“Failures
are the pillars
Success
is the byproduct
Dreams
and hopes, the rejuvenating fillers
Coupled
with a global moral conduct! “
An age-old adage holds that winners never quit and
quitters never win! But, history keeps
on retelling that whosoever called it quits had envisioned the whole world to a
new discovery. Right from Christopher Columbus and Benjamin Franklin to the
near recent Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg , we could embark on to an unending
list of people who adopted that unconventional path to finally taste success
buds. So, yes, winners never quit but
quitters can win a lot more!
“For
those who could not make it to the finish line, started up with a new
beginning”
Today, as youngsters we don’t pay much heed
to our studies because nowadays the general mass mentality is such that if you
act cool, do scrape things, you are smart. However, one who can unscramble
the problems with all his wits and knowledge is the real ‘cool’ genius. The
most fascinating thing these days is ONE BIG IDEA, and a correct strategy to
implement it. These successful dropouts had the same notion to reach to acme
and do well for the society. Rightly quoted by Sir Winston Churchill,“Success is not
final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”
Truly,
failures are the stepping stones to success. Not that it is being propagated to
stop studying, drop out from your learning institute and win success! We are
just proclaiming that people who left midway are not losers but they did so to
comeback and camouflage in a renewed, evolved and a worthwhile facet.
“Heights
by great men, reached and kept,
Were
not attained by sudden flight
For
they while their companions slept,
Kept
toiling upwards in the night!”
These
drop-outs were those drops of ocean that would have desiccated the ocean itself
in their absence! There would have been no science today if Sir Albert Einstein
wouldn’t have changed his life’s track towards his will. Abraham Lincoln became
a self-educated lawyer before him abolishing
slavery, strengthening the federal government and modernizing the economy as
the U.S. President in 1861. Edison dropped out at 12 to enlighten the world
with his bulb while Walt Disney abandoned schooling at 12 and eventually leaped
onto the renowned Walt Disney Company that entertains people of all ages till
date. Henry Ford did not even attend
college to establish one of the world’s largest automobile companies. Billionaire Michael Dell dropped out
of the University of Texas at just 19. Instead of studying biology, he spent
most of his time in his dorm room, building computers and selling them through
local newspapers. By the end of freshman year, he was raking in over $80,000 a
month, so he dropped out of college to start the company that eventually
became Dell computers.
Rightly said, “Discouragement is often the last key that opens the bunch of
success”
Russell Simmons,
George Clooney, Woody Allen, Tom Hanks, James Cameron, John Mackey, Sandra
Bullock and John Mackey all followed the trait to emerge as successful
billionaires in their own genres.
“Patience
and perseverance can overcome mountains”.
Let’s also
concrete this fact with some surveyed figures. Some of the world's most famous
and richest billionaires are college dropouts. The combined net worth of these
dropouts is USD 246 billion. This list is not exhaustive.
The average net worth of billionaires who dropped out of college, $9.4 billion,
is approximately triple that of billionaires with Ph.D.s, $3.2 billion. Even if
one removes Bill Gates, who left Harvard University and is now worth $66.0
billion, college dropouts are worth $5.3 billion on average, compared to those
who finished only bachelor's degrees, who are worth $2.9 billion. According to
a recent report from Cambridge-based Forrester Research, 20% of America's
millionaires never attended college. This one from the king and spider’s tale
surely follows:
“ ‘Tis a lesson
you should heed,
Try, try again
Till at last you
succeed,
Try, try again!”
Sir George
Bernard Shaw rightly puts in, “The golden rule is that there is no golden
rule-No shortcuts to success!”
But, definitely there’s always that one path that breaks you from your
comfortable zone and retorts you on this unusual and unconventional track
driven by your idea and creativity, if not for that shortcut! We Indians are no way behind. Azim Premji,
Mukesh Ambani, Gautam Adani, Micky Jagtiani, SubhashChandra Goel and P.N.C.
