Concluding Thoughts

                After examining the lives of Steve Jobs and Bill gates and the values they each hold, I have reached the conclusion that both men have worked hard to build such prosperous companies, yet a large factor for their success was timing and innovation. They both did something that had never been done before, Gates with his user friendly Windows operating system, and Jobs with his visually appealing Macintosh computer. Microsoft and Apple were able to gain momentum thanks to these two men. The fact that they both dropped out of college seems to be more of a coincidence, as they both had different reasons for leaving. I believe that despite the success of Gates and Jobs, dropping out of college is not the answer and (unless circumstances are right) it is not the proper action to take to further a computer/business career. There are many students who drop out of college with the same mindset as these two, yet do not reach the same level of success Gates and Jobs did.

                As I continue to look into this idea, I may slightly alter my original thesis as I now have many questions relating to business and marketing involving Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. For instance, I’d like to know how their businesses have evolved in designing products like the fancy gadgets we use today, and what type of involvement Jobs and Gates have had in past products. I keep thinking about the list of ideas Jobs incorporates into his marketing and I would like to do more research and find examples of this in not just Apple products, but Microsoft ones as well. In finding information about these strategies, I wish to learn from them and apply them to my own life as advice for the future, but I plan to hold off on creating my own multi-million dollar company, at least until after I get in my four years at college.

Many Dropouts, No New Billionaires

In my previous posts, I have really focused on what made Steve Jobs and Bill Gates so successful without graduating college. After rereading my blog and looking at all the comments, I have decided that I need more information about regular college dropouts and the success they have and compare it to Jobs and Gates. After some looking, I found an interesting journal article by Silla Brush entitled “College Dropouts Face Loan Hardships” in the Academic Search Premier database. The article claims that students who drop out of college after taking out loans to attend school are more likely to default on their loans. It then goes on to say that those who drop out of college are twice as likely to be unemployed as those who finish college. Following the reading, I can’t help but wonder why Jobs and Gates were so successful so quickly after quitting school, and how they dealt with any financial issues along the way.

After gathering this information, I came across an piece of writing by Travis Waldron on Think Progress called “Study: Nearly Half of America’s College Students Drop Out Before Receiving A Degree.” According to the article, the college completion rate in America is lower than other countries and only 56 percent of students who start college actually graduate within six years. This information makes me question the probability of dropping out of college to pursue an idea with the intent of becoming as successful as Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. When I look at the big picture like this, it seems almost impossible to accomplish what Jobs and Gates did, and it is my opinion that they both had a great deal of circumstantial luck on their hands when they made the choice to leave college. 

Rules to Live By

How have Steve Jobs and Bill Gates so effectively influenced the positive outcome of their companies? They both have their own life principles and rules of success, but neither of them learned these principles in a college course. Rather, these men learned their paths to success by experience and “being in the right place at the right time.”

Jobs came up with “Seven Rules of Success” that can be found here, all of which reflect his personal and almost spiritual take on life. The most important thing to Jobs was passion. He was big on the idea of doing what you love over anything else. His goal was to create and sell dreams, not products. In making all of his products simple, he was able to accomplish this. It is my opinion that his products seem to appeal to many different types of consumers due to their simple design and how every product seems to have a soul of its own. Jobs’ passion drove him to his success, and it is evident that he didn’t need a college degree to pursue his dreams.

Similarly, Bill Gates also had a list of rules he was rather fond of. The list is eleven rules kids won’t learn in school, and was first featured in the book Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why American Children Feel Good About Themselves, by Charles J. Sykes. This list can be found here. By looking at the similarities and differences between Gates’ list and Jobs’, I get the sense that the reason Gates has been so successful is that he is well grounded. He didn’t drop out of college for the same reasons as Jobs, but rather he saw an opportunity and acted on it. It is clear to me that, like Steve Jobs, Gates didn’t need the college degree to become successful, but for slightly different reasons.

