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There’s a view in popular culture that brilliant people emerge from nowhere to found world-beating businesses that change all our lives. Popular stories circulate about how the founders of Google were college dropouts or how Steve Jobs never rated education.
The problem with these tales is that they’re not true. Great entrepreneurs always have a fabulous education behind them, whether it is formal or not.
There’s a debate in academic literature about whether entrepreneurship is something you can learn or not. But that’s a separate issue from education itself. Being born a great business leader might be necessary for future success, but it’s not sufficient.
What Education Should You Choose?
Elon Musk is perhaps the world’s most famous entrepreneur right now. Not only did he build and sell PayPal for several hundred million dollars, but he also started a car and a space company – two things that seem impossible.
Musk credits his success to studying the right disciplines at college. He believes in first principles – or the idea that you can solve problems by building understanding from the most fundamental axioms.
For him, a bachelor’s in physics or a master of engg management is a great path to go down because you learn things from the bottom up. You’re not looking at the way the world is. Instead, you’re using rigorous methods to figure out whether it could be a different way. And, usually, it can.
Entrepreneurs who want to thrive in the marketplace should probably go into the hard sciences. It’s not a guarantee that you’ll be able to solve fundamental business problems. But it will give you the intellectual tools to make a good go of it.
For instance, you’ll be able to ask whether things are physically possible and then develop engineering solutions to make them happen in real life. You’ll also be able to make profound economic calculations that provide you with insight into whether your ideas have legs.
How Education Makes For The Best Entrepreneurs
The average CEO spends most of their free time reading books and trying to expand their knowledge of the world. At root, they understand that the route to domination is using what they know to create new opportunities.
Bill Gates, for instance, is a notorious bookworm. He’s continually reading, trying to make sense of the world. He even gets his personal assistant to pack him a rucksack full of books every time he travels, so he has something to engage his mind.
Mark Zuckerberg is said to do something similar. He tries to read at least one book per week, absorbing the most important ideas and then including them in his framework for thinking about the world.
Education, therefore, providers entrepreneurs with massive advantages. It lets them predict problems further in advance and deploy cross-disciplinary insights. You can get formal training at college, or you can educate yourself in private. Ultimately, though, it should be a habit, not something you have to force yourself to do. It seems fundamental to entrepreneurship.