Menon all made it big after successfully crossing the crossroads. Besides, those who have kept the whole
world’s eyeballs rolling including everyone from Aamir Khan, Mahesh Bhatt,
Salman Khan, Ranbir Kapoor, Akshay Kumar, Deepika Padukone, Kareena Kapoor
Khan, Katrina Kaif, Kajol, Karisma Kapoor, Sridevi, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan all
top this list. In words of Shakespeare,
all this is “hoping
against hope”. For achieving
success in life, one has to strive and struggle like a busy bee not caring
about the pitfalls and predicaments. We must learn how to surmount all the odds
and evens in life and come out successful. After all, “Fruits of success grow only on the branches
of hard work.” So, let’s skim through some of such inspiring
success stories.
William Henry Bill Gates III, the pioneer of Microsoft, dropped out of the Harvard University to emerge as the top
American business magnate, philanthropist, investor, computer programmer, and inventor and
of course the world’s richest person then in 2007 and again in April 2014.
Gates did not have a definite study plan while a student at Harvard and spent a lot of time using the
school's computers. Gates remained in contact with Paul Allen, and he joined
him at Honeywell during the summer of 1974. The
following year saw the release of the MITS
Altair 8800 based on the Intel 8080 CPU, and Gates and Allen
saw this as the opportunity to start their own computer software company. Gates
dropped out of Harvard at this time. Gates stepped down as chief executive
officer of Microsoft in January 2000. He remained as chairman and created the
position of chief software architect for himself until very recently when he
stepped down as chairman of Microsoft in February 2014, taking on a new post as
technology advisor to support newly appointed CEO Satya Nadella. It is
not for nothing that he quotes,
“Its fine to celebrate success but it is more
important to heed the lessons of failure.”
Let’s march on to one another person
who recent untimely death shattered the globe- Steven Paul, more renowned as Steve Jobs. His adoptive father Paul Jobs and taught his son rudimentary electronics and how
to work with his hands in the family
garage, demonstrating to his son how to take apart and rebuild electronics such
as radios and televisions. As a result, he became interested in and developed a
hobby of technical tinkering. Jobs’
youth was riddled with frustrations over formal schooling. At Monta Loma
Elementary school in Mountain View, he frequently played pranks on others. Though school officials recommended
that he skip two grades on account of his test scores, his parents elected for
him only to skip one grade. Following high school graduation in 1972, Jobs
enrolled at Reed College in Portland,
Oregon. Reed was an expensive college which Paul and Clara could ill afford.
Jobs dropped out of college after six months and spent the next 18 months
dropping in on creative classes, including a course on calligraphy. He continued auditing classes at Reed while sleeping on the
floor in friends' dorm rooms, returning Coke bottles for food money, and
getting weekly free meals at the local Hare
Krishna temple. Jobs later said, "If I had never
dropped in on that single calligraphy course in college, the Mac would have
never had multiple typefaces or
proportionally spaced fonts."
Jobs founded NeXT Inc. in 1985 after his resignation. He also
worked as the joint director at Pixar and Disney in the interim to generate a
horde of successful films. In 1996, Apple announced that it would buy NeXT bringing Jobs back to the
company he co-founded. He was formally named interim chief executive in
September only to gift Mac OS X, iMax, iPod, iPhone. In August 2011, Jobs resigned as CEO of Apple, but remained
with the company as chairman of its board. A man of
marvels, Steve Jobs, quoted,
“Because the
people are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who
do!”
Yes, these success stories are truly amazing
and inspirational. So let’s just check this fantastic quote, “I have had all of the disadvantages required for success.” This was echoed in by
Larry Ellison. He went ahead to say “When you innovate, you've got to be prepared for everyone telling you
you're nuts.” So, was he also a drop-out and what is his success tale? This co-founder and chief executive officer of Oracle
Corporation, was a bright but an inattentive student. He left the University Of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign after his second year, after not
taking his final exams because his adoptive mother had just died. After
spending a summer in northern
California, Ellison attended the University
of Chicago for one term, where he
first encountered computer design. In 1966, aged 22, he left it midway and he
moved to northern California. Also in 1997, Ellison was made a director
of Apple Computer after Steve Jobs returned to the company. Ellison
resigned in 2002, saying "my schedule does not currently allow me to
attend enough of the formal board meetings to warrant a role as a
director". With the defeat of Informix and of Sybase, Oracle enjoyed years
of industry dominance until the rise of Microsoft
SQL Server. Eventually, Ellison is still the
third richest American, with a net worth of about $36.5 billion. Indeed, “The journey of a
thousand miles begins with a single step!”
