The Personal MBA is a site dedicated to helping people gain an MBA education without the expense of business school. It’s a self-study guide to advanced business topics and concepts. As Kevin Kelly—the founding executive director of Wired—says:
No matter what they tell you, an MBA is not essential for landing or handling a good business job… Pursue your own Personal MBA in tandem with actual experience doing some kind of business. If you combine study with actually trying stuff, you’ll be far ahead in the business game.
An impressive introduction comes in the form of the Change This Manifesto, and one of my favourite pages on the site is the book list: The 77 Best Business Books.
At 24 I firmly believe that I’m still young enough to completely change my professional ‘direction’ and for it to have no discernible effect on my future earning power. As such I always have these fantastic ideas that one day soon I will go back to university and complement my CS degree with another degree in a field that has fascinated me for years: cognitive neuroscience.
Here are some links I’ve been clicking on a lot recently:
I suppose you could call Ooga Labs a conglomerate of start-ups. On their ‘About’ page they give a compelling argument to join their company, but more enticing is the open letter from their CEO imploring everyone to avoid the prestige (hype?) of big companies and do something entrepreneurial.
So you’re going to take a cube job[…]?
C’mon! Do you want spend all of your life wearing modest habits of charcoal grey, driving your Volvo on the salty roads of the drab East Coast, paying 50% of your earnings to taxes, and hanging out with narrow minded people, congratulating yourselves on improving a feature of a widget of version 12.1b.4 of some software, or maybe improving the financial return of some rich bald dude in Greenwich, CT by 0.2% above the S&P Index?
Has no one taken you aside and said, “Wait! You’re about to waste 10 years of your life figuring out the path you chose out of college is crap!”
Finding it difficult to discover good/great people? Ben Casnocha (author of My Start-Up Life) suggests relaxing your usual filters (Ivy League education, big breasts, etc.) and instead suggests seeking out the underrated geniuses who aren’t amazing at what you typically seek.
People who earn the label “hidden gems” are hidden because they lie unturned after a popular, blunt filter is applied to a population. To find good, underrated people, de-emphasize popular filters.
If you want to find a smart person who has time to be your friend, try to find a bad self-promoter. The popular filter, at least in business, is in favor of charismatic personalities and clever marketers. Find the brilliant mind who’s a so-so marketer and revel in her availability.
The Intrepid Mompreneur left a big law firm after 3 years to launch her own business; has left a marriage with two kids; and walked away from her own million dollar a year law business. Now she’s telling us how to know when it’s time to leave:
- The pain of staying is greater than the potential pain of leaving
- You are staying for the other person because it makes them happy (or you believe it does)
- The pain you are avoiding by not leaving is the guilt you’ll feel by leaving
- You’ve resigned yourself to a life without sex and decided your kids’ happiness is more important than your sex life
- You are staying because you “should” be happy, but you aren’t.
In 4, substitute “sex” and “kids’ happiness” for something more fitting to the situation you’re considering. The rest, I would keep the same.