During Mid-October 2005 in an online young entrepreneur forum I asked the following question…

If the goal for an entrepreneur is to one day be a multi-billionaire, what will give them the best odds in your opinion for achieving that…College or No College?

This question really hits home with me and is very near and dear to my entrepreneurial heart! Why? Because this is my situation. It is my goal to be a Multi-Billionaire. I was faced with the choice of college as a senior in high school in 2003. I remember the day I chose not to go college. It was the Saturday before Easter Sunday in 2003. I was at home in my room where my Mom came to talk to me about something. The conversation switched gears to the topic of college. Up until that point I actually had been planning on going to Northwood University, a good business school in Michigan, and going through their new Entrepreneurship Degree. So as we were talking about college it suddenly just hit me like a ton of bricks and I blurted out…”I’m not going to college!” My Mom looked at me like I was making a joke! I then proceeded to tell her the logic behind this statement that I had just realized seconds ago. Those reasons were… 1) I could teach myself almost anything that I could learn in college by finding and consuming the information on my own. 2) I could learn the total amount of knowledge that I would have gotten from college at a much faster rate than prescribed by the college. 3) Assuming #1 & #2 are true, why should I pay $100,000 to go the college route? At this point college made no logical sense to me as being my best option. That reasoning happened within a few seconds in my brain and that’s when I felt a switch flip inside me and I blurted out…”I’m not going to college!” So that is how I initially came to the conclusion that college was not right for me.

My family thought I was kidding when I announced it that day. I stuck to that statement though and have not been to a college class yet. After that I did go though the whole persuasion to go to college thing from family and friends. Not very fun or productive in building relationships but their words went right through me. By that Winter I had put a lot of thought into it and had mapped out many scenarios. At that point when others tried to persuade me to go to college I was like “How can you sit there and tell me college is right for me without knowing my situation or goals and do you really think you’ve come up with a better answer than me when I’ve put close to 100 hours of thought into this and you are probably just acting on an impulse after hearing my decision?” Ha!

Since then I have re-questioned college many times and have found additional factors to the equation. I will now tell you my current view about college for entrepreneurs and especially for entrepreneurs like me who are serious about realizing extreme financial goals.

It’s probably no surprise…I still don’t think college is the best option for serious entrepreneurs. I can actually be really passionate about this topic but I’m going to throw the passion out the window for this and give you my straight up logical thoughts on it.

I want to first make it clear that my reasoning is mainly for those who want to be entrepreneurs as their main career for all or at least a large amount of their life and make a healthy profit in their ventures…say at least maybe $25,000,000 over their lifetime. By entrepreneur, I am talking about those who produce income through the ownership and control of assets. So not only does that include business starters but many other roles such as real estate investors. My examples of alternative paths will mainly be for entrepreneurs with a goal to be a Billionaire but the principle of the alternatives and recommendation of skipping college will still be true for those with smaller but still large goals.

So why is college a worse option than the “real world?” First let me list the relevant benefits that I have heard for college.

1) You can receive a degree for your achievement that will give you more credibility in your field.

2) You can learn a good amount of knowledge in college.

3) You can build your social skills and confidence at college.

4) You can draw off of the knowledge and experience of professors.

5) You can network with other students and leverage those relationships in the future throughout your career.

6) You can get a taste of how many different types of people think and operate.

7) Colleges provide a lot of good resources and aid for entrepreneurs to get started.

8 ) College is a fun and unique time that you don’t get to experience again.

Guess what…all of these claims about college are true in my mind! But who cares! They are not ideal or even close to being great benefits! Let me tell you why these college benefits should not be up to the standards of a future wealthy entrepreneur and show you some higher leverage alternatives.

I’ve said before that if you are trying to produce stellar results then it generally makes no sense to follow the path of the masses. Why? Simply because the masses usually don’t produce stellar results so why copy their methods? This is especially true with this college scenario.

Let’s now analyze the evidence in favor of college I stated above.

1) You can receive a degree for your achievement that will give you more credibility in your field.

First off we all know that in order to be an entrepreneur you DO NOT need a degree. If you believe you do then entrepreneurship might not be for you! In all seriousness I’ve never heard of a customer, potential employee, independent contractor, investor, etc… requiring proof of a college diploma in order to do business with an entrepreneur. It is irrelevant! The comparable item to a degree for entrepreneurs is their track record. Just like companies are more likely to hire people with degrees. Investors are more likely to invest and continually invest in entrepreneurs with a successful track record. A degree is a tool for people on the other side of the desk…those looking to be hired as employees, like CEOs. An entrepreneur is not someone else’s CEO and if you were going to run your own corporation then you wouldn’t ask yourself for proof of a degree, right?!

