“Don’t measure yourself by what you’ve accomplished, but by what you should have accomplished with your ability” – John Wooden
100 Top Entrepreneurs Who Succeeded Without A College Degree
en•tre•pre•neur -noun Entrepreneur, translated from its French roots, means “one who undertakes.” The term Entrepreneur is used to refer to anyone who undertakes the organization and management of an enterprise involving independence and risk as well as the opportunity for profit.
Some of my favorites:
- Abraham Lincoln, lawyer, U.S. president. Finished one year of formal schooling, self-taught himself trigonometry, and read Blackstone on his own to become a lawyer.
- Amadeo Peter Giannini, multimillionaire founder of Bank of America. Dropped out of high school.
- Andrew Carnegie, industrialist and philanthropist, and one of the first mega-billionaires in the US. Elementary school dropout.
- Andrew Jackson, U.S. president, general, attorney, judge, congressman. Home-schooled. Became a practicing attorney by the age of 35 – without a formal education.
- Ansel Adams, world-famous photographer. Dropped out of high school.
- Benjamin Franklin, inventor, scientist, author, entrepreneur. Primarily home-schooled.
- Christopher Columbus, explorer, discoverer of new lands. Primarily home-schooled.
- Dave Thomas, billionaire founder of Wendy’s. Dropped out of high school at 15.
- Frank Lloyd Wright, the most influential architect of the twentieth century. Never attended high school.
- Henry Ford, billionaire founder of Ford Motor Company. Did not attend college.
- James Cameron, Oscar-winning director, screenwriter, and producer. Dropped out of college.
- Jimmy Dean, multimillionaire founder of Jimmy Dean Foods. Dropped out of high school at 16.
- John D. Rockefeller Sr., billionaire founder of Standard Oil. Dropped out of high school just two months before graduating, though later took some courses at a local business school.
- John Mackey, founder of Whole Foods. Enrolled and dropped out college six times.
- Kevin Rose, founder of Digg.com. Dropped out of college during his second year.
- Larry Ellison, billionaire co-founder of Oracle software company. Dropped out of two different colleges.
- Mary Kay Ash, founder of Mary Kay Inc. Did not attend college.
- Michael Dell, billionaire founder of Dell Computers, which started out of his college dorm room. Dropped out of college.
- Pete Cashmore, founder of Mashable.com at the age of 19.
- Rachael Ray, Food Network cooking show star, food industry entrepreneur, with no formal culinary arts training. Never attended college.
- Ray Kroc, founder of McDonald’s. Dropped out of high school.
- Richard Branson, billionaire founder of Virgin Records, Virgin Atlantic Airways, Virgin Mobile, and more. Dropped out of high school at 16.
- Richard Schulze, Best Buy founder. Did not attend college.
- Russell Simmons, co-founder of Def Jam records, founder of Russell Simmons Music Group, Phat Farm fashions, bestselling author. Did not finish college.
- Sean John Combs, entertainer, producer, fashion designer, and entrepreneur. Never finished college.
- Shawn Fanning, developer of Napster. Dropped out of college at the age of 19.
- Simon Cowell, TV producer, music judge, American Idol, The X Factor, and Britain’s Got Talent. High school dropout.
- Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, billionaire. Did not complete college.
- Thomas Edison, inventor of the lightbulb, phonograph, and more. Primarily home-schooled, then joined the railroad when he was only 12.
- Wally “Famous” Amos, multimillionaire entrepreneur, author, talent agent, founder of Famous Amos cookies. Left high school at 17 to join the Air Force.
- Walt Disney, founder of the Walt Disney Company. Dropped out of high school at 16.
- Wolfgang Puck, chef, owner of 16 restaurants and 80 bistros. Quit school at the age of 14.
Zappos.com & Happiness
If you haven’t heard of Zappos.com, you may be a new reader to my blog because I write about them a lot. I’m a big believer that what gets measured and focused within a company tends to get done. The slides below were presented by Tony Hsieh, Zappos.com’s CEO at an “all hands on meeting” at the Amazon.com headquarters (Amazon recently acquired Zappos.com). Zappos.com’s customer service is top notch and there aren’t too many companies which treats it’s employees and customers better.
What are Zappos’ core values?
- Deliver WOW through service
- Embrace and drive change
- Create fun and a little weirdness
- Be adventurous, creative, and open-minded
- Pursue growth and learning
- Build open and honest relationships with communication
- Build a positive team and family spirit
- Do more with less
- Be passionate and determined
- Be humble
Every year, the company reinforces its core values by publishing a 500-page culture book with unedited contributions made by employees and vendors. They distribute it company-wide, as well as to anyone who wants to purchase a copy. The company even opens up its Las Vegas offices for free tours, and welcomes companies like Southwest Airlines to spend time watching Zappos’s call center operations, recruitment practices, and training.
Leadership Lessons From A Crazy Dancing Guy
“If you are a version of the shirtless dancing guy, all alone, remember the importance of nurturing your first few followers as equals, making everything clearly about the movement, not you. Be public. Be easy to follow! But the biggest lesson here – did you catch it? Leadership is over-glorified. Yes it started with the shirtless guy, and he’ll get all the credit, but you saw what really happened: It was the first follower that transformed a lone nut into a leader. There is no movement without the first follower. We’re told we all need to be leaders, but that would be really ineffective. The best way to make a movement, if you really care, is to courageously follow and show others how to follow.”
