Most of us are familiar with the story about how Bill Gates decided to drop out of Harvard in 1975 to pursue his dream in the then-still-untested territory of computer programming. Imagine you were his father, and you had just received a phone call from your son, who was now telling you that he planned to drop out of Harvard in order to “be his own man”, what would you do?

I have no idea how exactly Bill Gates informed his father about his pivotal career decision, nonetheless, that particular conversation could rank very high as one of the most crucial father-and-son moments in modern history—if Mr. William Gates Sr. had decided to give his son a tongue-lashing and tell him to get his ass back to school, and had Bill obeyed his dad, the last quarter of the twentieth century might play out in quite a different way.

(This blog entry is not meant to be an endorsement of quitting higher education, nor should anyone “fantasize” that he, or she, could one day become as successful and wealthy as Bill.)