2) You can learn a good amount of knowledge in college.

Sure you will learn a lot by going to college. More knowledge and insight is a great advantage. The problem is that someone can learn much more in the same amount of time like I stated in the beginning as one of my initial reasons for skipping college. Now I know there is more learned in college other than from the reading in the books. But I think almost everyone would agree that the bulk of what is learned comes from the books used along with the classes. I’ve heard that to read 10 to 15 complete books in a year of college would be on the high end. I was shocked to learn this! I know of people with full time jobs who still read up to 150 books per year. In college I’m sure information is studied deeper and repeatedly so that would cause me to believe that retention is higher than just reading a book on a subject and moving on. But I think it is a large overall advantage to be able to read something like 50 books in a year on various topics. I believe that entrepreneurs are generally much more effective knowing some about a lot rather than knowing a lot about a little.

Another problem with college is the irrelevant, required classes. The best way to approach the order of what information you learn is by listing the highest leveraged knowledge down to the lowest leveraged knowledge, for reaching the ultimate goal (high financial wealth for this discussion), that you could learn. Then start gathering and consuming the best information on the topics starting from the top of the list down. Of course the items on the list are based on the sequence of the steps that you’ve identified that will get you from the present to the ultimate goal. This is based on your unique situation and I’m sure that any college program, even individual college classes, will not fit your ideal custom list for the sequence topics you should learn.

3) You can build your social skills and confidence at college.

I’ve said many times that confidence is a huge part of the people game and is therefore a huge part of entrepreneurship. The people game does not just involve other people. It involves you too! One of the biggest things that hold people back from achieving their goals is a lack of self-confidence or fear of rejection. Entrepreneurship naturally involves a lot more rejection than the employee world unless you are a salesman. The fact is that most people suffer from a good amount of self-doubt or fear of rejection when put into the right situations. Some of those common situations for people are public speaking and selling. Entrepreneurship involves both.

Is self-confidence part of social skills? No. Not to me. I view self-confidence as the underlying foundation and skills as what gets built on top of the foundation. It takes absolutely zero skills to be 100% self-confident. Some one can be the worst speaker or the worst salesman in the world but when they perform they truly are not influenced by other people’s opinions or reactions and are not emotional towards the quality of their performance in regards to their self-esteem. That is an example of self-confidence without skill. Most people though have some self-confidence with some social skills when college-aged. College can be good leverage for almost all people in building both self-confidence and social skills. “Good” doesn’t cut it for me though. To build extraordinary amounts of wealth like $1BB or more, it generally takes an equal amount of self-confidence and social skills. In most scenarios people don’t have them and college won’t elevate people to that level.

A high leverage alternative route, which is very uncomfortable for just about everybody, is to… 1) Get out in the world and constantly pursue many intensely awkward situations that normally cause embarrassment and self-doubt for yourself until they no longer do and it would be harder for others to revive the dead than to cause embarrassment, social nervousness or self-doubt in you. 2) Really work hard on improving your social skills in a wide variety of areas such as public speaking, selling, negotiating, NLP, persuasion, communication, body language, learning social trends, etc.

College generally just provides students with a few relevant classes and a lot of people around campus to interact with. Like I said before, that is good leverage but “Good” doesn’t cut it when going for Billionaire status. A person with this financial goal must take advantage of the excellent information, courses, people, and situations, of the World not of one college.

4) You can draw off of the knowledge and experience of professors.

Very true. I’ve heard of some circumstances where professors have been a large help to student entrepreneurs. But I doubt these students will be Billionaires. It is perfectly fine not to be a Billionaire or want to be. I am again just pointing out the amount of leverage in the situation. I stated before that the information from course books generally makes up most of all the knowledge learned from college. That means information from school faculty, other students, and guest speakers makes up the rest of the total knowledge college provides. This doesn’t make up a lot of knowledge and since from these sources the information delivery isn’t as structured as in books, most of it won’t be very applicable or important information. There are times when you can get some very good information in from these sources, but not much and not often usually. Most of the information you can get from professors and the other sources is probably going to be in books you can read anyway. But I will admit that reading a book or two when you want to find a small, targeted piece of knowledge doesn’t make much sense. It is a good thing that there are other great ways to get good information. One of these great sources is the internet. On the internet the two best ways that I know of to get information I am looking for is by using search engines such as Google and also by utilizing message boards to ask questions of targeted people who are knowledgeable in what you want to know. In the offline world there are other good options available such as mentors, clubs, advisers, etc.