Tachi Yamada
I enjoyed reading this interview with Tachi Yamada, M.D., president of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Health Program.
Q. How did you first learn to become a manager?
A. I think the most difficult transition for anybody from being a worker bee to a manager is this issue of delegation. What do you give up? How can you have the team do what you would do yourself without you doing it? If you’re a true micromanager and you basically stand over everybody and guide their hands to do everything, you don’t have enough hours in the day to do what the whole team needs to do. Learning how to delegate, learning how to let go and still make sure that everything happened, was a very important lesson in my first role in management. And that’s where I learned a principle that I apply today — I don’t micromanage, but I have microinterest. I do know the details. I do care about the details. I feel like I have intimate knowledge of what’s going on, but I don’t tell people what to do.
Q. Talk about how you hire.
A. You have to have people in an organization who are willing to truly embrace change, because if they don’t, then what you have is an organization that’s constantly fighting to stay at the status quo. And, of course, that leads to stagnation. It’s also an unsustainable model. I’ve made an observation about people. There are people who have moved. Take somebody who’s a child of an Army officer — they will have moved 10 times in their lives. And then there are people who’ve been born and raised and educated and employed in one town their whole lives. Who do you think is willing to change? I think, in this modern world, you really have to be sure that your work force has the experience of being elsewhere. That experience then has the ability to ensure that you will be comfortable with change. The biggest problems I see in a group of people who don’t embrace change is that they will always fight anything new, any new idea, any new concept, any outside point of view. And, of course, there are many examples of companies that have failed because of that. So I think that’s a critical point. Almost all of the people on our staff have traveled all around the world, have lived everywhere.
Q. What else are you looking for when you hire?
A. Native intelligence is critically important. I don’t think you can train people to be more intelligent.
Q. How do you test for that?
A. I really try to understand people, what their values are. So it’s usually quite an unstructured interview — where they come from, their family members. And then I try to understand how they deal with difficult interpersonal issues.
Q. Why?
A. Intelligence is often more displayed in what I would call complex abstract thinking, and there’s nothing more complex and abstract than human relationships. And if they can work their way through a human relationship problem intelligently, my guess is that they’re very smart people. Not that they can’t add and subtract six-figure numbers multiplied by whatever, but that they can take a complex problem, break it down into its pieces and figure out the best way forward. I also look for people who’ve moved. Did you move when you were a kid? When you went from one high school to another, what was it like? How did you deal with it? This kind of thing is often very informative about how people have had to deal with crisis, different circumstances and how they’ve had to adapt or change.
Q. What is your best career advice for young people?
A. I think one of the hardest things to do is to figure out what your North Star is. What is it that you really are interested in? This helps you to weigh one option versus another. And then keep your eyes and ears open. Be open to new challenges. I don’t think anyone should do one job for too long a time. I think every five to eight years you should be willing to take on some different challenges. It’s so easy to get stale. Every time I’ve left a job, I was loving the job that I left. But I never regretted the next move that I made.
Q. What else?
A. A second key lesson was from a doctor named Marcel Tuchman. He was the most compassionate person I have ever met in my life — I mean, full of human kindness. And every time he met somebody, you had the sense that he cared more about them than anything else in the world. So what I learned from him is that when you actually are with somebody, you’ve got to make that person feel like nobody else in the world matters. I think that’s critical. So, for example, I don’t have a mobile phone turned on because I’m talking to you. I don’t want the outside world to impinge on the conversation we’re having. I don’t carry a BlackBerry. I do my e-mails regularly, but I do it when I have the time on a computer. I don’t want to be sitting here thinking that I’ve got an e-mail message coming here and I’d better look at that while I’m talking to you. Every moment counts, and that moment is lost if you’re not in that moment 100 percent.
Tyler Playing Baseball
Every dad dreams of the day they get to play baseball with their son. Today was that day. Christina was playing catcher but I forgot to inform her. 🙂
Dublin, CA St. Patrick’s Day Parade 2010
Tyler St. Patrick's Day Parade 2010 from Jeremy Person on Vimeo.
Christina and I took Tyler to the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Dublin, CA this morning which he absolutely loved.
All Black Penguins Are One In A Zillion
“How big is a zillion? It’s “an extremely large, indeterminate number,” according to Dictionary.com. And how rare is an all-black penguin, rather than the black-and-white tuxedo-like colorings on most of the adorable, big, wabbly birds? It’s a one-in-a-zillion mutation, scientists say.” >> Read full story
Never Ever Give Up!
We have probably all seen the classic Peanut’s cartoons, where Lucy wants Charlie Brown to kick the football. Poor Charlie Brown goes to kick the ball and Lucy takes it away, making Charlie fall on his back and sigh. We’ve all had people give up on us, or worse we have given up on ourselves. So whether Lucy lives within us or is around us, never give up and always remember to keep on keeping on.
Onitsuka Tiger by Asics Ultimate 81
My favorite color for clothing is gray but my favorite color overall is lime green which is perfect for St. Patrick’s Day next week. I bought these shoes on Zappos and they are either the ugliest or coolest shoes ever (still deciding). 🙂