Is education necessary to achieve our dreams?

So, let us ask the question again? Is education really necessary to achieve our dreams? I would say that it does as it gives us the literacy which serves as a platform for us to acquire wealth.

We all know of the success stories of past businessmen who started as cobblers, plantation workers, tailors, and through sheer hard work, they are now millionaires many times over. What do you think was their secret to success? These people worked long hours, saved a lot of money, and built their fortunes by riding the boom of a particular industry. They also bought some land which became very valuable in later years of life! Although they did not study corporate or business strategy, they succeeded because they had a knack of knowing just what business to be in. But these are stories of the past. 

In today's knowledge economy, you need to be at the least a computer literate to keep up with this fast-changing business world. Also you need to have a wide horizon of thinking process.  You need to be a well rounded individual. How can you achieve this? a university degree may or may not teach you these factors as it all depends on the way the subjects are taught in the various universities.  However all the universities around the world are changing the delivery of the various subjects to allow students to think on their own?  They basically teach you how to think and not what to think.  Also the advent of all the search engines (yahoo, google, etc) made it easy to search for materials and most of the libraries are now electronic to benefit the young and the not so young learners. 

Having said this, I think that it is important to have a dream, as much as it is important to be able to covert the dream into reality; the only way to do this is by studying and having a good university degree to be a weapon that protect us from falling behind.  The magic number of hours to excel in something is 10000 hours of hard work, this can be achieved by both studying and working at the same time in the field that is as close to our dream as possible.  This last fact is not something that I had dreamt up; it came from the book that is still on the best sellers list for over a year its called “Outliers”.  So lets all be outliers to achieve our dreams.