Who doesn’t like tweeting or following
blogs? Apparently, we all are completely
into it. So now it’s time to meet the man behind strangling everyone in this
crazy circle-Evan Williams. Two of the internet's top ten websites have been
created by Williams's companies: Blogger and Twitter.
Williams grew up on a farm in Clarks,
Nebraska, where he assisted with crop irrigation in summers. He attended the University of Nebraska–Lincoln for a year-and-a-half, but eventually
left to pursue his career. Evan Williams and Meg
Hourihan co-founded Pyra Labs to make project management software. A
note-taking feature spun off as Blogger,
one of the first web applications for creating and managing weblogs. Williams invented the term "blogger" and was
instrumental in the popularization of the term "blog". Pyra survived the departure of Hourihan and other employees,
and was eventually acquired by Google on February 13, 2003. Williams left
Google in October 2004 to
co-found Odeo, a podcasting company. In late 2006, Williams co-founded
Obvious Corp. with Biz Stone. Among Obvious Corp.'s projects was Twitter, a popular, free social
networking and micro-blogging service. Twitter itself was spun out into a new
company in April 2007, with Williams as co-founder, board member, and investor. In October 2008, Williams became CEO
of Twitter. Eventually, this college
drop-out is worth $1.48 Billion
(November 2013) and hence today, we cherish his quote, “My life has been a series of well-orchestrated
accidents; I've always suffered from hallucinogenic optimism.”
Last but not the least, we have grown up and
so has our dear Facebook who is continuously stringed to the hearts of the
multitude. So, we just cannot abstain from mentioning the man himself-Mark Zuckerberg. Together with his college roommates and fellow Harvard University students, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes, Zuckerberg launched
Facebook from Harvard's dormitory rooms. The group then introduced Facebook
onto other campuses nationwide and moved to Palo
Alto, California shortly
afterwards. In 2007, at the age of 23, Zuckerberg became a billionaire as a
result of Facebook's success. Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard in his
sophomore year to complete his project and today after engulfing Twitter, this
man is an asset worth US
$25.3 billion (April 2014). This quote by
Mark Zuckerberg now can be well referenced,
“The biggest risk is not taking any risk... In a
world that is changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to
fail is not taking risks.”
“Each morning sees a task begun,
Each
evening sees it close
Something
attempted, something done
Has
earned a night’s repose!”
College isn't for
everyone. But that doesn't mean you can't be a genius without it. Though graduates are proven more likely to be hired than someone without
higher education, many of the technology companies we rely so heavily upon were
started by dropouts. With the increasingly high cost of a college education, and a job market that appears anything but
reassuring, there are plenty of reasons for young entrepreneurs to replace the
expensive textbooks and cinder-block dorms for a business of their own. Of
course, starting your own company doesn't come without its own heavy costs.
Though we certainly don't discourage students from pursuing any form of
education, it's hard to imagine a life without Microsoft, Apple, Facebook,
Twitter or Tumblr. Quite simply, great ideas don’t
belong in one simple category. Innovators can be any age, come from any
background, with any level of education. What they share in common isn’t a
prestigious degree but a passion for innovation, a great idea, and the strength
of purpose and business savvy to make people listen!
So, there we are.
No, this is not the end but just a new beginning for all of us! Nonetheless, failures
may hit you hard on your face, it’s you who decide how much to take it and move
ahead! This focus on talent over pedigree is what helps one
stand out and achieve! It’s time we create that
drop in ourselves defragmenting us to that path which is mobilized by our
ideas, passion, dreams, technology, soul ,mind and lastly heart!
“Talent, creativity and wisdom,
With a great idea as the chief prop
In every accomplished system,
Ladder of success is never crowded at the top
When fear of failure is less than seldom
When perseverance knows no halting stop
Out of the world, in freedom,
Flows this excellence and SUCCESS-DROP BY DROP!” ----- HAPPY
SUCCESS TO ALL!
Meet Gidwani
