Chances are, like me, you have already heard or read a lot of other people’s success stories. I can, without any pretension, say that I am genuinely happy for a successful person, but at the same time, I also feel a little jealous. Maybe not green with envy, but I ask myself what that successful person has done to achieve more success than I have. Of course, there are different measures of success, but the most tangible, at least up to this day, is obviously wealth. So, when I hear or read stories about how this or that person has become a multi-billionaire, I wonder how he ever did it.
Some people made it big through sheer work, with a dusting of good luck. Some inherit the wealth of their family. Yet some are just more educationally fit than others, in that their formation proved to be the most essential through of the arc of the generation when they lived.
A recent study conducted by Approved Index, a UK-based business-to-business platform, showed that 22% of the world’s wealthiest people studied engineering in college. This is in stark contrast to only 12% who had a business degree, nine per cent who had an Arts degree, and six per cent who studied either Science, Maths or Law.
Source: Mark Zuckerberg
Engineering-graduate billionaires are not only more, they are actually richer than their ultra-wealthy peers. They have an average net worth of US$ 33 billion, compared to US$ 29 billion for those with a Finance degree.
Curiously, the study indicated that having a degree was far from being a stringent requirement to be a fat cat. A third of the world’s top 100 billionaires had no university degree, and they have a net worth or US$ 31 billion, hot on the heels of those with Engineering degrees. In fact, those without degrees have the most fabled success stories, read Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Bill Gates of Microsoft.
Source: Carlos Slim Helu
Though the billionaire’s list was dominated by those with Engineering and Finance degrees (like Carlos Slim who studied Civil Engineering), and those without (like Gates and Zuckerberg), experts say that the results of the study, which showed people of other specialisms make it to the list, underline the importance of having a society in which people have varied range of specialization to a thriving and diverse economy.
Sure, not everyone dreams of becoming a billionaire. We all have different measures of success. To some, it lies on the stability of their job, the happiness of their family, the good manners of their children and other people’s regard of them, among others. It doesn’t matter whatever “success” you may be enjoying at the moment, what is important is that you worked for it and that you’re happy and proud about it.
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