Basically, to me, where the large leverage lies in the alternatives to college is that with some of the sources you don’t have to be married to the source to get the benefits. To efficiently utilize the college sources you also need to be going to college. Even with clubs and some mentor relationships you have to put forth a nonproductive effort (usually based on your time) into the sources in order to continually extract their benefits. That is why I say that sources such as internet search, message boards, advisers and others where you can extract the benefits without having to invest a lot of resources in them makes these much better than the sources of college. With professional advisers you do pay a decent monetary fee for their advice but generally you do end up with higher quality advice but another big difference is that you don’t have to give up your time (a finite resource) to nonproductive actions with the source. This is a big reason why it makes sense for people making a lot of money to just directly purchase what they are going for rather than putting time into getting it. The truth is a person’s time is finite and person’s potential for profit is infinite. This is because humans invented money not time. To become a Billionaire understanding and applying that principle is crucial.

5) You can network with other students and leverage those relationships in the future throughout your career.

From what I’ve observed many people put a lot of stock into networking with other people for gaining a lot of leverage. I however don’t put much stock, at this point, into networking based on relationship building. Networking is a technique that can yield high dividends and is practiced by almost all successful entrepreneurs. I see problems with it though. The problems I see are mainly with networking based on building emotional relationships. The problems I have with networking is that it is usually used in a speculative way, its market is volatile and its market is very inefficient.

Let me delve further into these three points about networking. I say that the market is volatile simply because people change. People change their minds, people change their career paths, people change their opinions about you, etc. The bottom line is that people change many things that affect their value to you. It is volatile. I say that the market is inefficient because the act of networking involves building relationships which involves the psychology of individuals. People come in many different forms and that is especially true when it comes to what is in their heads. Even for good networkers it can take going through a lot of people to find exactly what you want in a person/organization. I say that most people use networking in a speculative way because from what I’ve noticed a lot of people will base their networking efforts on a one size fits all approach and they will pitch everybody. You can see this same mindset many people’s approach towards advertising too. They should be putting their efforts into identifying the best prospects and pursuing them in a way that is tailored to the individual person/organization. The higher standard in a relationship you are looking for and the more customized approach you take with networking with prospects, the more resources this will generally take.

I believe networking pays off more and more the greater amount of resources you have. There are obviously some businesses and situations where heavy networking is a necessity for success. As far as college goes though I don’t think you are going to get better people for obtaining your objectives than outside of college. You can always network with those people in college from the outside if you need to. Sure some college relationships may provide some decent value but most of your friends and associates from college will fall within the problem categories above at the times you want to leverage them in the future, making college networking highly speculative in itself. Define what you need. Define what it is worth to obtain it. Look for highest quality prospects (probably aren’t at a college). Prioritize them. Learn what you can about them. Market to them.

I said that I’m not big on networking right now for myself, not only because of the problems I listed but because I don’t have a large amount of resources at the moment to make networking efforts really payoff. I will however do some networking because in some focused cases it is smart and pays off well without a lot of resources. Now if you are contacted by someone who wants to network with you then that reduces much of the costs and you should not shut the door on at least seeing what they have to offer. The bottom line when it comes to college is that networking is not a reason to go and the networking is likely to payoff much less at college.

6) You can get a taste of how many different types of people think and operate.

This reason in favor of college, compared to the others listed, is the closest to its alternative identified by me. I will admit that college is a great place to interact and observe many types of people. The better alternative would be to interact and observe people outside of college because students tend to be mainly younger people and also people’s personas are somewhat different outside of the school environment. Also, having access to the people in just one area is a limit. Being able to travel and observe people around the world would be better. But I realize that this one is more limited by personal money than the others and that most college-aged people do not have much access to money to travel the world constantly. So depending on your businesses you will interact with a fair amount of people without traveling but college still may have an advantage in that there is usually a diverse array of students continuously surrounding you. To bad this is not that important in choosing to go to college or not!

7) College’s provide a lot of good resources and aid for entrepreneurs to get started.

No they don’t. I’ve already shown you better options for some of what a college offers you as an entrepreneur. For the remainder, it is worth very little to a serious entrepreneur. It’s kind of like buying a new car and the salesman throwing in the optional floor mats at no charge. So a college offers you things like technology, possible small amounts of startup capital, startup assistance, etc. These things are probably worth less than $25,000 per year. That is nothing for a future Billionaire even if this person is currently dirt poor (Remember, money is an idea?). I’m not buying a car for free extras!

Ok, ok…maybe if an entrepreneur is shooting for the minimum dollar amount of $25,000,000 to keep this document relevant and starting their serious venture on a small shoestring then the leverage of these resources does increase in that situation. I say future Billionaires are better off with the floor mats! An alternative is to secure some investment capital and start off bigger. If you are going to be the next Billionaire you got to leverage OPM (Other People’s Money). Of course you have to have a deal that is investment worthy to the types of investors you are pitching for capital.

