The post's title is misleading. You can very easily have both, and both have quite a bit of overlap. If you are working toward getting your education, chances are you're meeting people in the field that you're interested in and building a network that will allow you to slide into a job after you graduate. How easily are you going to be able to network if you don't go to school? Too many dudes try to fool themselves with some movie-like dream that they're going to make it without education with some inflated sense of "street smarts" that they've convinced themselves that they have without being able to convince people that they meet that they are the right people to do business with, despite not having an education.
They also seem to look at people with education with a certain amount of undue disdain because they think that they're "wasting" time studying relevant subject material, as if that's all that this person actually does. Do you really think that education and networking are mutually exclusive? How and when can we stop convincing people that this is the case? Seriously, I'm tired of people trying to point out an anecdotal case of someone that they know that "made it with only a high school diploma" when they know goddamn well that avoiding college didn't give them "street smarts," those people were able to succeed in spite of not having an education. Every time I meet a person that made it with little to no education, they still always tell me that they with that they had the education that many of their colleagues enjoy.
