Wanting to be engineer #5549383 at a big company is a fools errand if you want recognition and reknowned. It's like trying to get famous working as the guy who bolts the doors onto the frame at the Belvedere assembly plant.
The lion doesn't concern himself with the opinions of the mouse.
All of the people cited in the article (Gates, Musk, Jobs) eschewed "prestige institutions" and worked on what they wanted to work on.
They're incidentally famous because of their success in other areas.
Of course the risk is that working on what you want to may not ever put bread on the table. There's heavy confirmation bios in play here as you only hear about the Gates', Musk's and Jobs'.
The optimal approach for most is probably to do their level best at their day job and work on what they want to in their spare time. And perhaps, with luck and time, the knowledge and skills developed in the spare time can be leveraged to put bread on the table.
Also, I think Jobs is the only one who could really be said to eschew prestige institutuons. Gates went to Harvard and Musk went to Wharton (and Queen's, which is the Canadian equivalent of ivy-league).
Doing your homework for you: Jobs had an unusually international background; was born to highly-educated parents who made sure he went to a suitable family when they put him up for adoption; grew up in a relatively wealthy, highly-educated community that was the hotbed of a nascent industry; and was able to do drugs, an experience here considered life-altering, without being arrested or sent to jail.
I know the word "privilege" is anathema here, but it applies, even if neither his biological nor adoptive parents were necessarily rolling in dough.
Yes, doing drugs in the 60s was a real privilege. He almost didn’t get adopted because his adoptive parents weren’t well educated enough. And he dropped out of college because he was burning his parents life savings.
He was born in 55, so I imagine we're talking more about the 70s. And yeah, not being arrested for doing illegal drugs is a privilege. And according to his wiki article, he ended up with the parents he did because they promised to send him to college; education was at the heart of the decision-making there.
>He had a wonder years middle class life.
In the middle of the tech revolution's ground zero. In fact, being on a lower rung of the upper-middle class ladder might have been protective, in that he had access, but not too much access. In other words, enough resources (that most Americans of the time did not have) to get off the ground, without being tracked into less risky, more conventional, still lucrative work.
In America, there's the whole mythos of the rags-to-riches American dream. Some people whose story is really riches-to-more-riches present their success as the former.
The lion doesn't concern himself with the opinions of the mouse.
All of the people cited in the article (Gates, Musk, Jobs) eschewed "prestige institutions" and worked on what they wanted to work on.
They're incidentally famous because of their success in other areas.
The Kardashians are famous for being famous.
Which do you really want?