8 ) College is a fun and unique time that you don’t get to experience again.

Are these people serious? Ok I’m sure they aren’t speaking directly to the question…”Does going to college or not going to college provide more leverage to a serious entrepreneur in achieving their ultimate monetary goals?” But that is the question here so in regards to it this point about college being a fun and memorable time adds zero leverage towards the monetary goal…period. Although this point is a valuable one and it is important in choosing to go to college for other goals in your life.

To me money is not the most important thing in life. It is not my ultimate goal. My ultimate goal is to be consistently extremely happy and to give the gift of World Happiness. This is what drives everything I do. Money itself is worthless to me. What is of value to me is the things I can do with money in my life that will get me closer to my ultimate goals. That is it. Money is only a tool to provide leverage towards my ultimate goals. When I expand the scope of influence beyond the monetary goal then my general recommendation for serious entrepreneurs not to go to college may completely change based on the person’s situation. It would be very unlikely though. When you look at your goals beyond how much money you want to make then going to college may be the right option.

The initial question was… “If the goal for an entrepreneur is to one day be a Multi-Billionaire what will give them the best odds in your opinion for achieving that….College or No College?”

I have presented the major reasons in favor of going to college by people that I have heard of. I then presented what I believe to be higher leverage alternatives in favor of skipping college to those reasons for going to college.

After that some people may say that an entrepreneur can still go to college and also follow the higher leverage alternatives too at the same time. That would make no sense though. If a person believes that alternatives do provide more leverage towards the goal then it makes absolutely no sense to purposely take up time with lower leverage actions. Time can not be purchased back. It will have been wasted by doing that.

I myself have decided to skip college. I am going on 2½ years since my high school graduation. Skipping college has been one of the best choices I have ever made. One very big advantage I’ve seen is that by not going to college I have been able to really learn about myself at a much more rapid pace and I’ve been able to better create and prioritize my life goals better. How do I know that this is true without going to college? I’ve noticed the results from two perspectives. One is by comparing myself while I was in high school to myself after I had graduated. The other is by interacting with and observing people currently in college.

I think the reason I was able to make bigger leaps than most people in these personal development areas and compared to myself when I was in school is because I have simply had more thinking time. It is known that almost all people put on their own persona or public face when they are around other people. I think that for most people this limits their ability to deeply think and try to understand themselves further while in their persona. I say this because in school I never really cared about what was going on in the classroom and half the time was not paying attention to the teacher. Even though I was not focused on the teacher I found that I was not able to deeply focus and think about myself and my own life while at school. I strongly believe this was because of the social persona getting in the way, telling me to constantly be alert of the social consequences of what you are doing in front of other people. Also, being in school and having homework limits the time you can just sit and think. By not being in school or having a job I have found that I do take and have more time than other people for personal development.

Another thing that I’ve observed with college is that the atmosphere can be very distracting. This is definitely due to the other students. Most students are not passionate about their work at school. If I thought school was good leverage towards my goal then I would be passionate about it. But even if I did go to school the lack of passion and negativity towards school work by others would definitely not help me with mine. On the other hand if I was surrounded by very passionate hardworking people, especially other entrepreneurs, then it would help me produce a lot more results for myself.

A big distraction from other students at college is the mindset towards having fun. Fun doesn’t have to be a distraction but it almost always is for college students. Some of the most notorious examples are partying and drinking. I’m not telling you to not do these things at all. I’m saying they can possibly be big distractions to you and they are usually done on other people’s time tables. Many times it will happen where peers will say ‘Hey, there is a party tonight over at Brian’s house! He has the best parties and you can’t miss it!’ I think it is a lot easier to give in to social distractions and put off important work in a college atmosphere than outside of college. If you are not in college you can surround yourself with people that motivate you to produce results and aren’t required to be around so many other distracting people. It is also easier to design and follow your own schedule outside of college. You pick when you work and play and you choose the people around you who might influence how well you do.

The biggest overall distinction in the advantage of skipping college for serious entrepreneurs with very large goals is that you get to completely customize everything you do instead of being subjected to the limits of the systems created by a college and its professors. Think about it. A college is just someone else’s system for people to go through. Outside of college you are able to spend your time following your own totally custom system that has the potential of providing you many many more times the leverage towards your goals. If you have a goal of being a Billionaire then I don’t see how a person would want to follow someone else’s system rather than creating and following one completely customized for them.

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading my perspective on college for serious entrepreneurs.