Should I Drop Out Of University To Start A Business (The Truth)

It is older age and written in books that college/university is not very valuable because the most wealthy and successful people did not go to, or finish, college. You cannot attribute their success to whether or not they attended college though. Most entrepreneurs did go to college, though I do not necessarily agree.

The question if you should quit college largely depends on you and your current circumstances, not on what other people have done. There are some people who should quit college, but this is the minority and is not applicable for most people.

I have seen a lot of people make the mistake of quitting college when they should not have done so because they see their idols and people they look up to online who say, “I quit college and I am a dropout and like Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg.” They think because someone made $100 billion doing so that they should as well because they are on their path to $100 billion, too.

If you chose to drop out of college, what is your plan?

If you are going to quit university then it better be worth it and you better have huge goals which you want to focus 20-30 years of your life on and really work hard at. Once they quit college, most people make the mistake and think that once they quit it will be less work, more travel, more fun, and money will just work out because they think, “I am an entrepreneur and entrepreneurs have money.”

Entrepreneurs do not automatically have money because they are entrepreneurs, but entrepreneurs have money because they hustle super hard, have a little luck, work smart, find the right people to work with, choose the right niche, sell the right thing, do not get sued too much, and do not pay too many taxes.

Those people may travel around often and probably don’t have to work too much, but everyone else pays taxes, needs to work a lot, and has employees that are not always great from day one. If you are going to quit college and become an entrepreneur, you better make sure you understand all these things because if you do not, you may be in for a surprise.

If you go to college, what do you actually get out of it?

Some things in college are actually pretty good. I am not saying that if you are going to study business then you will learn how to run a business or anything like that, but in college you are going to learn how to use your brain, you are going to learn statistics, math, and economics, how money works, and how accounting works. Some of these skills are actually quite useful. If you are planning on starting your own company, someone will need to be able to know how to do that stuff.

I am not really good at accounting so I hire people who are good at it, however, I know the basics and enough that I can direct and see if those people are making me pay too many taxes for example. College did help me with that, but does this mean that I should not have spent four years in college and should have focused those four years on business?

For me, I would probably say yes. I was always a fan of reading business books, looking for mentors, and trying to learn from them. I was always interested in not following the social norms. I was always skeptical of what teachers and professors said and how qualified they were to teach courses because, if we are honest, most college professors are not qualified to talk about topics like business.

However, if you are into science or wanting to start a life-science company like some of my friends want to, you are going to need to study science in a university because it is going to be very hard to learn this type of stuff yourself. You actually need to learn from the professors and masters in the field.

Business schools and learning entrepreneurship stuff is not very useful in college in my opinion. You are not really going to learn too much unless you count statistics and accounting – which you can learn at home. Do study courses like sciences in college, but be prepared to study for a lot of years and with your nose deeply in books. Also for engineers, you do need to study that information in college.

Who should absolutely not go to college?

The people who are willing to work hard and the people who are already making money.

This is very important – if you have not made a consistent income of $3,000/$4,000 US Dollars per month profit after tax over 3 months and you are not sure if you can increase that or if it is scalable, you should stay in college. If you are sure that this business is working already and it is generating you consistent, regular income that you need to bankroll all your other ideas, then yes, you should quit college because in that specific case, college is holding you back from growing your business.

Ultimately, if you allow college to hold you back, then you are most likely going to abandon your business or it is not going to grow, it will just be very average, and you are going to have to go get a job after college. That sucks because the people that are going to hire you most likely are not going to be awesome entrepreneurs, – there are some like Google where they are – but most companies are not awesome entrepreneurs.

For me personally, I found that when starting my own company right after college, I learned a lot more than from internships and reading books. Implementing things, digging in, and making things happen are really where I learned. Some people are actually better at learning stuff by doing rather than reading books, studying subjects, and memorizing stuff. I am very bad at those, but if you give me a problem I am very good at making it happen and generate cash. This is something I learned and am good at while it is also one of my natural strengths. This is why for me, I probably should not have gone to college at all.

Is this the case for you?

Maybe it is, but maybe it is not. You need to have some self-knowledge to know. Maybe you do not have this self-knowledge yet and need to go to college for a few years to find out if it is for you or not. You need evidence to indicate whether or not you should go to college, not just making a decision based on passions or what people you look up to have done.

Make a decision on your personal situation and what will work for you and your personal strengths.

For some people, you should probably not even start a business. Some people think that they just work a few hours per week, scam people on the internet, pretend they know something, and teach other people that which is the whole, “I want to be a coach” thing that is going on right now. For those people, I would definitely tell them to stay in college and learn about how the world works before they go into business. It is really up to you and your circumstances to decide if you should go to college or not.

Are you going to college?