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You are making a mistake. It ultimately comes down to the drive that powers you.

If you are in it to be a billionaire then you're looking at it in the wrong way. It's a testament to the quixotic nature of life that you never, ever get what you're looking for.

I am in it to learn and grow as a human being, while trying to figure out what it means to be me on this ball of rock and liquid metal. I don't care if my start up makes a million dollars or a billion or a ridiculous trillion. I will work towards that goal, but my first priority is creating something beautiful and keep showing up everyday no matter what.

So, where does an education come in over here? Are colleges the only way I can learn in my life? Except for a few fields where direct intervention from a teacher is required I can learn a lot of things on my own. Whenever I face any problems whatsoever there is something called the internet to collaborate on.

Then again the question arises, why do people still fail? We're back to my initial point; drive. You can be an autodidact only if you are driven enough and there is a voice inside of you that tells you that you need to learn. Some people need flogging and "discipline" to do the same thing. They need to go to an institution to internalize things and get things done under a Damocles sword (exams).

Most people are like that. Some aren't and this is the difference between them zuckerburgs and me.

I respect your perspective and attitude, and while it may be a perfectly functional one to operate in, it is not realistic.

I'm not a fan of truisms such as "the quixotic nature of life that you never, ever get what you're looking for" and whatever it is called when you claim 1 factor of many is the culprit such as "lack of drive is the reason people fail" and "this is the difference between zuckerburgs and me".

Truisms are nearly always incorrect. I am looking for my keyboard. Well, it's right beneath my fingers. That should seem to disprove your theory of innate life quixoticness. I'm not meaning to be facetious. That's just how reasoning works. It's very likely that you perceive life to be this way because you don't give credit to the times where you do get what you're looking for, and, conversely, you may attribute too much to the times where you don't get what you really, really want (despite seeking it very thoroughly).

In terms of why people fail, and the difference between zuckerburgs and you, there are many, many different reasons. While you might have meant to say "the main reason" or "the main difference", it is my perspective that issues as complex as "what makes people different from one another" and "why do some people succeed, and some people fail" are pretty much unsolvable. There are just so many factors in each person's life, and the world in general, that it seems incredibly unlikely that one or two factors are behind any given characteristics of our life and world. This is also why I lend very low credibility to anything I read that says: "Want some big thing X, then do some simple thing Y" and other such link-bait articles. It is in their brevity they appealing, easy to believe, and probably wrong.

That being said, of course these types of life-experience and drama-driven topics are fun to indulge in, from time to time, but it takes a lot more than a few paragraphs and minutes of thought for me to take away anything other than: "Interesting..."

In specific response to "drive" being the main factor behind success, it's probably true that it is very important. There is also luck (a massive topic that encompasses anything from having your competitors succeed/fail [which recursively accounts for more luck], to whether or not you overhear a specific person say something when you're in a certain frame of mind [aka: Inception]), who you know, where you are, etc. Kyro was pointing out these attributes and their relation to the article, which I thought was insightful. And I definitely do not think he is mistaken in doing so.

I respect your comment.

You're right about truisms, but in this case making a billion dollar is something so vague and unsubstantiated that there isn't any fixed path to it. Whereas smaller short term objects and goals can be grasped and put into perspective. How can you do that with something as fluid as the path your life will take? It's certain that in the random chaos your plans will never work.

So, what happens when you set out to become a billionaire, or a millionaire with single minded intensity? You lose your ability to adapt and invest in the seeds that grow into something truly meaningful be it people, knowledge, observations, research, projects. So in essence by having that rigid goal in mind you're setting yourself up for failure.

Yes, I agree that people are complex beings and you can never factor them in, but what I have observed is that almost anyone who became anything in their lives at any level had a comparable amount of resilience. Whenever you do anything at all you will fail again and again and again. It will be as if the only thing you can do right is getting things wrong, but it takes persistence to move beyond that and that persistence is a combination of the amount of resilience a person has and what drives them.

As far as luck goes the interesting thing about it is that you have to be the one to walk through that door. Chance in itself can only go so far someone has to see the significance and exploit it, but that again is a function of the state of that person. Hence, you have a recursion. The luckiest people tend to be the ones who go the farthest.

On the other hand, my comment really might be a bunch of sour grapes. I can't go to college any time soon and I admit that I would love to be in the type of environment MIT offers. So, I have soul searched a lot and tried to see if I could convert this into something far more beautiful.

The only thing my life has taught me is that failure should be celebrated more than success.

