The Power Of Dropouts

The latest name in the digital field is Lucy Guo. What I find interesting is that she is yet another college dropout, not a graduate but a dropout. Why is it that the computer industry has been made by dropouts, rather than graduates?

THE BENEFIT OF INDIVIDUALISM

Have you ever noticed something about the people who are always in the news for making the modern economy? I mean Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Elon Musk and so on. Generally college students who come up with a brilliant idea, drop out of college, and end up with their name in the news all the time and more money than they could ever count.

I notice a couple of things that they seem to have in common that I have never seen documented.

1) They have never served in the military.

2) They have not had much involvement in team sports.

Coming up with new ideas requires individualism. If one thinks like everybody else then they won't notice the things that everybody else didn't notice. There is a lot of emphasis nowadays on being a "team player" but being part of a team, as positive as it might sound, inevitably reduces the individualism that is necessary to come up with breakthrough new ideas.

As for dropping out of college the one disadvantage of a formal education is that it inevitably means learning to think like everyone else. Many people who come up with breakthrough new ideas or discoveries have been largely self-educated.

Countries with a Protestant cultural background, northern Europe and the U.S., have created the modern world because the individualism and think-for-yourself mentality of Protestants is ideal for coming up with new ideas and discoveries. It is no coincidence that the Reformation was followed by the Industrial Revolution. 

Modern democracy, where anyone can run for office and anyone can vote for whoever they want, is 100% a Protestant development. The traditionally Protestant dim view of the world opens the mind to seek better ways of doing things. If someone has too much respect for things as they are they will be less likely to notice better ways of doing things.

History is so often made by radicals who turn out to be right. The way to make history is usually not to follow the crowd but to sense when NOT to follow the crowd. This is the power of Individualism. 

So it is dropouts who come up with the new ideas, because they have gained enough knowledge to come up with the ideas, but have not gone to school long enough to learn to think like everyone else. Then they let the graduates manage the companies that they have created.