Both Jobs and Gates dropped out of college to follow their passions, though Jobs had a more personal connection to his work, while Gates was a man of opportunity, and it is hard to say which approach has been more effective in marketing Apple and Microsoft. 

Both of the photos in this post are from Google. The photo in the upper left is of Steve Jobs and a co-worker with the first Macintosh computer. The photo in the bottom right is of Bill Gates holding a guidebook to the original Windows operating system.

Two Different College Situations

                 It is so strange to think that one of the most famous and successful businessmen in the world didn't go to college; at least not officially. According to an interesting Forbes article by Dave Surchuk, Steve Jobs didn't fully apply himself in high school, even though it is obvious he could have done well. He was accepted to Reed College, but after attending for a short while, he dropped out. Yet he was a drop-out on paper, as Jobs stayed to audit classes even after he was no longer a student. He took a liking to a calligraphy class and although he had no direct use for the knowledge at the time, he later applied what he learned about fonts to the first Macintosh computer.

It is very peculiar that by sitting in on a few calligraphy classes, Jobs was able to help revolutionize the way a person interacted with a computer. This makes me wonder if Jobs’ success was just based on luck and chance or if he truly made the right choices. Either way, it worked for him and I am not going to question his ability to make a product look appealing. In the video below, Jobs addresses the graduating class of 2005 at Stanford and shares the story of how he got to be CEO of Apple.

Steve Jobs talks about his success in a commencement speech at Stanford (2005).

On the other side, Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard for a completely different set of reasons. Gates got two-and-a-half years of college in before he left to work on starting Microsoft. He was convinced that the time was right, and his education at the university was not essential to his foreseeable success with his company, so Gates made the call to bow out for the time being with every intent on returning to finish his schooling. Microsoft was hugely successful and according to an article on The Economic Times’ website, Gates has been touring universities such as Stanford, Harvard, and MIT giving motivational speeches as his own way of “returning to college.”

Though Gates has been so successful even without a degree, he is very adamant that dropping out of college “is not a good idea.” He truly believes that college education is vital, and his success only came because of a unique set of circumstances and ideas. I can’t help but wonder how he knew that his idea would be so successful.

Both Jobs and Gates were successful for different reasons and after some thought, I have more questions about the two of them. For instance, what were their respective companies like in the early stages of business, and were they still sold on the choices they had made? 

Self-Made Billionaires

Look at Steve Jobs. Look at what he accomplished in his time here on Earth. He built one of the most successful companies in the entire world entirely from scratch! As of this year, Apple is worth more than the entire country of Greece, and the company’s worth is only increasing from there! The success of the Macintosh computer and the array of iDevices can be contributed to none other than Jobs himself. Similarly, the fundamentals of Microsoft were born and raised in a garage owned by the parents of Bill Gates! Gates brought Windows into this world, a feat that has forever changed computing for the better! Despite their infamous rivalry, these two men are the very faces of modern technology and their success has both motivated me and shaped my personal interests and life-goals. That's why I want to find out what allows certain self-made individuals such as Gates and Jobs to be so successful, even without a college degree. Is their success an ability that can be learned, or does it all come from rare talent.

In my admiration of these two geniuses, I couldn’t help but wonder what made them the perfect “man for the job,” and it wasn’t until I started looking into their personal backstories that I came across a peculiar similarity between Gates and Jobs: neither one of them graduated from college! Why? How? I can’t even comprehend how either of them could have become so successful without even a simple college degree!  Throughout my entire scholastic career I’ve been under the impression that if I didn’t go to college I’d be flipping burgers at Mickey D’s for the rest of my life.  It is quite clear that this is not the case with Jobs and Gates.

To achieve a greater clarity on what makes these two billionaires so successful I will be conducting research through a variety of sources that detail the lives of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, and through my findings I hope to unlock the mysteries behind their success and find possible correlations between these two college dropouts and their respective empires of modern computing.