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.
This interview between Tim Ferriss and Derek Sivers—the entrepreneur who founded CD Baby—concentrates on The 4-Hour Workweek and provides a good recap and overview of the concepts. The following quote, however, feels more relevant to me now as it was when I originally read the book:
To learn anything quickly, I approach people who did it correctly and say, “I have an idea, but I don’t know anything, so can I buy you a beer and pick your brain? I’m really ambitious but kind of ignorant.” Whether it’s language learning or tango or kickboxing. That’s how I did all of it. That’s how I identified the rules of engagements, so I could deconstruct them.
Waiting for the right moment to start your own company seems like a perpetual waiting game. There’s always a reason not to, right?
LifeRemix tackles the 7 lies preventing us from starting out own business:
- I’m too busy right now. I’ll start when I have more time.
- After I get an MBA, I’ll be ready to start up.
- I hate sales.
- I’ll do some research after South Park.
- I don’t know anything about business.
- I don’t have start-up capital.
- Before doing anything else, I need to write a business plan.
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!”
A list of startup ideas Y Combinator would like to fund:
- A cure for the disease of which the RIAA is a symptom
- Simplified browsing
- More variants of CRM
- Web Office apps
- Online learning
- Tools for measurement
- A form of search that depends on design
- New payment methods
- A web-based Excel/database hybrid
- A buffer against bad customer service
- Hardware/software hybrids
- Fixing email overload
- Easy site builders for specific markets
This is only part of the list, and the full page goes into much more depth.
[…] when you read the list, you get a pretty accurate composite portrait of a startup: a combination of relentless predator upon the obsolete and benevolent solver of the world’s problems. As ways of making money go, that’s pretty good. Startups are often ruthless competitors, but they’re competing in a game won by making what people want.