Do book smarts translate to entrepreneurial smarts?
Ted Turner, founder of CNN and owner of the Atalanta Braves, among many other companies, was worth $9 billion at his peak in the mid 1990s.
When he was young he went to the military-oriented McCallie School where he did not do well as a student. He was always breaking the rules and earned the nickname “Terrible Ted” from his fellow classmates and teachers. The school had a demerit system where when you did something wrong you earned a demerit point and had to walk a quarter mile as punishment. Turner ended up gaining over 1,000 demerit points.
Turner was always a ‘C’ student and never excelled at school - but he went on to become one of the most successful entrepreneurs in recent history.
It got me to thinking is Turner the exception to the rule where he was able to overcome the poor academic grades and build a successful company?
There are many stories of entrepreneurs who drop out of school and launch tremendous companies - but there are even more who drop out and never accomplish their dreams of building a successful business.
Is there a correlation between doing well in school and being a great entrepreneur or do schools simply prepare you to get a job?
Evan Carmichael
Evan CarmichaelYoungEntrepreneur.com Blog Manager
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4 Comments so far
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I do believe that schools only prepare you for a job, but it also helps you get a head start on becoming and entrepreneur. But if you already have the smarts and know what you want to accomplish, no amount of school is going to change that. Some of the biggest entrepreneurs never finished school. Look at Bill Gates, Michael Dell (I believe he is one) that dropped out of school onces they realize that school wasn’t going to help them with what they wanted to do. Oprah, didn’t even attend college, I’m not positive, but I don’t believe she even finished high school.
Paul Orfalea, the founder of Kinkos is another example of this. If you read his book Copy this he talks about his challenges as a dyslexic hyperactive entrepreneur. Many of these successful entrepreneurs were “learning disabled” I am sure if Ted went to McCallie School in the 90’s they would have put him on Ritalin and said he had a “disease” called ADHD.
there are truly many examples of succesful school dropouts. Paul Allen, Steve Jobs and Richard Branson to name a few. Even, in my lovely country of Indonesia, one of the biggest students tutoring franchise is owned by, ironically, a college dropout (his name is Sony Sugema,btw). to me, it’s an issue of likes and dislikes. psychologically, people who like what they’re doing tend to produce better results. maybe, these people liked being entrepreneurs more than being students. and they had the guts to pursue what they love the most, despite the pressure to meet with society’s standards (having a stable job and so forth). having good academic education plus entrepreneurial spirits and smarts would be a major plus, though.
Ted was my roomate at the school and it must be said that of all his attributes the greatest was his HEART!!!