8 Highly Successful People Who Struggled Through School

Want to make billions? Driven to leave your mark on this world? Maybe the thing to do is . . . drop out of school?

Of course your education is important, but how well you perform in school is not necessarily an indication of how successful you will be in life. Just look at these 8 people who became highly successful despite their struggles in the classroom.

Benjamin Franklin

Dropped out of school at the age of 10 to work as a soap and candle maker with his father. Later Franklin moved on to apprentice under his brother who was the founder of the first independent newspaper in the colonies. After being denied to publish his letters in the paper, Ben left his apprenticeship—labeled as a fugitive—and ran away to Philadelphia. 

Elizabeth Holmes

Elizabeth is the youngest female billionaire in the world. She dropped out of Stanford to pursue her dreams of revolutionizing medicine. Holmes started a company called Real-Time Cures in Palo Alto—later changing the name to Theranos—which developed a blood-testing device that uses a few drops of blood obtained via a finger-stick rather than traditional vials.

Richard Branson

Richard Branson suffered dyslexia and dropped out of high school at the age of 15. He
started Virgin Records and rapidly grew the Virgin brand during the 1980s. Forbes listed Branson’s estimated net worth at $5 billion dollars as of 2015.

Steve Jobs

Jobs dropped out of Reed College after just 6 months due to financial difficulties. Although never finishing college, Jobs went on to found Apple, Pixar, and NeXT Computer. During his commencement speech at Stanford University in 2005, Jobs credited his calligraphy class as his inspiration for the typography used in the first Macintosh computer.

Bill Gates

Bill Gates is known as Harvard’s most successful dropout. Gates dropped out of Harvard after only two years and became one of the wealthiest men in the world after founding Microsoft with his childhood friend, Paul Allen. Over 30 years later, Gates returned to Harvard and received his degree (an honorary doctorate) in 2007. 

Mark Zuckerberg

During his time at Harvard , Mark Zuckerberg locked himself in his dorm room to found the world’s most popular social networking site—Facebook. Zuckerberg left Harvard once the site exploded in popularity and relocated to Palo Alto. He is now the youngest billionaire in the world with an estimated net worth of $4 billion.

Walt Disney

Walt Disney began drawing in high school. After dropping out at the age of 16 to join the army, Disney was rejected for being underage and joined the Red Cross instead. He was sent to France, where he became an ambulance driver. After returning to America, he became a newspaper artist and eventually one of the most influential animators the world has ever seen. 

Charles Dickens

One of the most famous authors in history was forced to drop out of high school twice to support his family financially. Dickens became an office boy where he learned shorthand. It is thanks to this job that Dickens tried his hand at freelance writing and ultimately became known as the greatest novelist of the Victorian Era.