Out of the 3 pursuits you mentioned explicitly, I think only one of them actually truly benefits from the education system: medicine. With finance, the fundamentals are easily learned by self study, and to excel really depends more on personality type and drive than stuff that's taught in school. Law you can absolutely self study, there's plenty who've passed the bar exam without a degree in the past, though it's harder these days now that a lot of bar associations require a degree before you can sit for the test. That's likely due to favors to law schools rather than any real qualification reason.

Some other fields do certainly benefit from the resources a university provide though. With many engineering and science subjects, lab work is pretty key to understanding, and you're not going to have to resources to do that on your own general. Computer science is an exception here, since computers are pretty readily available.

However, with the rise of grade inflation and the general dumbing down of university curricula, for a lot of subjects your average school just doesn't confer much actual value.

I benefited greatly from the courses I took at Caltech. What I learned was:

1. how to learn 2. organized methods of thinking about problems 3. how to separate truth from crap 4. how to break down large problems into solvable small ones

I'm not sure how these can be learned effectively through self study.

Interesting, please could you elaborate on the specific courses/experiences which helped you learn these things (esp no. 3)

My experience of a CS degree was being drowned in information but not anything nearly as useful as that which you've noted.

None of the courses were labeled with "organized thinking" or "separating truth from crap". Learning that stuff was a side effect of probably 80% of the standard curriculum.

Separating truth from crap is essentially what the scientific method is all about. If there is data that doesn't fit the theory, no matter how small, the theory is wrong and needs to be revised. A theory may explain existing facts, but it is useless unless it can make predictions that can then be tested. Stuff like that.

Being homeschooled, I had learned these things prior to college. Perhaps that is why I didn't get much out of it.

I'm not sure how [1. how to learn 2. organized methods of thinking about problems 3. how to separate truth from crap 4. how to break down large problems into solvable small ones] can be learned effectively through self study.

Perhaps you should break down that problem into solvable small ones? Then you could determine how I was able to teach myself each of those with only a high school education.

> Perhaps you should break down that problem into solvable small ones? Then you could determine how I was able to teach myself each of those with only a high school education.

This is something I've heard a lot. I don't mean to disparage your accomplishments, but how exactly do you know what you're missing with a college/grad school education? It's fallacious to think that a college education will instantly make you smarter, but it's also fallacious to think that a college education is worthless.

Pretty much everyone believes they are organized thinkers, can separate truth from crap, etc. I certainly thought so when I entered college. After 4 years of Caltech, though, I emerged with the realization that I didn't know much about any of that before. While maybe I still am not an organized thinker, I could tell that I had gotten a great deal better at it.

Additionally, when I work with others, even though they have college degrees, I can often see the disorganized thinking and lack of problem solving skills.

I see this a lot in the programming world, for example. Many programmers, when confronted a bug, flail about essentially at random hoping to get lucky and fix it. If you show them how to approach finding the problem in an organized manner, it's like you're speaking a foreign language to them (or at least I'm a very bad teacher, which is entirely possible).

For another example, I once had the job of figuring out the force involved when a screw drive ran full tilt into its stops. I worked out the math, etc., coming up with a formula for the force, plugged the numbers in, and got the answer. My colleague nearby (with a 4 year engineering degree as well) asked me in amazement "what book did you get that formula from?"

If you're an EE, and you carry around a card that has printed on it V=IR, R=V/I, I=V/R then you do not know how to solve problems - you learned how to formula plug.

Some people can learn all this stuff from self-study. The risk with self-study, however, is that you may not be aware of where the gaps in your skills are, especially if they are difficult to quantify like "organized thinking" or "problem solving skills" or "ability to separate truth from crap".

School gives you three things: Exposure to a range of scenarios, a safe place to screw up, and someone who knows what they're doing to show you the right way to do it. Like everything else in life, though, you get out what you put in - you can't just show up for four years and magically expect to know what you're doing. There's still a whole hell of a lot to be gained if you do more than just the rote assignments, though, and I'd wager four years spent actively learning at a university yields better than four years studying by yourself for equal levels of commitment.

I think it would be hard to be a competent lawyer without going to law school. Good law schools change the way you think, and that's not something that you can get self studying.

It is true that you can pass the bar without going to school. In fact law school does not prepare you for the bar exam. Most people take a supplemental course after law school just to prep for the exam. I am pretty sure that a reasonably bright person could just do the prep and pass the exam. But the exam itself is sort of a joke in that the material you are tested on is pretty orthogonal to what you'd need to know to be a good lawyer.

I've heard this expressed many times from various people: law schools love engineers because they already know how to think analytically and don't have to be taught that. This is independent of whether they learned any form of engineering in school or not.

