It's useful here to split up these people into different categories. Terrance Tao was a prodigy and was allowed to succeed within the school system beyond what others are given access to. Zuckerberg and Gates succeeded and didn't require finishing college - not really dropping out.
Indie Gaming slant on these following examples, and I suspect that this sector is above average for this type of thing, but I suspect if I looked I could find many dropouts in other fields. On the other hand, Carmack dropped out of college, Jonathan Blow dropped out of college. Markus Persson dropped out of high school. Eric Barone never found a job despite graduating from college. All of these people are out-of-this-world fucking good, but were not at the time that they dropped out, which means according to your guide should not have gone on to create what they did.
They shouldn’t have. Not everyone needs fit an example.
Let’s take Markus: before he made Minecraft, he made relatively mediocre games that didn’t get much traction. Minecraft was an exact copy of someone else’s game (Infiniminer) that was posted on the same forum that he went to. He saw potential when its original creator did not (the creator of Infiniminer got angry that people extended his game so he shut it down). Minecraft blew up. The games that Markus made after Minecraft? Relatively mediocre again.
So what can you learn from the example of Markus? Nothing. Nothing at all. Sometimes you just get lucky.
What do people on here say, luck favors the prepared? Had he gone on to college, the odds that he was on that forum go down, and thus he would not be the one strike when the opportunity arose.
Confirmation bias is very tricky here. A quick look at top essentially single games of all times shows that a full 50% or so of them were created by drop outs, a number way outside of what we would expect. But how many dropped out and failed?
All of these guys clearly had the capability to create greatness within them their entire life, but were stuck in an environment that did not fit their talents or did not otherwise give them the support that would allow them to thrive, like Tao got.
And yet, all of the people whom were failed by the system will never be heard of, and we have no idea the numbers of these people either. I expect that there are way more of them than unsuccessful dropouts.
It wasn’t a copy of Infiniminer, despite the name that game wasn’t about infinity or really mining. It was more a team fps with blocks and a bit of digging in a small arena.
While yeah his early games are very weak seeing Infiniminer‘s engines potential as a survival game and creative game rather than a team fps deserves credit.
Carmack is probably the only one who sticks out as he wasn't rich, connected or have early access.
Gates had super-early access to computers via his prep school. By the time he left high-school, he probably had more computer experience than almost all college graduates.
Markus Persson--(By 1994, Persson knew he wanted to become a video game developer, but his teachers advised him to study graphic design, which he did from ages 15 to 18. ... He never finished high school, but was reportedly a good student.) That's hardly a high school dropout. And, IIRC, studying something like graphic design in the system in Sweden is akin to an apprenticeship, no?
The ones Ive seen succeed without going to university seems all to have a chip on their shoulder and is still angry, and what I suspect worry, about it even decades later. They mention it out of the blue and seem angry thinking about it.
Seems kind of sad to me that, that is the price to pay...
I should mention that I such an experience myself with the driving licence. I did not need a driving license, because I live in a city with a great subway, but I was thinking about it. Took some mental energy on the regular. So I took it when I was around 27 years old and haven't driven our thought about it since.
Highly successful people (like waaay outside the normal distribution) needed a reason to get there.
There are far too many off-ramps to ‘comfortable’ along the way, for it to be any other way.
Anger is as good a motivator as any, I guess. What else do you propose?
Greed has a lot of history too.
Love (at least genuine love) much less often, since love for oneself has to be there first - and that is rarely going to coincide with actual high performance.
