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6 Nov 09 Want to be an entrepreneur? Forget the MBA
I recently chipped in on a Twitter discussion with Cody McKibben of Thrilling Heroics on whether or not getting an MBA to become an entrepreneur is a good idea. My take in it was short and sweet:
If you want to start your own business, start your own business. You might fail at first, but you’ll learn
To me, getting an MBA to become an entrepreneur is somewhat like reading about martial arts in books and thinking you can whoop a Black Belt in the ring. Ain’t gonna happen.
The best way to learn about being an entrepreneur is being an entrepreneur. Even if you fail (which I have done), you will learn something from it which you definitely would never learn reading books in school.
Secondly cold objective logic is in favour of the “just do it”-approach over going for an MBA: I don’t have accurate figures, but I believe an MBA with a good school can cost upwards of $50-60000 per year. That’s a lot of money.
Could you sustain your own living costs for a while on that and bootstrap a business on it? You bet.
Even if you fail, if you where prepared to pay that amount of money for an education in entrepreneurship, spending it on being an actual entrepreneur will be the superior choice ahead of reading about entrepreneurs in books and being lectured about them by stuffy professors who have scarcely ventured outside of university campus.
Practice is always the best education, just as you won’t become a black belt martial artist by watching Kung Fu movies, you won’t become an accomplished entrepreneur by reading about it in school.