As far as the bar exam being a joke, if that's true, that's broken. If the more important thing is going to law school for 3 years, then why put so much emphasis on the bar exam t all? There are people who graduate to law school but never pass the exam, or the ones who try and try again and pass it on their 4th or 5th try, if they went to school why isn't that meaningful? Either the schooling isn't all that it's cracked up to be or the metric doesn't measure the right things, but either way there's an impedance mismatch which means the system is broken.

> law schools love engineers because they already know how to think analytically and don't have to be taught that

I went to engineering school as an undergraduate. In my opinion, the biggest value of a traditional engineering education is that you learn how to solve problems. This works very well in the software industry where X is supposed to do Y but does Z.

First year: Traditional coresciences. Physics, Chemistry. Very structured problem sets (well defined problems, well defined answers)

Second year: Core engineering classes. Statics, Dynamics, Materials. More specialized problem sets, less definition.

Third year: The hardest year. Labs, beginning of long-term group projects. Problems are now more general. Doing a homework problem now is much more difficult because if you get off track early - you don't get the textbook correct answer. Lots of engineering labs where you have to collect a lot of raw data and use a cookbook of formulas to write the analysis.

Routine now on tests to not solve many problems in time allotted. It's really a test of your problem solving process now. The point is you could probably solve all of the problems given enough time but in the real world you have time constraints so the faculty is helping you adjust your analytical skills to be quicker.

Fourth year: This is the year where you work on a Capstone project. Very big problem with some constraints. All the design is up to you. It's your problem to solve.

"Some of the comments go so far as to claim that higher education is this era's biggest scam, which is an extremely ignorant view."

There is a gigantic difference between medical school and University of Phoenix.

And between getting training on a job where you actually do the work involved and "watching videos online".

You're right, there is. I never said all institutions that claim to offer higher education are not scams or not free; some are in it purely for business. The University of Phoenix is pretty much 'open source' online education with a price tag, which really just supports my point in that there's still a definite need for and lots of value in the traditional hands-on sort of education.

Yes, that's true. PhDs are, in the end, a commodity. People like Zuckerberg are not. You can commoditize yourself to the extent that you follow a traditional path (HS > College > Grad School > BigCo Coder > BigCo Manager > Retirement / Death).

At some point, you have to start deviating from that path if you want a better-than-expected outcome, unless you happen to be really good at following whatever path has been set for you by others. Zuck and Gates started early; many people never do.

Your better-than-expected is interesting. At the point BigCo Coder, your probably get above-average income already. Maybe we should learn a little modesty?

While this is true, and I respect your decision to go to medical school, consider this:

In Japan, which has the best life expectancy of any nation, doctors are trained for three years after high school. That's it.

I believe a case can be made that the entire pre-medical curriculum is a scam, one that wastes years of life from some of our most promising young people and rakes in billions of education expenses that drive up the cost of health care.

Life expectancies != a countries medical care performance.

For example, no amount of medical care can overcome the US obesity problem.

Non sequitur. Your second statement does not follow from the first. First you state what medical care is not, then as an example, state something else medical care is not that appears unrelated to the first.

More constructively, saying that medical care cannot help with obesity is unnecessarily restricting the definition of medical care. Further, obesity is a factor in life expectancy, so measuring life expectancy is a reasonable proxy for measuring obesity, and to some extent, vice versa.

I responded to someone who attempted to show the quality of medical care in a country by looking at the countries life expectancy. The problem I pointed out is that many factors play into life expectancy with medical care being one of the many[1]. From what I have read obesity leads to many early deaths and people who are obese have a much higher rate of disease. The US is one of the more obese countries and is far more obese than Japan. The difference in life expectancy could be attributed to the poor general health of the citizens and not to any difference in medical care. In fact, with how poor Americans seems to treat their bodies it's amazing that many live as long as they do. Perhaps it's through access to much better medical care than available in other countries?

[1]Other life expectancy lowering factors that have little to do with the quality of medical care include murders. For example wikipedia states and [Japan] experienced 1.1 murder per 100,000 population, compared with 3.9 for West Germany, 1.03 for England and Wales, and 8.7 for the United States that same year.

In my (admittedly terse) response I was trying to say that medical care, or perhaps more appropriately health care, should include preventive care, such as obesity reduction. I suspect that health-related death has a much greater influence on life expectancy than accidents or crime, even if the US homicide rate is 8.7 per 100000, but would accept compelling evidence to the contrary.

Medical school in Japan lasts 6 years, not 3.

It's true that you can apply to medical school straight out of high school in Japan, but that's also true for many (most?) other countries.