The Dropout Hall of Shame

So there you are, loaded with years of experience, capable of way more than most in your field, and every job posting you see that fits you to a “Tee” lists some sort of degree as the first qualification.

And, that would be the degree – any degree – that you don’t have.

Throw your discouragement out the window. You’re actually in great company.

Here are the top six on my list of current-day dropouts:

• Steve Jobs dropped out of Reed College after six months, saying “I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life or how college was going to help me figure it out.”
• Peter Jennings,  top news anchor on ABC, flunked out of 10th grade and went to work as a bank teller at age 16.
• Michael Dell, the founder and CEO of Dell, Inc., dropped out of college at 19.
• Bill Gates was 10 points away from a perfect score on the SAT. He dropped out of Harvard College after two years and never went back.
• Steven Spielberg was denied acceptance to film school and dropped out of California State University in Long Beach.
• Simon Cowell, TV producer, dropped out of school at the age of 16.

And then there are the Degree-less from History:

• Henry Ford never completed high school.
• Andrew Jackson, 6th president of the United States, never went to college.
• John D. Rockefeller Sr., the first American billionaire, was a high school dropout.
• Andrew Carnegie, one of the first mega-billionaires in the U.S., dropped out of elementary school.
• Thomas Edison joined the railroad at the age of 12.
• Benjamin Franklin had less than two years of formal education.

If they could succeed, so can you.

Einstein once said that he was no different than any other man except for one thing– that he never gave up, and stuck with a problem till he solved it.

Ray Bradbury, the gifted author of Fahrenheit 451, Dandelion Wine, and so many other brilliant novels, said “I never went to college. I went to the library.”

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