There’s a lot of truth in the famous quote “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones that do.” With the recent passing of Steve Jobs the story of his life has come into the spotlight and a lot of people, like me, are beginning to see the scale of his achievement, both on a personal and global level.
Jobs attributes a lot of his success to dropping out of school and getting fired from Apple, both events pressuring him to progress in a non-conventional way and in a sense freeing him to be his own person.
Upon dropping out of school:
“It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting…much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.” (from Jobs’ 2005 Stanford address)
Upon being fired from Apple:
“The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.”
The point is that, in a way, following a traditional route to “success” is inhibiting the creativity of many people who would otherwise be the next Jobs or Zuckerberg. I’m not saying that there isn’t value in traditional schooling; the reason why traditional schooling has prevailed is because of its immense value. School makes is possible for a student to attain a culmination of perhaps decades of knowledge in a certain field and from there help break barriers.
Although I’m not advocating a decrease in the emphasis of a traditional education there should definitely be much more emphasis on the development of entrepreneurship and productive creativity. There are far too many people in traditional schooling that either have no sense of direction or aren’t enthusiastic in the direction they’re headed. My proposal is to consider entrepreneurship as a field in which students are educated in the same manner as any other field. Nourishing entrepreneurship will unlock a lot of hidden potential in aspiring youths especially because it speaks to individuality and value; qualities that everybody strives to understand and achieve.
-AW
The Continental Super 