Inspired by Mark Zuckerberg, the young entrepreneurs I meet often think the best way to succeed is to drop out of college and launch their startups immediately. They've got no time to waste.
But if you really want to build a company that changes the world, I recommend a contrarian approach: Get a job at a well-known company for a year or two, like another famous college dropout, Steve Jobs. Before Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976, he worked for Atari, the video game maker that invented Pong. The two years he spent there influenced everything from the components he later used in Apple's computers to the culture at Apple, where work was about having fun.
