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These Men Are Not Dropouts!

These Men Are Not Dropouts!
Great founders - Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) and Bill Gates (Microsoft)

Nigerian students, do not drop out of school citing Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. Bill and Mark did not drop out, they merely dropped in.  In a way, they replaced mass-training professors at Harvard University with private Harvard-quality professors called venture capitalists (VCs).

Magically, they have “special professors” who actually pay them! Which one is better: a Harvard professor that asks you to pay school fees or the VC that writes you $millions and still coaches you because he wants to ensure his $millions are safe?

I am a TED Fellow, a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, etc, the kind of immersive experiences in some ecosystems is a testament that using “dropout” does not do justice to what happens to these technical “dropouts”. In TED, I met a guy who did not finish secondary school but MIT admitted him.

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Do not fall into the illusion: stay in school and work hard. Startups and opportunities to create new ones will always be here. The best businesses have not been started. You will have time to do just that, post-graduation. That university education is an internship for something big – make the best out of it.

And I will add, education is not just for making money or for finding jobs. Education liberates your mind.  These guys are brilliant and do not be fooled into thinking that their Vice Presidents and Directors run them.  The “dropouts” are insanely in charge and brilliant because they are well coached, “educated”, mentored and ventured.

Just recently, Facebook used a single word to practically de-weaponize the highly heralded EU GDPR privacy law. The law has required “consent” to track users, but if you have a “contract” to fulfil, that is not needed. So, technically, Facebook upgraded its terms that once you visit its site, you have established a contract for it to track you. And with that, the law is largely muted. One word and that is it: it requires a huge elevation in thinking, and the process to get that is not in the streets. #SchoolWorks

“Before the GDPR was introduced in 2018, Facebook said its users were “consenting” to having their data used for personalized ad-targeting. But the new law introduced stricter standards for what “consent” means and implies—people can withdraw their consent at any time—so Facebook switched to saying the consent clauses in its user agreements are instead contracts in which its users order personalized advertising.

Under the GDPR, personal data can be processed if doing so is necessary for fulfilling a contract. However, the conditions for using this reason are pretty narrow. The EU’s privacy regulators have advised that the “contractual” basis for processing is fair enough if, for example, an online retailer needs to process billing addresses for payment purposes—but not if they want to profile their users’ tastes, because that isn’t strictly necessary for executing the sale.”


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2 THOUGHTS ON These Men Are Not Dropouts!

  1. It is not the job of medicine to cure any illness, but rather to put the sufferer on the road to recovery, as far as possible. This is is because there are those whose conditions won’t improve, even with best medical care.

    It is not the job of education to make you wealthy or get you a job, rather it’s just an accessory with which you can accomplish anything you care for. Schooling won’t teach you how to become witty, but it can help you refine and elevate how you deploy or apply it.

    Young people may despise or feel disappointed with schooling, because they weren’t giving the right information on what education is and is not. Stop telling kids that going to school will get them a job or make them wealthy, no, it’s not correct, rather going to school could increase your chances of getting a job or becoming wealthy.

    With some level of good education, you reduce your deficiencies and number of things you will be dependent on others to do for you. If you learn writing and speaking through education, it means that you have cured those deficiencies, and if it helps with reading graphs/charts, then you won’t totally depend on someone else to do that for you.

    The road ahead is long, acquire whatever that could help in the journey.

  2. I totally agree with this concept 100% because it’s becoming absolutely impossible for graduate who’s interested having the true picture of what academic qualifications/ideas is all about.

    It’s quite unfortunate that those individuals who seems to be uneducated are equally not fortunate in assessing formal qualifications (drop-outs) but it’s in their own best interests to note that my indifference to the society seems much better in informal way of education than that of formal education.

    Talking of assessment and evaluation! Statistically an individual who is skill-basd practically/theorically is properly equipped than he or she who is merely applying theirs formally with no atom of basement.

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