dropout!), 8. Dell (college dropout), 9. Allen (college dropout). Only Warren Buffet at #2 didn't drop out of school at some level, but he was already established in business before he went to college, and only went because his father pressured him into it. He hated it. (I left out the Koches because they inherited Koch Industries.)

The causal effect is that the same thing that drives them to be successful also drove them to drop out.

[neilc]

I think you can easily get into trouble by looking at only the very richest people: by definition, they are the 1-in-a-million who took the right risks, and got fantastically lucky. Dropping out could very well be high risk, high reward -- but that doesn't mean the overall expected value is particularly high.

  Dropping out can be a necessary condition due to timing reasons alone.

Sure, if you're sitting on an opportunity that is truly once-in-a-lifetime, then dropping out can be justified. But I think that is almost always not the case: if you have opportunities now, you'll have opportunities in a few years once you graduate. Good business ideas are not scarce.

  There's also the non-trivial issue of losing your most
  energetic years as a young adult (18-22) by spending them
  on something other than your life ambition.

I think more people should view entrepreneurship as a career, not as something you do for a few years in your early 20s to make a few quick bucks. IMHO you have 20+ years to start businesses, and there's not much to be gained by rushing. The long-term value of a good education is considerable: credentials, quality of life, networking, and simply a much broader base of knowledge.

[hacklite]

> if you have opportunities now, you'll have opportunities in a few years once you graduate.

Sure, but not all opportunities are created equal. Think how different things would be if Gates waited a couple years, or Woz and Jobs, or even the Google guys. Google would have incorporated right around the dot-bust and likely would've tanked because it wouldn't have had those couple years to become established first. If ViaWeb had waited a couple years then instead of selling to Yahoo in 1998 they would have run into the bust as well, making it that much harder to get bought. WebTV would've missed out on two years' worth of being viable back when websites were designed for 640x480. Microsoft would have been a couple years behind and would've missed the IBM deal.

In this industry, a couple of years is a long time and things are constantly moving, so there's always an incredible opportunity cost for waiting.

On the flip side, college will always be there. Woz went back and got his degree after Apple went public.

> I think more people should view entrepreneurship as a career, not as something you do for a few years in your early 20s to make a few quick bucks.

You can do it as long as you want. However, as an oldie, I can tell you that my productivity level was MUCH higher when I was younger. In the 18-22 range, this stuff is EXCITING. You've never DONE it before. Everything motivates you!

I don't think it's an accident Reddit was done by guys that age. It's such a simple site with a boring design that people with massively more experience wouldn't even bother to do something like it. But they started out in Lisp, so it was an adventure! Then they learned Python and rewrote it. New and interesting!

Nothing substitutes for enthusiasm because enthusiasm leads to getting things done. New things are exciting. Youth = inexperience = more things are new and therefore exciting and so you have more enthusiasm. Youth also means higher hormone levels, which means more energy and caring about things more and being irrational by expending irrational amounts of energy on projects that interest you. Lower hormone levels mean indifference or just talking about something but not having the excitement level needed to break your energy-conservation threshold and DO it.

[cheponis]

Also as an oldie, I'd say my productivity today is the highest it has ever been. How do I keep myself motivated? By constantly being a beginner. I do web programming, GUI programming, embedded systems, drivers, unix, mac, PC, bare metal, lisp, python, C, dozens of assembly languages, Verilog, hardware, analog, RF, antennas, etc.

In my opinion, you are just making excuses for why you are less productive than you should be; it's called rationalization. ;-)

My advice is to dive in to some area of s/w (or whatever) that you don't know at all (i.e. become a beginner) and see if that doesn't spark your excitement again. It does for me, over and over again!

[hacklite]

If you're constantly a beginner, your productivity is not going to be high. That's a given.

I'm not sure why you thought I'd need your psychoanalysis or advice :) We have different neurobiology.

I've dived into new things many times. It's just not exciting to me the way it was when I was younger.

[cheponis]

I think you're depressed.

But, you're right: why should I care?