There are, of course, many wonderful things you can learn in college, which have absolutely nothing to do with career and financial success. You can expand your mind, sharpen your critical thinking skills, get exposed to new ideas and perspectives, revel in the intellectual and cultural legacy of the world’s greatest thinkers. These are all worthy pursuits.
But the idea that simply focusing on these kinds of things, and getting a BA attesting to the fact that you have done them, guarantees you will be successful in life is going the way of company pensions, job security, and careers consisting of a single employer for forty years. More and more people—including people who haven’t even graduated college yet—are waking up to the reality that the old career and success advice is no longer adequate. We need to start taking some new advice.
Let’s say, in a tough market, you’d rather be Bryan Franklin than the Harvard MBA. In other words, you want to optimize your chances in life of being the one posting job ads during a recession instead of the one begging for the job. Let’s say you want to be the one hiring (either as an entrepreneur or as a leader within an organization), not the one out on the street looking for work.
If this were your goal—to maximize the chances of your professional success under any economic circumstances—then what would you need to start learning?
That is the central question this book answers. I’ll be answering this one question, in detail, for the next several hundred pages.
But let’s take a first pass at answering it right here.
Why was Bryan the one hiring that day, despite having no college credential, and why was the man with the Harvard MBA the one seeking the job?
I don’t know the MBA personally, so I can only make educated guesses about his plight. But Bryan’s story I know quite well, as he’s a close friend. He had by that time spent a decade of his life in passionate pursuit of learning things that would make him successful—sales, marketing, leadership, management, finance, and accounting—within the context of owning real-world businesses, with his own money at stake. In other words, Bryan had focused his self-education outside of class on what some researchers call “practical intelligence”—how to get things done effectively in the real world, a.k.a. street smarts.
The other man, the Harvard MBA, had presumably studied the same material about marketing, sales, management, leadership, accounting, and finance. But my guess is, he did so primarily in an abstract, theoretical way. To get through such hallowed educational grounds, the focus of his education was probably on academic intelligence—how to do well on tests—not on get-it-done-now real-world practical intelligence.
Both men were highly educated, but one man’s education consisted—I am guessing—primarily of theory, which is the stuff most readily on tap in colleges and universities. The other man’s education (and it was self-education, not obtained in a formal classroom) consisted primarily of practice. One man’s education was bureaucratic, formal, and by the books; the other man’s education was gained on the front lines. One man was educated in the most prestigious institution in the land, the other in the school of hard business knocks. One man had focused on book smarts, the other on street smarts.
Which kind of smarts do you think wins in an economic downturn? Which wins when the economy picks up again?
In the eternal debate between practical intelligence and academic intelligence, street smarts and book smarts, there’s little ambiguity about which side parents, relatives, teachers, media pundits, and politicians push us toward when we’re kids.
In the famous scene from The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman’s character Benjamin, a newly minted BA, receives some unsolicited career advice from a family friend at a graduation party around the family pool. “I want to say one word to you. Just one word. . . . Are you listening?” the family friend asks.
Benjamin nods yes.
“Plastics.”
If we had to boil down to just one word the career and success advice we give our own young people, that word would be “education.” Or, if we had fourteen words, it would be: “Study hard in high school, get into a good college, and get your BA.”
Yet, like “plastics” in The Graduate, this advice is starting to feel more and more hollow, stale, and outdated. If you want to know the value these days of having a BA certifying your academic intelligence—the value of the single thing we repeat to our young people again and again they should get, at great cost in time and money, in order to be successful—you need only place an odd-jobs employment ad on Craigslist.
I myself have placed many employment ads on the site over the years, for small odd jobs, moving and packing boxes, cleaning out garages, hauling junk piles. As in Bryan’s example, I can confirm: there is literally no job too shitty or low-paying for which you won’t get a river of BAs desperately asking you for the work.
These degree-bearing applicants have attained the very thing society, their parents, their teachers, and everyone else around them told them they needed to attain in order to be successful—a credential certifying their achievement in academic intelligence. And yet, in Bryan’s case, the comparatively tame recession of the early 2000s had hundreds of these BAs, MAs, JDs, PhDs, and MBAs lining up for a $10-an-hour shit job posted by a scruffy young business owner without a college degree.
Is this really the best life advice we can give young people? As with “plastics” in The Graduate, shouldn’t we ask ourselves if our advice couldn’t use a bit of updating and refining?
Next: Do You Want to Chase Degrees, or Do You Want to Chase Success?
